Reversal on ethics office aids transparency

It was a line buried in an Office of Congressional Ethics report that tipped me off to members of Congress and staff receiving more than 200 improper trips overseas from groups tied to a Turkish cleric now accused of launching a failed coup in Turkey.

Under the rules House Republicans approved late Monday then abandoned Tuesday, I never would have seen the report.

The 2015 OCE report on a May 2013 trip to Azerbaijan by 10 members of Congress and 29 staffers concluded that the travel was not in fact paid for by the non-profit groups that had invited everyone, but by a foreign oil company, which is a violation of House rules. But the report also included an admission from the non-profit groups that they regularly relied on a Turkish organization to provide free travel for Capitol Hill VIPs on trips to Turkey. That allowed me to track down 200 other trips these groups had sponsored over the past decade that had probably all violated House rules.

But the House Ethics Committee didn’t want this report released. The committee had ordered OCE in March 2015 to drop its probe of the Azerbaijan trip, saying it had its own investigation underway, despite the fact that the committee had originally approved the trip for the entire congressional delegation, including Rep. Yvette Clarke, D-N.Y., who was a member of the Ethics Committee. But OCE refused and proceeded to publish its report over the objections of the Ethics Committee.

Under the rules changes pushed by House Republicans on Monday night, OCE would have had to stand down.

It is not the first time OCE has provided information to the public that the Ethics Committee could not or would not release. In 2010, then-congressman Nathan Deal, R- Ga., resigned while the Ethics Committee was reviewing allegations that he had used his congressional office to pressure state officials in Georgia on a vehicle policy that would help his family’s auto-salvage business. His resignation meant that the Ethics Committee lost jurisdiction over him, but OCE decided to issue the report anyway, saying it had a right to release the report on its own. Under the new rules, it would have lost that right.

In fact, with a handful of exceptions, the only information the public has had about House ethics cases during the past seven years has come from OCE reports. The rules as currently written require that once OCE has referred a matter to Ethics for further review — since OCE has no ability to rule on violations or issue punishments — the Ethics Committee has to publicly release the report even if it has made no decision on guilt or innocence. The most common action by Ethics is to release the report and declare that they are still looking onto the matter ... and no conclusion is ever announced. The new rules proposal raised questions about how much of the OCE work would still be public.

Since the OCE was created in 2008, it has publicly released about 70 reports on investigations of members of Congress and staff. By comparison, in 2007, before the OCE was created, the Ethics Committee announced reviews of conduct of four members of Congress. Two cases involved lawmakers who were facing charges in court; the other two were for improper trips taken four years earlier.

On the Senate side, with no similar independent ethics review body, the Senate Ethics Committee has not publicly announced a single investigation against a senator in nearly five years.

It is not clear exactly how the new proposed rules would have affected ethics investigations, but it is almost certain that the net result would have been that the public would learn less about allegations of ethics violations by their elected officials.

This is also not the first — and probably not the last — attempt by lawmakers to make it harder for OCE to investigate them. Two years ago, Republicans pushed through a late-night amendment that underscored the need for OCE to protect the due process rights of accused lawmakers. It is not clear that rules change had much impact.