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Rep. Maxine Waters again calls for ethics case to be dropped

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Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles) on Tuesday launched a new drive to push the House Ethics Committee to drop its long-running case against her, saying that internal committee documents show she cannot get a fair hearing from the panel.

Waters’ lawyer, Stanley Brand, said the documents included allegations that there was misconduct among the committee staff members who investigated the Democratic congresswoman, and further action by the panel would be “irremediably tainted.”

“Simply put,” Brand said, “this committee can never conduct an impartial and unbiased inquiry.”

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Waters, a South Los Angeles political fixture since the 1970s, has been accused of intervening on behalf of a bank where her husband owned stock and served on the board. But the case against her, growing out of an investigation that began two years ago, has been sidetracked by strife within the committee.

In the documents, Politico first reported, former committee staff director and chief counsel Blake Chisam last year accused two suspended staff members who had worked on the Waters investigation of unauthorized communications with Republican committee members and inappropriately withholding information from Waters’ defense team.

Richard Sauber, the lawyer for the two staff members, said Tuesday that his clients, who have found other jobs, “acted appropriately at all times.”

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“To use postdated documents to suggest otherwise is cowardly and libelous,” Sauber added.

In a March letter to the staff members, the new Republican chairman of the committee, Rep. Jo Bonner (R-Ala.), said he had determined that their actions were “consistent with the highest ethical standards.”

The ethics panel, scheduled to meet this week, had no comment Tuesday on the Waters case.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington called on congressional leaders to appoint an outside counsel to investigate the committee. “At this point, who could possibly have confidence in anything that comes out of the committee?” said Melanie Sloan, the watchdog group’s executive director.

Brand, a former House counsel, said in a letter to Bonner and the panel’s top Democrat that the committee conduct was so “fundamentally improper … that it cannot be cured by reliance on any other device, including employment of an outside counsel.”

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Waters, who has denied wrongdoing, was to face a rare ethics trial last fall, but the proceedings were put off to allow an investigative panel to look into the case further. Waters, 72, has contended that the committee turmoil demonstrates that the case against her is weak.

richard.simon@latimes.com

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