Rep. Charlie Rangel's lawyers are firing back at the House ethics committee, saying the panel was "wrong on the facts and unsupported by the law."In a letter to the ethics panel on Friday afternoon, Rangel's attorneys complained that the committee erred in admonishing the veteran New York Democrat for failing to know two trips to the Caribbean were corporate-funded, a violation of House rules. The ethics committee found that two Rangel aides knew about the source of funding for the trips, but it found no evidence that Rangel himself was aware of that fact.
Rangel was the only one of six lawmakes sanctioned for participating in the trips, which were sponsored by the Carib News Foundation.
The Standards Committee report holds "Congressman Rangel accountable under the rules for errors by his staff, even though it acknowledges that he did not know of those errors," said Leslie Kieman and Jason Knott of the law firm Zuckerman Spaeder. "The Committee's conclusion is wrong on the facts and unsupported by the law."
Kieman and Knott also complained that Rangel did not have adequate time to respond to the committee's lengthy report on its investigation.
"Rather, by the time the report was first made available to Congressman Rangel, the findings of the Committee had already been improperly leaked to the public. Releasing the report on less than a day's notice compounds this unfairness by presenting the public with a one-sided and incomplete account of the events," Kieman and Knott added. "Ethics matters are too important to be handled in this fashion."
