Office search riles GOP
Jefferson raid violates precedent, they say
Wednesday, May 24, 2006
By Bruce Alpert
Washington bureau
WASHINGTON -- House Republicans continued Tuesday to strongly denounce the weekend FBI raid of Democrat William Jefferson's congressional office as a possible violation of the Constitution's separation of powers.
Telling reporters that he was trying to restrain his outrage, House Majority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, said he expects congressional leaders will talk about "the Justice Department's invasion of the legislative branch."
"I've got to believe, at the end of the day, it's going to end up across the street at the Supreme Court," he said.
The raid of the New Orleans congressman's office by more than a dozen FBI agents Sunday marked the first time in U.S. history that federal agents had searched the office of a sitting member of Congress, according to the Justice Department.
The FBI has been investigating Jefferson since March 2005, when a cooperating witness, Lori Mody, agreed to secretly record conversations that investigators say included discussions about how a percentage of the proceeds of telecommunications deal in Nigeria and Ghana could be paid to a company controlled by Jefferson's family.
Jefferson has not been charged and has denied wrongdoing.
U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez said Tuesday that the government believed it had no alternative but to search Jefferson's office.
"The reason it has never been done before is because we have been able to reach an accommodation, to reach an agreement, to receive the evidence that we need to prosecute wrongdoing through a subpoena," Gonzalez said. "And for a variety of reasons, that could not occur here. And we worked very hard over a period of time to get the information, the evidence that we felt was important to a criminal investigation."
Investigators say Jefferson also solicited a $100,000 cash payment from Mody that he said would be used to bribe a Nigerian official to advance the project. All but $10,000 of the money was found in the freezer of Jefferson's Washington home.
Robert Trout, Jefferson's attorney, did not return a call seeking a comment Tuesday. But he has said that information sought by the FBI, including faxes, notes, telephone records, ledgers and computer files, were all safeguarded and not at any risk of being destroyed or lost.
House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., said he understands that there is a need to investigate possible wrongdoing, wherever it occurs, but that "nothing I have learned in the last 48 hours leads me to believe that there was any necessity to change the precedent" of more than 200 years.
Spillover to other probes
Political analysts suggested that the GOP concern may be shaped in part by other ongoing federal probes.
Norm Ornstein, a veteran congressional observer for the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said it looks to him as though the Justice Department was on a fishing expedition with the office raid, given all the taped evidence it has already gathered on Jefferson.
What motivates Republican leaders, Ornstein said, is a fear that federal prosecutors are sending a message that they are extending the investigation well beyond Jefferson to include GOP wrongdoing related to lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who has pleaded guilty to bribery and tax evasion, and former Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, R-Calif., who pleaded guilty to taking millions of dollars in bribes to add defense appropriations to spending bills.
Thomas Mann of the liberal Brookings Institution agreed.
"They must be worried by the expanding Department of Justice investigations following the Cunningham plea and the Abramoff affair, both of which are likely to involve sitting Republican members of the House and Senate," Mann said.
Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss., said he has ordered his staff at the Senate Rules Committee to prepare a memo on how the Senate should respond if the Justice Department attempts to search a senator's office.
"This is a little bit of a wake-up call," Lott said. "I don't know if what happened here (with Jefferson) was appropriate, but I want to make sure to create" a process to deal with such an event.
Crime investigation
Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid of Nevada was much more restrained than his Republican counterparts in talking about the raid.
"I believe strongly in separation of powers," Reid said. But, he said, when people commit crimes they should be prosecuted, whether "that person is a member of Congress or driving a cab."
"I will be happy to take a look at this," Reid said. "From the little bit that I know about it now, I'm not going to beat up on the FBI."
Another analyst said that members of Congress should protect congressional independence, but noted that current GOP leadership has not been nearly as aggressive in demanding information or access to documents from the current administration as it was when Democrat Bill Clinton was in the White House.
"They might be right about the separation of powers question, but they could have left Democrats to make the legalistic arguments that look so bad to voters," said Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. "Instead, it's the Republicans who moved front and center to demand that members of Congress should be treated better than the average American who is suspected of committing a serious crime. People absolutely despise the fact that congressmen think there are two sets of rules: one for Congress and the other set for everyone else."
