Ethics Panel Head Admits Tie to Investigation Target : Politics: Nancy L. Johnson says she assisted GOPAC when House Speaker Gingrich ran the committee, which is at the heart of the probe.

The chairwoman of the House ethics panel, charged with investigating a complaint against Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), acknowledged Friday that on at least four occasions she assisted the political action committee that is at the heart of the probe.

Her statement came the same day Washington newspapers reported that Gingrich has decided to lower his public profile in favor of less controversial Republicans.

Rep. Nancy L. Johnson (R-Conn.), the chairwoman, was listed in a GOPAC document as a key recruiter of candidates that the group would support in 1992. The same document also listed a second ethics panel Republican, Rep. Jim Bunning of Kentucky, as a recruiter.

A spokeswoman for Johnson said she did not recruit candidates for GOPAC but did participate in at least four events sponsored by the group, including two in which she addressed GOPAC-endorsed candidates.

Johnson’s “involvement with GOPAC was so limited that she doesn’t believe there’s a conflict of interest here,” spokeswoman Lisa Pelosi said Friday.

Johnson has been under fire from Democrats in recent months for the committee’s delay in deciding whether an impartial, outside counsel should be appointed.

Democrats were quick to seize upon the new ties between GOPAC and the GOP panel members, which were disclosed in documents released this week by the Federal Election Commission in its lawsuit against GOPAC.

“These are very troubling revelations, and I think the chairwoman ought to recuse herself from the case, and appoint a special counsel,” Rep. Patricia Schroeder (D-Colo.) said.

David York, Bunning’s chief of staff, said the congressman was not aware that he was listed in the GOPAC memo and does not recall any specific work for the organization.

“As a Republican committeeman for Kentucky at the time, he always was trying to recruit candidates for public office,” and the congressman “doesn’t perceive any conflict of interest,” York said.

In all, four of the five Republicans Gingrich appointed to the House ethics panel this year have ties to GOPAC, which Gingrich led from the mid-1980s to earlier this year as it assisted Republican candidates. Rep. David L. Hobson of Ohio received assistance from GOPAC as a state candidate while Rep. Porter J. Goss of Florida was a GOPAC contributor.

Five Democrats also are on the ethics panel, which has been investigating a college course taught by Gingrich in which GOPAC handled much of the tax-deductible fund raising.

Gingrich is not unaware of the controversy around him.

He returned from the Thanksgiving holiday convinced that an outburst over his back-of-the-plane seat on Air Force One and the connection he drew between a grisly murder in Illinois and Democrat-backed social programs required him, as he told his colleagues this week, to bench himself, the Washington Post said.

Gingrich also concluded, after several Republican friends went to him with their concerns, that he had become far too deeply enmeshed in the details of the ongoing budget negotiations and too eager to be the party’s principal voice in the public debate with the White House over budget priorities.

“He feels he’s made some mistakes, that he hasn’t been disciplined,” one Republican official said.

Gingrich’s own description, as he put it this week to his colleagues, was that he had “thrown a few interceptions” and it was time to put himself on the bench and let others play. The account of the meeting first appeared in Friday’s Washington Times.

A running feud between the Speaker and the Atlanta Constitution continued, meanwhile, with the paper publishing an editorial that said: “And as the days go by and the outrages mount, it gets more and more difficult to see Gingrich still holding public office in a few years, and almost impossible to see him still sitting in the Speaker’s chair.”

A Gingrich spokesman responded by saying the former history professor does not read the newspaper’s editorials “and finds that it makes life a whole lot more pleasant.”