TUESDAY, AUGUST 10, 2010


KLMNO POLITICS THE NATION & DIGEST Waters takes committee to task


Rep. Graves was cleared of similar ethics claims, her attorneys contend


by Paul Kane JOHNNY HANSON/HOUSTON CHRONICLE VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS


A mourner pays respects to slain Lance Cpl. Shane R. Martin, 23, of Spring, Tex., after burial services at Houston National Cemetery on Monday. Martin died in Afghanistan’s Helmand province Thursday.


WEST VIRGINIA


Mine monitors not disabled


Tests of methane monitors tak- en from the scene of the worst U.S. coal mining disaster in dec- ades show the safety devices had not been tampered with before the explosion, the head of West Virginia’s mine safety program said Monday. The monitors were taken from a longwall mining machine near the site of an April 5 explosion at Massey Energy’s Upper Big Branch mine. The blast killed 29 miners and injured two. Methane monitors are de- signed to shut down mining ma- chines when they encounter ex- plosive levels of gas. State and federal investigators sought the tests following claims by former Massey employees that monitors were routinely electronically “bridged” so machines would keep running. Officials with Virginia-based


Massey have repeatedly denied the allegations.


— Associated Press HAWAII


Engineer guilty in spying case A federal jury in Hawaii on


Monday convicted a former B-2 stealth bomber engineer of sell- ing military secrets to China. Noshir Gowadia pleaded not


guilty to 17 counts, including con- spiracy, violating the arms export control act and money launder- ing. The decision came after a week of deliberations at a federal court in Honolulu. Prosecutors accused Gowadia of helping China design a stealth cruise missile. The trial lasted nearly four months. The 67-year-old from Maui has spent almost five years in federal detention since his Oc- tober 2005 arrest after a judge ruled he was a flight risk. — Associated Press


WYOMING


Escaped Arizona inmate captured An escaped killer with a hand-


gun and a hitchhiking sign ex- pressed relief at his capture on Monday after 10 days on the run, while authorities searched to the north of this tourist-packed park for a second fugitive and his female accomplice, a self-styled “Bonnie and Clyde.” Tracy Province, 42, was caught as he walked in sleepy Meeteetse, Wyo., steps from a church where he sat in the pews a day earlier and sang “Your Grace Is Enough.” The search for inmate John McCluskey, 45, and Casslyn Welch, 44, focused for a time on sprawling Yellowstone National Park, which straddles Wyoming and Montana. But authorities now believe the two fled the park with agents following leads in Montana. Province, McCluskey and Dan-


iel Renwick escaped from a pri- vate, medium-security Arizona State Prison near Kingman on July 30 after authorities say Welch threw wire cutters over the perimeter fence. Welch is McCluskey’s fiancee and cousin. Renwick, who turns 37 on Tuesday, was captured in Colorado.


— Associated Press


In defending herself against congressional ethics charges, Rep. Maxine Waters plans to put a sur- prising witness on the stand: The House Ethics Committee. The committee unveiled a three-count charge against the California Democrat on Monday, alleging she broke conflict-of-in- terest rules by helping arrange a cash infusion of more than $12 million in federal bailout funds for a troubled bank in which her husband was a large shareholder. Waters has countered that her initial assistance was intended to benefit a broad category of minor- ity-owned banks, not just her hus- band’s bank, and that follow-up help to the bank was minimal and handled by staff. The congresswoman has ex- pressed no intention of settling the case. She is expected instead to defend herself in an ethics trial, which would probably begin in September. In her defense, Waters and her


attorneys intend to present the case of another member of Con- gress who recently faced similar charges before the ethics commit- tee and was exonerated. Rep. Sam Graves, a four-term


Missouri Republican who sat on the Small Business Committee, was accused of helping his wife’s investment partner by inviting him to testify before the commit- tee. Graves said that his wife’s partner was acting on behalf of a larger trade association and that his staff had selected him to testi- fy.


The ethics committee cleared him of the charges. “This committee has adopted an approach that is sharply di- vergent and significantly harsher than the decision rendered in Graves and other relevant prec- edent,” Waters’s attorneys, Stanley


Brand and Andrew Herman, wrote the Ethics Committee last month. “In light of the disparate treatment of Representative Wa- ters the allegations cannot be rec- onciled with this committee’s precedent.” The Brand-Herman memo was released Monday as part of the Ethics Committee’s “statement of alleged violation,” which outlined the conclusions of an investiga- tive subcommittee that had been examining Waters for almost a year. It found that Waters “im- properly exerted” her influence by helping Boston-based OneUnited Bank in securing funds from the federal Troubled Assets Relief Program. The Waters case, which will be heard by an eight-lawmaker pan- el, will probably hinge on whether it can be proven that her office’s actions led to OneUnited’s TARP aid. In September 2008, Waters ar-


ranged a meeting between the bank’s officers and Treasury offi- cials. At the meeting, the bank’s officers requested $50 million in federal money. In exchange, the bank said it would turn over the value of its holdings in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mort- gage giants that had just been placed in conservatorship by Treasury and the Federal Reserve. Treasury balked at the request,


saying the law did not allow such an exchange.


At the time, OneUnited was in


poor financial shape. According to the committee’s charging docu- ments, Waters’s husband, Sidney Williams, held $350,000 in OneU- nited stock as of June 30, 2008; two months later, its worth had dropped to $175,000. In interviews with ethics inves-


tigators, Waters said that she ar- ranged the meeting as part of an effort to help minority-owned banks in general, and not OneU- nited specifically, and said her husband’s investment in the bank did not motivate her actions. She told the ethics investigators that, after the meeting, she removed herself from the effort to help the bank, citing the conflict. But the four-member investiga-


tive subcommittee found that the lawmaker’s chief of staff, Mikael Moore, remained “actively in- volved in assisting OneUnited representatives with their request for capital from Treasury.” The report said that Waters did not instruct Moore, who is also her grandson, to “refrain from as- sisting OneUnited” and that the eventual $12.1million infusion of TARP funds prevented her hus- band’s bank shares from becom- ing “worthless.” Brand and Herman, however, argued that Moore’s assistance to OneUnited was done “without [Waters’s] direction or knowl- edge.” They wrote that the help her office gave consisted of three e-mails to the staff of Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), the chairman of the Financial Services Committee, along with the receipt of several other e-mails from OneUnited of- ficials asking for updates. Waters’s attorneys devoted most of their 16-page defense to the Graves case. Graves, the rank- ing member of the Small Business Committee, invited Brooks Hurst to testify at a hearing related to the renewable fuels industry. At the time, Hurst and Graves’s wife were co-investors in a pair of re- newable fuel cooperatives. Graves’s wife held less than 0.2 percent interest in the two com- panies — slightly more than Sid- ney Williams’s 0.1 percent stake in OneUnited. In dismissing the case, the Eth- ics Committee wrote last year that Hurst had appeared before Con- gress not in his private business role but as a representative of the Missouri Soybean Association and that Graves’s aides had played the key role in selecting him to ap- pear. For Ethics Committee mem- bers, the difference between the two cases may come down to a question of results: In Graves’s case, his wife’s business partner did not see any direct benefit from the invitation to testify. But, the committee alleges that OneUnit- ed ultimately received direct fed- eral help because of Waters’s in- tervention on its behalf. kanep@washpost.com


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