Reviving a contentious issue from US Representative John Tierney’s bruising 2012 reelection battle, the House Ethics Committee on Friday said it is considering opening an investigation into the nine-term Salem Democrat....
The Ethics Committee did not disclose the nature of the report it received on Tierney, but last year he faced questions about $223,000 that federal prosecutors said his wife received through a joint bank account she managed for her brother Robert Eremian, a federal fugitive who was running an illegal gambling business on Antigua.
Related: Tierney's Time to Leave
What do you have to do down there to get kicked out?
Patrice Tierney served a month in federal prison in 2011 after admitting to “willful blindness” about the source of the funds and pleading guilty to helping her brother file false tax returns.
The Ethics Committee was required to acknowledge it had received reports on potential violations by Tierney as well as three other members of Congress, including Minnesota Republican Michele Bachmann.
Related: Waving Bye-Bye to Michele Bachmann
But leaders of the committee cautioned against concluding that legislators committed violations based on the referrals from the Office of Congressional Ethics’ referrals.
“The mere fact of a referral . . . does not itself indicate that any violation has occurred, or reflect any judgment on behalf of the Committee,” wrote committee chairman K. Michael Conaway, a Texas Republican, and Linda T. Sanchez of California, the panel’s ranking Democrat, in identical statements on each of the House members.
Translation: nothing will be done because they are investigating themselves (now the biparti$an$hip flourishes). A harshly-worded reprimand should be good enough!
Officials from nonpartisan open-government groups said the Ethics Committee should investigate to settle questions about whether the money from Tierney’s brother-in-law should have been disclosed on public disclosure forms and reported as income to the IRS....
The illegal part doesn't mean anything?
The Office of Congressional Ethics, which filed its report on Tierney in June, is a nonpartisan organization created by Congress in 2008 to bring more transparency to ethics investigations. The office reviews complaints filed primarily by citizens, but may also review matters raised by board members and staff and refers the cases it believes merit formal investigation to the Ethics Committee.
The office also referred reports on Tim Bishop, a New York Democrat, and Peter Roskam, an Illinois Republican, to the Ethics Committee, which now has until Sept. 11 to decide whether to investigate.
Both John and Patrice Tierney have described the money she received through the joint account with her brother Robert as a gift from a relative that was exempt from requirements that Tierney disclose the source, or report the funds on federal income tax returns.
“It was a gift to my wife, so it was not income; it was not reportable,” Tierney said last July.
So the illegal part doesn't matter? Sometime better tell the drug dealers and Whitey Bulger he can give that loot away before government gets at it!
On Friday, Tierney reiterated that defense.
“There is nothing new that has not already been reviewed in both a court of law and by the voters of my district who sent me back to Congress,” Tierney said in a prepared statement. “I hope the Committee will expedite its review and I am confident it will find the allegations meritless as they have no foundation in law or fact.”
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Republican challenger Richard R. Tisei repeatedly underscored Tierney’s association with the Eremians’ gambling business during a hard-fought campaign that Tisei lost by a margin of only 1 percent....
Yup, Massachusetts voters had the chance to elect a good, moderate, pro-gay Republican and bounce a corrupt Democrat -- and unless those machines were rigged, they blew it!
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