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Full title: Ethics Committee releases messages showing Tlaib asking campaign for personal money, as ethics probes announced The House Ethics Committee on Thursday released a trove of striking internal campaign communications sent in 2018 by Michigan Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib , in which Tlaib urgently requests money from her congressional campaign to defray personal expenses. The document dump was related to the committee's ongoing ethics probe into Tlaib, which the panel said on Thursday would be "expanded" based on a referral from the Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE). Additionally, the Ethics Committee acknowledged for the first time on Thursday an...

Judicial Watch Sues for Key SpyGate Document Judicial Watch Sues Over the International Conspiracy Against Trump Judicial Watch Demands Expanded Ethics Investigation of Rep. Ilhan Omar Why Was Nellie Ohr Deleting Emails From Her Husband? Judicial Watch Sues for Documentss on FBI/CIA Informant in Trump Organization Judicial Watch Court Victory against California Effort to Target Trump Judicial Watch Sues for Key SpyGate Document Our powerful and secretive spy agencies were unleashed, and the Justice Department and the FBI is making it difficult for us and even Congress to get to the bottom of it. We sued for one key...

A conservative watchdog group is asking the Office of Congressional Ethics on Thursday to review whether 14 Democratic lawmakers and one Republican inappropriately used their office to try to coerce a Las Vegas casino mogul into allowing his employees to unionize. In May, Wisconsin Rep. Mark Pocan and 13 other Democrats wrote a letter to Frank Fertitta III, the CEO of the Las Vegas-based casino management company Red Rock Resorts Inc., urging him to “respect the rights of employees” at the company “to form a union and collectively bargain.” Republican Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania sent Fertitta a similar letter...

Judicial Watch Demands House Ethics Investigation of Rep. Ilhan Omar Robert Mueller’s Latest Attempt to Smear President Trump Leftists in the State Department Sabotage Trump’s Guatemala Asylum Deal Judicial Watch Demands House Ethics Investigation of Rep. Ilhan Omar Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Democrat from Minnesota, is in the news often because of her racially inflammatory anti-Semitic views , including her support for a terrorist front group . But far-left views are not our concern at this moment – her alleged criminal behavior is. Earlier this week, we hand-delivered an ethics complaint to David Skaggs, chairman of the U.S. House...

The head of a conservative watchdog group said Thursday that Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters is inciting "mob violence" with her call for protesters to confront Trump officials in public, as he urged a formal ethics investigation on Capitol Hill. "When you’re out there ... inciting mob violence against sitting Trump Cabinet members, that doesn’t obviously reflect credibly on the House," Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton told "Fox & Friends." "And the House has to decide whether they’re going to allow its members to use the House as a platform and its power and position to attack and incite violence." Judicial...

Getting the Supreme Court Back on Track Federal Judge Slams Justice Department for Stonewalling on ‘Russiagate’ Judicial Watch Files Complaint Against Rep. Waters for Inciting Violence and Assaults Happy Independence Day! Getting the Supreme Court Back on Track We are pleased that Justice Kennedy’s retirement from the Supreme Court will provide President Trump another opportunity to nominate a constitutional conservative who will honor the Constitution and the rule of law, rather than legislate from the bench. And the U.S. Senate should move quickly to work with President Trump to consider and approve a new justice who will apply the...

Judicial Watch Calls On House to Retain Congressional Ethics Office JW Uncovers Another Obama Administration Email Scandal Jihadists Train, Plan U.S. Attack from Mexican Border State Premier Vodcast: Chris Farrell’s “On Watch” Investigative Report Judicial Watch Calls On House to Retain Congressional Ethics Office True to our non-partisan mission, nine years ago, we worked with then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s Special Task Force on Ethics Enforcement to push for an independent body to help handle ethics investigations of House members. This effort led to the establishment in 2008 of the Office of Congressional Ethics. This week House Republicans proposed a rule...

WASHINGTON — House Republicans, overriding their top leaders, voted on Monday to significantly curtail the power of an independent ethics office set up in 2008 in the aftermath of corruption scandals that sent three members of Congress to jail. The move to effectively kill the Office of Congressional Ethics was not made public until late Monday, when Representative Robert W. Goodlatte, Republican of Virginia and chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, announced that the House Republican Conference had approved the change. There was no advance notice or debate on the measure. The surprising vote came on the eve of the...

Greg Nash The House Ethics Committee publicly acknowledged Monday it is conducting a review into Florida Senate candidate Rep. Alan Grayson. In a statement, the panel said it will issue a decision on whether to open a formal investigation into Grayson's activities by April 5. If the committee decides not to proceed with an investigation, it must release the Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE) report on the case. Grayson's management of a hedge fund while serving as a member of Congress has been looming over the Aug. 30 Senate Democratic primary. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) earlier this...

John Boehner’s Speakership was a setback for Congressional ethics. He backslid on a number of important reforms, and helped to return the Ethics Committee to its traditional role of covering up wrongdoing by incumbent members of Congress. Boehner ally Rep. Charles Dent (R-PA), the Chairman of the Ethics Committee, is currently orchestrating a whitewash of apparent House rules violations related to a junket by ten House members to Azerbaijan in 2013. On July 31, the Ethics Committee announced that it had found “no evidence” that broke House rules. It plans “no further action regarding this matter and considers it...

The House Ethics Committee is launching a full-tilt investigation of Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota. The committee announced on Friday it had received a referral from the Office of Congressional Ethics, an independent investigative body, and said in a brief statement that it would formally investigate the one-time Republican presidential candidate. A lawyer for Bachmann had previously acknowledged the investigation by the OCE and said that Bachmann was cooperating. That probe is focused in part on her short-lived presidential bid.

Today the House Ethics Committee announced that it was taking no action against Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-NY) who secretly took a $40,000 payment from an individual who subsequently pled guilty in a multi-million-dollar mortgage scam. In 2007, Meeks received $40,000 from a "businessman," Edul Ahmad. Under the Ethics in Government Act, Congressmen are required to disclose such financial transactions on their annual Financial Disclosure Reports. Meeks failed to disclose the transaction on his reports for 2007, 2008 and 2009. In 2010, the New York Daily News reported, "Queens Congressman Gregory Meeks made no payments for three years on a...

The House Ethics Committee announced on Friday that it is investigating allegations against Rep. Silvestre Reyes (D-Texas). The secretive panel stated that after six weeks of investigating the lawmaker, it was moving to continue its probe until Nov. 28, 2012. The Ethics committee did not specify the nature of the alleged violations of House rules that it is probing in the case, but stressed that the extension of its investigation did not indicate that Reyes was guilty. The outside Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE) board referred the case to the Ethics panel on Aug. 30. Reyes lost his Democratic primary...

Last week's announcement by the House Ethics Committee that it is investigating Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-NY), a year after questions about his finances were in the headlines, has put the spotlight back on the Committee's ability to do its job.The Committee recently hired 10 new and internal counsels, bumping their staff up to 23 members. But even with the beefed-up staff, the status of other, more high profile cases, is still unknown.It's taken about seven months for the Ethics Committee to hire new staffers since the chief counsel staff director resigned and two senior counsels were placed on administrative...

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) will reappoint the same slate of Democratic members to an outside ethics board she created although she has yet to do so, according to a Democratic aide familiar with the matter. Pelosi and Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) are each responsible for appointing four members to the Office of Congressional Ethics’s (OCE) board. The roster must be reappointed at the beginning of each Congress, and as of Wednesday afternoon Boehner had renamed the Republicans on the board but Pelosi had yet to reapprove her slate. The delay in reappointing the OCE board members has fueled...

Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton issued the following statement in a coalition press conference held today by 10 groups, including Judicial Watch, Taxpayers for Common Sense, National Taxpayers Union and a number of reform groups urging the incoming House leadership of the 112th Congress to continue the Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE) and to oppose any efforts to weaken or undermine the office: I’m Tom Fitton, President of Judicial Watch. Judicial Watch is a conservative, non-partisan educational foundation which advocates high standards of ethics and morality in our nation’s public life and seeks to ensure that political and judicial...

A coalition of 10 groups, including Judicial Watch, Taxpayers for Common Sense, National Taxpayers Union and a number of reform groups will hold a press conference Thursday at 10:30 a.m. to urge the incoming House leadership of the 112th Congress to continue the Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE) and to oppose any efforts to weaken or undermine the office.The Office of Congressional Ethics is an independent nonpartisan investigative office in the House credited with pressuring the notoriously inactive House Ethics Committee to do its job.The groups will release research showing an increase in activity this Congress by the House...

Americans hate Congress, but love their congressmen. Sadly, the people with the power to take strong action against errant congressmen continue to let them give the institution a bad name. There was "clear and convincing evidence" gathered by the U.S. House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct that Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., violated the U.S. Code, the Code of Ethics for Government Service, the congressional franking regulations and official House rules and codes.During the two-year investigation that led to the committee's findings, Rangel labeled his unethical actions as benign bookkeeping errors, accounting mistakes, misunderstandings and misrepresentations. In the case...

Emerging signs suggest Republicans may choose to keep the Office of Congressional Ethics despite worries voiced by watchdog groups that GOP leaders will try to ax it. Watchdogs remain nervous, and Democracy 21’s Fred Wertheimer sent House GOP Leader John Boehner (Ohio) a three-page letter Monday calling on him to keep the OCE to show the GOP is serious about not repeating the ethics mistakes of the previous Republican majority, then controlled by former Rep. Tom DeLay (Texas). But Republicans on Monday pushed back on a report that Rep. David Dreier (R-Calif.) asked the OCE to justify its existence three...

Just when it appears that no one could possibly get away with blaming former President George W. Bush for even one more thing, another crazed liberal Democrat exercises the right to do just that. The latest knee-jerk, Bush-bashing excuse came from none other than Rep. Maxine Waters, perhaps the second dumbest member of Congress, right after Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas. I know that it is terribly politically incorrect of me to notice their stupidity and race-baiting, since both of them are black and female—especially since they have so much competition in Congress from obtuse white men. But in 2010,...