By WILL TUCKER*
opensecrets.org
Ten government watchdog groups have called on House Ethics Committee Chair Charlie Dent (R-Pa.) and Ranking Member Linda Sanchez (D-Calif.) to release the Office of Congressional Ethics’ findings regarding all-expense-paid trips to Azerbaijan taken by 10 members of Congress in 2013, according to a Wednesday press release. Earlier this month, the Ethics Committee dropped its own probe into the trips, cleared the lawmakers of wrongdoing and did not release the OCE’s findings.
“We are concerned about the committee’s unprecedented decision not to release the OCE’s findings in circumstances where the Members under investigation remain” in Congress, the groups’ letter reads. The Campaign Legal Center, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, Common Cause, Demand Progress, Democracy 21, Thomas Mann, the National Legal and Policy Center, Norm Ornstein, Public Citizen, and James Thurber all signed the letter.
“This decision is especially concerning because the Committee itself played a decisive role in approving the Members’ travel to Azerbaijan,” the authors wrote. The groups also raised questions about whether Dent should have recused himself from the matter after receiving contributions from individuals associated with the nonprofit network under investigation in May. OpenSecrets Blog broke the story of the contributions to Dent.
The Ethics Committee must approve a lawmaker’s travel beforehand when a nonprofit group offers to foot the bill. Each member who went to Azerbaijan in May 2013 — Reps. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas), Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.), Yvette Clarke (D-N.Y.), Ted Poe (R-Texas), Jim Bridenstine (R-Okla.), Leonard Lance (R-N.J.), Danny Davis (D-Ill.), Ruben Hinojosa (D-Texas), Michelle Lujan Grisham (D-N.M.) and then-Rep. Steve Stockman, (R-Texas) — was cleared by the Ethics Committee to attend an energy conference in Baku, the Eurasian nation’s oil-rich capital.
If the OCE investigated why the Ethics panel approved such a trip, that information might be in findings Ethics is withholding, said Meredith McGehee, policy director at the Campaign Legal Center — and if that’s the case, “it’s pretty important to know why the committee screwed up so badly,” she said.
On the forms they submitted to the Ethics Committee for approval, the lawmakers’ sponsors did not indicate that the convention was funded by the State Oil Company of Azerbaijan and BP, among others.
The Houston Chronicle uncovered the connections between the convention’s organizers and the oil companies in an investigative report last summer. OCE found $750,000 in payments from the State Oil Company of Azerbaijan, or SOCAR, to the U.S.-based Turkic non-profits claiming to solely sponsor the trips, according to a Washington Post account of OCE’s report on the matter leaked to the newspaper.
The OCE itself, an independent ethics watchdog created by Congress, cannot adjudicate cases and can’t subpoena witnesses or documents. It can investigate allegations, interview witnesses and then refer cases to the Ethics Committee for review. But as OCE investigators carried out their probe into the Azerbaijan convention, they were ordered by the Ethics Committee to “cease and refer,” or stop and send the case straight to Ethics. The reason given for the order was that Ethics was conducting its own investigation.
In a press release after terminating the matter, the committee said it had reviewed “approximately 10,000 pages” of documents collected by the OCE and that it will hand over some materials, including bank records, to the Justice Department for review. Those materials, however, all are connected to third parties in the case — for instance, some of the companies involved — and do not centrally involve conduct by the lawmakers on the trip.
Instead of releasing the OCE’s findings to the public– as it has in other cases — the committee called the findings “supporting documentation” and declined to release them, according to the press release.That’s a problem, the watchdog groups claim in their letter, in part because the findings might shed light on the Ethics Committee’s “cease and refer” order. That order may not have been valid, according to the groups, and “could establish a dangerous precedent that would allow the Ethics Committee to order the OCE, a supposedly independent body, to ‘cease and refer’ at any time, regardless whether the Committee meets the legal conditions for such an extraordinary order.”
Tom Rust, a spokesman for the Ethics Committee, had no comment about the letter.
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