By Emelie Rutherford
A House ethics panel officially concluded last Friday that seven defense appropriators, including the recently deceased Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.), did not improperly earmark funds for defense firms linked to campaign contributions and a former aide’s lobbying shop.
The House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct investigated the now-defunct lobbying shop PMA Associates, which was run by former House Appropriations Defense subcommittee (HAC-D) staffer Paul Magliocchetti, and defense earmarks added to spending bills by HAC-D members. Those lawmakers are Murtha, the former chairman who died Feb. 8, along with Reps. Peter Visclosky (D-Ind.), Todd Tiahrt (R-Kan.), Norm Dicks (D-Wash.), C.W. “Bill” Young (R-Fla.), James Moran (D-Va.), and Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio).
“The Standards Committee has unanimously determined that the evidence presently before the Committee does not support a determination that any House Member or employee violated any law, regulation, rule or other applicable standard of conduct,” it says in a 305-page report released last Friday.
The 10-member bipartisan panel is chaired by Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.).
The Standards Committee’s report officially closed the investigation into the seven lawmakers. The committee’s probe followed an earlier investigation into the appropriators’ lobbying activities that the Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE) forwarded to it last December.
The OCE’s board had recommended dismissal in the matters involving five of the seven lawmakers–Murtha, Dicks, Young, Moran, and Kaptur. The Standards Committee then launched an independent investigation into Visclosky and Tiahrt.
The report issued last Friday, the panel said, “resolves both the Standards Committee’s independent investigation and the seven matters forwarded by OCE.”
The Standards Committee report says it “found no evidence that Members or their official staff considered campaign contributions as a factor when requesting earmarks.”
“The Standards Committee further found no evidence that Members or their official staff were directly or indirectly engaged in seeking contributions in return for earmarks,” it adds. “Rather, the evidence showed that earmarks were evaluated based upon criteria independent of campaign contributions, such as the number of jobs created in the Member’s district or the value to the taxpayer or the U.S. military, and without Members or their official staff linking, or being aware that companies may have intended to link, contributions with earmarks.”
However, the Standards Committee said its investigation “uncovered troubling aspects to PMA’s conduct.”
“The evidence revealed instances in which PMA employed ‘strong-arm’
tactics, threatening to withdraw financial support or encourage businesses to relocate out of a Member’s district if Members did not reverse policies opposing earmarks,” the report says. “In these instances, Members and their staff refused to change their positions and, in one case, notified the Standards Committee.”
The panel also found that PMA’s lobbyists prodded company executives to maximize campaign contributions to and attend fundraisers for appropriators while seeking earmarks. Yet the report says evidence did not show that lawmakers or staffers knew PMA was doing this.
Tiahrt praised the Standards Committee’s report last Friday as a total vindication and exoneration for him.
“The process referenced in the report reflects the same professional and objective procedures followed in my office for reviewing and requesting defense-related projects for Boeing and other reputable Kansas-based companies that employ thousands of Kansas workers in my district,” Tiahrt said in a statement.
Yet not everyone praised the Standard Committee’s move to close the earmark investigation.
Steve Ellis, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense in Washington, D.C., said he was not surprised the probe found the appropriators did nothing wrong, considering Standards Committee members themselves helped secure hundreds of millions of dollars in earmarks in recent years.
“The (Standards) committee seems to have taken a ‘see no evil, here no evil, speak no evil’ approach potential earmark quid pro quo, while at the same time recognizing that lobbyists certainly think contributions result in earmarks or special treatment,” he said. “The idea that lawmakers ignore previous or future campaign contributions flies in the face of political realities and quite frankly common sense.”