The Senate Ethics Committee on Thursday declared that it has “substantial and credible evidence” that former senator John Ensign broke federal laws in his effort to cover up an extramarital affair he had with a political aide, referring its case to the Justice Department and Federal Election Commission.
In a highly unusual public rebuke, the bipartisan committee presented its case on the Senate floor, announcing it had voted unanimously to release its findings and request the Justice Department re-start a criminal investigation into the Nevada Republican’s actions.
“We have reason to believe Senator Ensign violated laws,” Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), the chairwoman of the panel, said during the speeches.
Boxer, reading from a report of the special counsel hired to handle the investigation, said that the evidence against Ensign was “substantial enough to warrant the consideration of expulsion” had he not resigned.
Ensign, who has said he never violated any rules or laws, resigned May 3 rather than face questioning under oath from the committee.
Ensign has now retained one of Washington’s top criminal defense lawyers, Abbe Lowell, who accused the committee of rushing its report without fully considering a lengthy rebuttal that Ensign’s legal team submitted Wednesday.
“Senator Ensign has admitted and apologized for his conduct and imposed on himself the highest sanction of resignation. But this is not the same as agreeing that he did or intended to violate any laws or rules, and this submission demonstrates that there is a lot more to the issues than the committee’s report indicates,” Lowell and Robert Walker, who defended Ensign before the ethics committee, said in a statement.
The Ensign case has been unusual in many respects: his affair was with Cynthia Hampton, his political treasurer, while her husband, Doug, served as one of Ensign’s top aides on the legislative staff. Now, less than 10 days after his resignation, the investigation ended in even more unusual fashion with a public rebuke on the Senate floor by the ethics committee’s leaders and its first criminal referral of a colleague in decades.
Boxer and Sen. Johnny Isakson (Ga.), the ranking Republican on the evenly divided six-member committee, issued a 75-page report that included eight counts of either legal violations or internal Senate rules violations. The most prominent charges were that Ensign broke federal “cooling-off” laws when he aided his mistress’s husband, Doug Hampton, in gaining lobbying employment after Ensign dismissed both Hamptons from his political and legislative offices.
The committee could not formally rebuke Ensign, because it lost its jurisdiction in the case once he left the Senate. After that, the committee quickly released an announcement — as Boxer and Isakson traveled in China on a congressional delegation trip — that they would not just end the inquiry.
Since June 2009, the committee had focused on Ensign’s affair with Cynthia Hampton and his decision to dismiss her and Doug Hampton, firings that came in the spring of 2008. Ensign’s parents then gave $96,000 to the Hampton family in gift money, and the senator also helped Doug Hampton land lobbying work with his political supporters back in Las Vegas.
Earlier this year, Ensign released a statement saying the Justice Department had ended the criminal investigation into his case, although Justice has never publicly confirmed that. Last month federal prosecutors brought charges against Doug Hampton, accusing him of violating federal laws that required him to not lobby Ensign for a year after leaving his office.
The ethics report found that the $96,000 payments to the Hamptons and their children were not gifts, but actually were severance payments that violated federal campaign finance laws. In addition, the committee alleged that Ensign engaged in “potential obstruction of justice” in the case.
Read more at The Washington Post.