Alan Mollohan

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.

In a letter to the editor, House Ways and Means Chairman Charles Rangel responds today to the Wall Street Journal’s Monday editorial. He writes:

Your July 27 editorial “Morality and Charlie Rangel’s Taxes” insulted me in an attempt to undermine my work on health-care reform legislation. But your slurs can’t change the fact that the Ways and Means Committee, which I chair, has already succeeded in negotiating and passing its portion of the health-care bill without a hint of the rancor you’ve resorted to in your mean-spirited editorial attack. (emphasis ours)

Rangel’s indignation in the wake of his own admissions of failing to pay his taxes is the clearest evidence yet that he is divorced from political reality, and will become an increasing liability for Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama.

Rep. Alan Mollohan (D-WV) has been under investigation for more than three years after NLPC exposed his cozy relationships with the recipients of earmarks that he sponsored. Yet, as chairman of an Appropriations subcommittee, he has jurisdiction over the budget of the Justice Department, which includes the FBI, the very entity that is investigating him.

Mollohan claims he recused himself in a January 2007 letter to the full Committee Chairman David Obey (D-WI) but he refuses to release the letter. Republicans say they have never seen it.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is AWOL on the issue, having said nothing since she forced Mollohan out as ranking member of the Ethics Committee in 2006. At the time, she blamed NLPC for Mollohan’s problems.