Saturday, June 12, 1999
Story last updated at 12:33 a.m. on Saturday, June 12, 1999
Brown facing inquiry House committee starts ethics probe
By Dave Roman
Times-Union staff writer
The U.S. House ethics committee is investigating U.S. Rep. Corrine Brown's association with an African millionaire and accused con man.
The House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct announced yesterday that it would open a formal inquiry into whether Brown, a Jacksonville Democrat, acted improperly when she accepted lodging and her adult daughter accepted a $50,000 Lexus from Foutanga Dit Babani Sissoko in 1997.
Brown tried to convince the Justice Department to deport Sissoko rather than send him to prison for trying to bribe a customs agent.
The committee said it would look into the relationship, if any, between the lodging or car and Brown's status or actions as a member of Congress.
Federal laws prohibit members of Congress from receiving gifts in return for an official act.
The ethics committee, headed by Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, said it had looked into other allegations against Brown and concluded that no further investigative action is warranted.
Brown, who is in her fourth term, has been the focus of numerous allegations of improper or questionable conduct dating back to her days in the Florida Legislature.
In a written statement yesterday, Brown focused on being cleared of the other charges.
''For more than a year, I have had to answer a series of baseless allegations about my conduct,'' she said. ''It was said that I had too vigorously championed the causes of my constituents, that I had accepted improper financing for a civil rights rally, that I had followed improper employment practices in my office, and other equally groundless suggestions. Today the Committee on Standards of Conduct dismissed those allegations.
''Now, with the organization of the subcommittee to examine the only two remaining allegations, I can look forward to the resolution at long last of this whole matter. I am confident that these charges, like so many others dismissed today, will also be finally put to rest.''
The charges still under investigation were first raised last year in stories published in the St. Petersburg Times.
This year, the Congressional Accountability Project, a Washington watchdog group affiliated with consumer advocate Ralph Nader, tried to find a House sponsor to file a formal complaint against Brown.
''We drafted an ethics complaint and called about 20 House Republicans and asked them to transmit the complaint to the ethics committee,'' said Gary Ruskin, director of the Congressional Accountability Project. ''They would not do so. We talked to other influential Republicans to try to convince them to help us. Nobody would.''
Ruskin said he sent the text of the complaint with the newspaper stories attached to the ethics committee so the members would have the information, but he never heard from the committee.
A committee employee said staff director Rob Walker, the only one authorized by the committee to speak to the press, was out of the office and could not be reached.
In announcing the investigation yesterday, the ethics committee said it was doing so on its own initiative.
''It's a good step forward,'' Ruskin said. ''The committee has done the right thing by initiating an investigative subcommittee. They've taken way too long to do it, since it's been more than a year since the St. Petersburg Times broke the Lexus story.''
Ruskin said the Congressional Accountability Project has criticized the ethics committee repeatedly over the years for being too slow to initiate investigations.
Ruskin said the allegations against Brown are serious, but at the same time they're only allegations.
''It's the job of the investigative subcommittee to get to the bottom and find out how much truth there is in the allegations,'' he said.
In January 1997, Sissoko was sentenced to four months in prison after pleading guilty to making a $30,000 payoff to a Customs Service agent to improperly export two helicopters.
Brown wrote letters to Attorney General Janet Reno on Sissoko's behalf. She also visited him in prison.
Last year, Sissoko's attorney, Tom Spencer, said Sissoko ordered his aides to buy the Lexus as a token of his friendship for Brown. The car was put in the name of Brown's 32-year-old daughter, Shantrel.
Shantrel Brown, a government lawyer in Washington, said last year that she sold the car because of the publicity and donated the $36,000 from the sale to the African Methodist Episcopal Church for college scholarships.
Sissoko, who has left the country, has been accused in a lawsuit filed by a bank in the United Arab Emirates with stealing more than $240 million.
Allegations of ethical misdeeds are nothing new to Brown, who has weathered them all.
Brown was elected to Congress in 1992 despite allegations by Andy Johnson, her Democratic primary opponent, that she improperly used her influence as a state lawmaker to get City Hall to back a $425,000 federal grant that went to one of her friends.
The city ended up having to pay $314,000 to the federal government when the One Stop Economic Development Center, which had received the grant, failed.
She was re-elected in 1994 despite agreeing to pay a $5,000 fine to settle a case brought against her by the State Ethics Commission, which accused her of using staff members to work in her private travel agency when she was still in the Florida Legislature.
Brown was re-elected to a fourth term last year in the wake of newspaper accounts about the Lexus and her association with Sissoko.
One allegation the committee dismissed involved a $10,000 payment Brown received from the Rev. Henry Lyons, who was recently convicted of racketeering and theft. Brown produced a check showing the money was used to pay for buses to a 1996 rally in Tallahassee to support keeping her district boundaries intact when the court was considering redrawing them.
The outcome of the investigation could lead to anything from expulsion, censure, reprimand, fine, limitation of privilege or no action.
I think Corrine needs to show her disloyalty like Cynthia McKinney before she will be voted out.