Muncie Times, Muncie, Delaware County, 15 June 2006 — Page 23

The Muncie Times • June 15, 2006 • Page 23

NEWS BRIEFS

Compiled By Andre ’ Scott FBI raid on Jefferson's Capitol Hill office fuels bipartisan furor WASHINGTON, D.C.Former U. S. Rep. Dan Rostenkowski (D-Ill.) served in Congress 36 years, until 1995 when he lost his re-election. Charged with keeping ghost employees on his payroll, using congressional money to buy gifts and trading in officially purchased stamps for cash, he pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of mail fraud, served 15 months of a 17-month sentence in prison and was later pardoned by President Bill Clinton. Similarly, former U. S. Rep. Joe McDade (R-Pa.) was indicted on bri bery and racketeering charges in 1992, after the FBI spent 8 years probing his political activities. Ultimately, a jury acquitted him in 1996. Despite the severity of the charges and lengths of the investigations in the cases of Rostenkowski, McDade and many other congressional members since the founding of the United States, the FBI had never raided a congressional office. Not until May 20, 2006, when 15 agents searched and seized documents from the Capitol Hill office of U. S. Rep. William Jefferson (D-La.), who has been accused of accepting bribes in exchange for using his influence in private dealings with high-tech busi-

nesses in Nigeria, Cameroon and Ghana. While Jefferson, a Harvard-trained lawyer and constitutional scholars around the nation debate whether the federal agency violated the separation of powers provision of the U. S. Constitution, there are enough troubling questions for everyone. Of course, Jefferson needs to explain the $90,000 found in his home freezer. He pledged to do that at the appropriate time. But the FBI also needs to explain what was so unique in the Jefferson case that caused it to raid his office—other than the fact that he is black. “You look at every motive there could possibly be. Of course, when you’re an African American in elective office, you look to see whether that might be a motive. I don’t have any evidence of that. But, I can tell you that you have to look at everything,’ Jefferson says in an exclusive interview with the NNPA News Service. “We’re trying to see what the reasons are and we’re investigating, very carefully, why it happened to me. But we can’t put our finger on it, at least not without factual evidence until we can say to you with reasonable certainty this is why this was done.” Jefferson has been advised by attorneys to remain silent on the facts of the case, including the cash found in his home freezer in Washington dur-

ing an FBI raid on Aug. 3. FBI documents allege the money came from a briefcase with $100,000 in marked $100 bills that he had received as a bribe from a cooperating witness. The FBI says it videotaped the transaction. The clash between executive and legislative powers has prompted Republicans to speak out against the FBI's Capitol Hill raid, not because of any affinity for Jefferson, but on constitutional principles. The acrimony is so deep that President George W. Bush ordered the seized documents to be held by an independent party until tempers can cool on both sides. In addition, given a history of racism and unequal treatment in the criminal justice system towards blacks, some experts are not ruling out racism as a motive. But it is an issue they discuss gingerly. “No one is above the law, including a congressman, especially a congressman. I believe that the allegations against Congressman Jefferson would have been investigated, whether he was white or black or whether this was a Democrat or Republican administration,” says Charles Tieffer, a constitutional scholar and law professor at the University of Baltimore School of Law. “But it is hard to understand why he was not investigated in the same way that all other congressmen before him have

been investigated. But instead, his office was raided.” Tieffer knows how other congressional representatives have been treated. He has worked as deputy general counsel of the U.S. House, a trial attorney with the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, and as an assistant legal counsel for the U.S. Senate. Tieffer was one of the legal experts called to testify before the House Judiciary Community during last week’s hearings about the controversial Jefferson raids and how investiga tions should be conducted in the future. In an interview, he says he is still perplexed by several aspects of the raid. “A number of observers agree with me that if you study carefully what the FBI and Justice Department have put forth, they not only make no showing of an emergency situation requiring something special like a raid. But, more than that, they do not even claim that there was an emergency situation requiring something extraordinary,” Tieffer said. “So, while I would be extremely reluctant to make the assertion for which there is no direct evidence whatsoever-that it was because of his race that the raid occurred— something seemed to have misled the Justice Department and FBI officials into failing to understand or anticipate that the House of Representatives’

bi-partisan leadership, that is both [Republican] Speaker [Dennis] Hasten and Democratic Leader [Nancy] Pelosi would come together and denounce the ra id as wrong.” Tieffer speculates, "One possibility is that the Justice Department officials simply did not imagine that a black Democratic congressman would get bipartisan support from both the Republican Party leadership and the Democratic Party leadership. They may have looked at him as an isolated figure that you could use tactics on that you might not be able to use on a senior white Republican congressman.” Jefferson says he has received comforting support from his constituents in New Orleans, where he has been addressing Hurricane Katrina-related issues and last week spoke at Mayor Ray Nagin’s inauguration. “I don’t have a lot of pressure back home from regular people to explain this and explain that. Basically, they are very supportive and I thank God for that,” he says. “And I know that though in the larger community people are looking at things and they see them happen for the first time with me after 219 years, and they wonder, ‘Well, there have been other cases and apparently there was a way for them to get information from other offices and all the rest and continued on page 29