House minority leader Nancy Pelosi didn’t say Sunday if she believed the multiple women who have accused Democratic Rep. John Conyers of sexual misconduct, and instead encouraged “due process” as a congressional ethics committee probes allegations made against the 88-year-old lawmaker in multiple sworn affidavits in 2014.
“We are strengthened by due process. Just because someone is accused—and was it one accusation, is it two—I think there has to be,” Pelosi said on Meet the Press.
Two former Conyers staffers reportedly have leveled claims against him: one in a notarized complaint published last Monday by BuzzFeed, and another in an attempted lawsuit earlier this year that the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia refused to seal. The latter woman dropped her case. But the first one settled with Conyers’ office for about $27,000 in exchange for a confidentiality agreement, BuzzFeed reported. Both women alleged Conyers sexually harassed them, with similar accounts of unwanted touching.
“John Conyers is an icon in our country,” Pelosi continued. “He’s done a great deal to protect women: the Violence Against Women Act, which the right wing is now quoting me as praising him for his work on that, and he did great work on that. But the fact is that as John reviews his case, which he knows, which I don’t, I believe that he will do the right thing.”
Moderator Chuck Todd asked Pelosi what the “right thing” was. Is it resigning, which Conyers has resisted? Is it a lesser action? Pelosi did not say. (Conyers announced later on Sunday that he was leaving his leadership post on the Judiciary committee.)
“That he will do the right thing in terms of what he knows about his situation, that he’s entitled to due process, but women are entitled to due process, as well,” she answered.
The House Ethics Committee announced it had launched a formal investigation into Conyers on Monday. Pelosi referenced that probe when Todd asked her directly if she believed Conyers’ accusers—a question to which she did not provide anything close to a yes or no.
“I don’t know who they are. Do you? They have not really come forward,” she said. “That’s for the ethics committee to review. But I believe he understands what it at stake here, and he will do the right thing.”
Her evasion bears more than a passing resemblance to the defenses employed by supporters of Alabama Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore, who was alleged to have habitually pursued teenagers while in his 30s. The recent claims against Moore include on-the-record accounts from Leigh Corfman and Beverly Young Nelson, both who accuse Moore of sexual assault when they were 14 and 16, respectively. The volume of reporting on Moore’s behavior, which includes the first-hand accounts of other women and anecdotes of people familiar with him contemporaneously—particularly at a local mall where he was said to search for teenagers—has been deep.
Republican Texas Rep. Jodey Arrington is among the Moore backers who have invoked a “due process” excuse to defend one of their own.
“I’m telling you that the only way to render a verdict of if [Moore] is telling the truth or they’re telling the truth is to have a jury of their peers and have due process, not play it out in the national media,” he said.
Here’s Alan Keyes on Moore ten days ago: “What’s going on right now? One, that the people have chosen to be their agent, their representative, and their ambassador, they’re telling us that he is not entitled to the presumption of innocence. That when people come forward with scurrilous accusations, when they come forward with vile calumnies, they must be treated as true. And they tell us that the presumption of innocence has no place in our elections.”
And here’s an editorial from the Washington Times trotting out the due process canard: “Sometimes a lynch mob gets a guilty man, but it’s nevertheless an unspeakable evil. The accusations against Roy Moore in Alabama are sordid and serious, but so far they’re accusations, not charges, and he is entitled to his day in court.” (The paper’s definition of “day in court” is Election Day, December 12.)
But these “due process” defenses of Moore have been more the exception than the rule from conservatives and establishment Republicans, after House speaker Paul Ryan, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and the Republican National Committee ditched him this month. As David French observed, no one is attempting to deprive Moore of life, liberty, or property by considering the women’s allegations. “Due process protections absolutely, positively do not prevent voters from evaluating the veracity of news reports and judging whether a politician is fit for public office,” French wrote.
And they didn’t prevent Pelosi from doing so, either—when it came to Moore, not Conyers.
“We’re talking about a child molester,” she said in the same interview.
