Maxine Waters Caught in Triple Ethical Tangle

Posted on Aug 9, 2010

Wikimedia Commons

Rep. Maxine Waters may be in deep ... trouble if she’s found guilty of the trio of ethics charges that a House committee hit her with Monday. The congresswoman apparently plans to contest the violations, stemming from her alleged involvement in 2008 in funneling TARP funds to save an ailing bank to which she had family ties.  —KA

Los Angeles Times:

Reporting from Washington — Even as Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters of California was warned by a colleague against interceding on behalf of a troubled bank with ties to her husband, her chief of staff, who also is her grandson, was “actively involved” in working to help the bank, according to a House Ethics Committee report released Monday that accuses the longtime Los Angeles political figure of three ethics violations.

Around the same time that Waters set up a September 2008 meeting between U.S. Treasury Department officials and representatives of minority-owned banks, her chief of staff, Mikael Moore, sent an e-mail to the staff of Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), chairman of the House Financial Services Committee. According to the report, the subject of the e-mail was: “O[ne] U[nited] is in trouble.’”

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