Lawyers for Waters want ethics to halt probe for evidence

Rep. Maxine Waters’s legal team is demanding that the ethics committee stop gathering evidence against her.

Attorneys Stanley Brand and Andrew Herman sent a letter to the ethics committee on Wednesday, taking issue with the panel’s ongoing investigative activities after the formal probe was over and Waters was charged with violating House rules. An investigative subcommittee of the ethics panel conducts the probe and issues formal charges in a document known as a Statement of Alleged Violation (SAV).

“Such inquiry violates both the Committee’s rules and comparable federal criminal procedure and raises significant questions about the sufficiency of the evidence that the Investigative Subcommittee replied upon when it issues the charges contained in the SAV,” wrote Brand and Herman. “Most alarmingly, it calls into question the impartiality and good faith of the Investigative Subcommittee.”

The lawyers cite an ethics committee document request to Waters’s office that aides received on Aug. 17 and ongoing contacts and interviews with witnesses. The information requested, they argue, relates solely to matters addressed in the SAV. In addition, a top ethics committee aide threatened Waters with a subpoena if she did not voluntarily provide the documents in question, according to Brand and Herman.

Waters has vigorously defended herself against charges that she violated House rules by using her position to help a bank in which her husband owned stock and previously served on its board. She has chosen to fight the allegations in a public trial.

Brand and Herman point to ethics committee rules and “long-standing comparable federal criminal practice and procedure” to make their case that the panel is outside its bounds in gathering additional evidence in the case against Waters.

Read more: http://thehill.com/homenews/house/116017-lawyers-for-waters-want-ethics-to-halt-probe-for-evidence

find something they can use.

It'll be minor, but they only need it to be enough to get a reprimand, not even a censure. Even with just an ethics reprimand they can smear her in the media for endless media cycles and never let it die. They can turn a mole hill into a mountain to try to drive her out of office.

So they want to keep digging until they find that mole hill. That's all they need.

Exactly.