Alan Mollohan

Political reporter Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post has initiated a new “award,“ which, in his words, “honors, so to speak, that person, place or thing that had the most terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week.”

The judge considered the Redskins' Albert Haynesworth, and the bureaucrats on whose watch the Gulf oil spill occurred. According to Cilliza:

But in the end, they were all in a race for second place. Rep. Alan Mollohan, a West Virginia Democrat who was defeated in Tuesday's primary, was our runaway selection.

The Justice Department has confirmed that it has ended its investigation of Rep. Alan Mollohan (D-WV). The probe began after NLPC filed a Complaint with the U.S. Attorney for D.C. in February of 2006 alleging that Mollohan failed to report millions in assets on his Financial Disclosure Form (FDR) in order to conceal cozy financial relationships with recipients of earmarks he had arranged.

The closing of the four-year probe by the Justice Department comes after Mollohan voted for Barack Obama’s unpopular health care plan. Has Attorney General Eric Holder now made it legal for members of Congress to earmark money to their business partners? This is a horrible precedent.

In the uproar that followed our original allegations, Mollohan “temporarily” resigned as ranking Democrat on the Ethics Committee. I doubt that Nancy Pelosi will now try to put him back. Even she realizes that Mollohan represents everything the public loathes about Congress. Holder's letting him off the hook is sure to further inflame anti-incumbent resentment.

According to a confidential House Ethics Committee report produced in July, and described in the Washington Post today:

The Justice Department has told the ethics panel to suspend a probe of Rep. Alan B. Mollohan (D-W. Va.), whose personal finances federal investigators began reviewing in early 2006 after complaints from a conservative group that he was not fully revealing his real estate holdings. There has been no public action on that inquiry for several years. But the department's request in early July to the committee suggests that the case continues to draw the attention of federal investigators, who often ask that the House and Senate ethics panels refrain from taking action against members whom the department is already investigating. (emphasis ours)

Rep. Alan Mollohan (D-WV) is the subject of a story in The Intelligencer/Wheeling News-Register newspapers today about the investigation touched off by NLPC.

The immediate reason for revisiting the issue is the naming of Mollohan as one of the 15 most corrupt members of Congress for the fourth year in a row by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW).

Following a nine-month investigation, NLPC filed a 500-page Complaint on February 28, 2006 with the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia detailing more than 250 misrepresentations and omissions on Mollohan’s disclosure reports, prompting an extensive probe by the FBI.