Today’s action doesn’t begin to cover Rangel’s multitude of sins, but it’s a start:
The House ethics committee said on Thursday that it had admonished Representative Charles B. Rangel for violating Congressional gift rules by accepting corporate-sponsored trips to the Caribbean in 2007 and 2008.
But the ethics panel, the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct, did not issue findings in its continuing inquiries into more serious matters concerning Mr. Rangel’s fund-raising, his failure to pay federal taxes on rental income from a Dominican villa, and his use of four rent-stabilized apartments provided by a Manhattan real estate developer.
Mr. Rangel, a Harlem Democrat who heads the House Ways and Means Committee, was one of five members of the Congressional Black Caucus who accepted trips to attend business seminars in Antigua and Barbuda and in St. Maarten organized by the Carib News Foundation, a charity affiliated with a Caribbean-focused newspaper in New York. But the conventions had been underwritten by corporations like Pfizer, Verizon and AT&T, and that sponsorship was widely noted at the events, according to an ethics complaint filed by the National Legal and Policy Center, a conservative advocacy group.
The committee’s findings, released Thursday night, admonished Mr. Rangel, even though it said it had no proof that he knew of the sponsorships. But it held him accountable because two members of his staff knew.
