Rangel to face House ethics trial

WASHINGTON — A House ethics subcommittee announced Thursday that it found that Rep. Charles Rangel violated congressional ethics rules and that it will prepare for a trial, probably beginning in September.

The panel is expected to make the details of the purported violations public next Thursday.

Rangel, D-N.Y., has been under the House ethics committee’s microscope since early 2008, after it was reported that he may have used his House position to benefit his financial interests. Two of the most serious inquiries have focused on Rangel’s failure to declare $239,000 to $831,000 in assets on his disclosure forms, and on his effort to raise money for a private center named after him at City College of New York using his congressional letterhead.

Additionally, investigators examined whether he had the Ways and Means Committee consider legislation that would benefit donors to the Charles B. Rangel Center for Public Service at the same time he solicited donations or pledges.

In March, Rangel reluctantly stepped down as chairman of the Waysand Means Committee, a week after the ethics panel ruled in a separate case that he had broken congressional gift rules by accepting trips to conferences in the Caribbean that were financed by corporate interests. The panel said that, at a minimum, Rangel’s staff knew about the corporate backing for the 2007 and 2008 trips, and that the congressman was therefore responsible.

Rangel, 80, said he welcomed the opportunity to respond to the allegations. “At long last, sunshine has pierced through this cloud that has been over my head for more than two years,” he said when asked about the panel’s decision.

Sources familiar with the case said that Rangel could have avoided this showdown by accepting the subcommittee’s findings. He was briefed on the allegations against him, as required by House rules, in recent weeks, and he rejected some of the allegations during settlement talks.

A judge like panel will meet next Thursday and read the charges. That will happen just as the House is about to leave Washington for a 6 1 /2-week recess. The full trial is not likely to begin until the week of Sept. 13, right before Rangel faces a Sept. 14 primary challenge from New York State Assemblyman Adam Clayton Powell IV. Powell is the son of the late Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr., D-N.Y., who faced his own ethics problems and was bested in 1970 by Rangel in a Democratic primary.

Republicans used the news to try to make Democratic ethics woes a campaign issue.

“Today’s announcement is a sad reminder of Speaker [Nancy] Pelosi’s most glaring broken promise: to ‘drain the swamp’ in Washington instead of presiding over ‘the most honest, most open and most ethical’ Congress in history,”said House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio.

Information for this article was contributed by Lori Montgomery and Alice Crites of The Washington Post and by Larry Margasak of The Associated Press.