Maxine Waters rebutts ethics charges; demands speedy trial

[pscot]

I like Maxine a lot and I hope she's vindicated. The charges seem a bit thin, and I suspect race is part of this.

Rep. Maxine Waters will make two demands of the House ethics committee Wednesday, according to a source close to her: Release the full document charging her with breaking House rules and finish her trial before the November elections....

The results of a preliminary investigation by the independent Office of Congressional Ethics were released Monday in conjunction with the ethics committee’s announcement that it would move forward with the Waters trial....

The case centers on Waters’s work to schedule a September 2008 meeting with Treasury officials for executives of a bank in which her husband, Sidney Williams, holds about $250,000 in stock and on whose board of directors he had once served. One of the bank executives was also the incoming chairman of the National Bankers Association, a trade group representing more than 100 minority-owned banks, and the group’s counsel also attended the meeting.


Months later, OneUnited was approved for $12.1 million in funds from the Treasury Department’s Troubled Asset Relief Program, though the fund did not exist at the time of the meeting.


Waters has denied any wrongdoing and accuses the committee of bringing a case against her that lacks merit. The 10-term Democrat from Los Angeles says she acted to help struggling minority-owned banks at a time in 2008 when their heavy investments in home-mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac threatened to pull them under....




“The suggestion that I could gain personally from one phone call made to assist the National Bankers Association in getting a meeting with the Treasury Department is not credible,” Waters said Monday

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0810/40624_Page2.html