HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
106th Congress, 2nd Session
Report 106-
In THE MATTER OF REPRESENTATIVE E. G. "BUD" SHUSTER
October ___, 2000.—Referred to the House Calendar and ordered to be printed
Mr. SMITH and Mr. BERMAN from the Committee on Standards of Official Conduct, submitted the following
REPORT
I. INTRODUCTION
The Committee on Standards of Official Conduct ("Committee") submits this Report pursuant to House Rule XI, Clause 3(a)(2), which authorizes the Committee to investigate any alleged violation by a Member, officer, or employee of the House of Representatives, of the Code of Official Conduct or of any law, rule, regulation, or other standard of conduct applicable to the conduct of such Member, officer, or employee.
In November 1997 the Chairman and Ranking Minority Member of the Committee established an Investigative Subcommittee to investigate a complaint filed against Representative Shuster by the Congressional Accountability Project on September 5, 1996.
After a two and a half year investigation into allegations in the complaint and additional matters that came to the attention of the Investigative Subcommittee, the Investigative Subcommittee found substantial reason to believe that Representative Shuster violated House Rules within the Committee’s jurisdiction.1 As part of a negotiated settlement Representative Shuster admitted to the violation found by the Investigative Subcommittee. The Investigative Subcommittee unanimously adopted a Statement of Alleged Violation ("SAV") on July 26, 2000. The SAV consists of one count setting forth a pattern of conduct, in five specific areas, that did not reflect creditably on the House of Representatives, in violation of former House Rule 43, Clause 1. Two areas identified in the SAV also involve violations of House gift rules and former Rule 45 regarding use of official resources. Several of the specific areas of conduct related to Representative Shuster’s professional relationship with Ann M. Eppard, who resigned as his Chief of Staff in November, 1994.
On September 27, 2000, the Investigative Subcommittee unanimously adopted a Report in this matter. On September 28, 2000, pursuant to Committee Rule 22(c)(3), the Investigative Subcommittee transmitted to the Committee its Report and the Views of Representative Shuster submitted in response to that Report. On September 28, 2000, the Committee agreed to Representative Shuster’s written request, pursuant to Committee Rule 27(b), to waive a sanction hearing in this matter.
On October 4, 2000, the Committee unanimously adopted the Report of the Investigative Subcommittee and includes that Report herewith as part of the Committee’s Report to the House of Representatives on this matter.2 Pursuant to Committee Rule 25 (d), on October 4, 2000, the Committee unanimously determined that a Letter of Reproval constituted the appropriate sanction for Representative Shuster’s violation of House Rules. Pursuant to Committee Rule 25(d), the Letter of Reproval issued by the Committee to Representative Shuster is included in the Committee’s Report to the House of Representatives.
The Letter of Reproval issued to Representative Shuster follows.
II. LETTER OF REPROVAL ISSUED BY THE COMMITTEE ON STANDARDS OF OFFICIAL CONDUCT TO REPRESENTATIVE E. G. "BUD" SHUSTER
October 4, 2000
The Honorable Bud Shuster
United States House of Representatives
2188 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20515
Dear Representative Shuster:
By a unanimous vote on October 4, 2000, the Committee on Standards of Official Conduct, acting on behalf of the House of Representatives, voted to issue to you this Letter of Reproval. The Committee unanimously voted to adopt the Report of the Investigative Subcommittee concerning its investigation of the numerous allegations of misconduct lodged against you.
By your actions you have brought discredit to the House of Representatives.
On November 14, 1997, the Chairman and Ranking Minority Member of the Committee on Standards of Official Conduct established an Investigative Subcommittee pursuant to Committee Rule 17(c)(2) in the matter of Representative Bud Shuster. The Investigative Subcommittee’s inquiry focused on the allegations in a complaint filed by the Congressional Accountability Project and expanded to include an examination of whether your campaign committee violated House Rules and/or federal laws between 1993 and 1998. During the course of its inquiry the Investigative Subcommittee thoroughly investigated the allegations against you. The Investigative Subcommittee issued over 150 subpoenas, counsel interviewed approximately 75 witnesses and the Investigative Subcommittee deposed 33 witnesses. At the conclusion of the inquiry, the Investigative Subcommittee found substantial reason to believe that you had committed violations of House Rules within the Committee’s jurisdiction. On July 26, 2000, the Investigative Subcommittee unanimously adopted a Statement of Alleged Violation finding that you engaged in a pattern of conduct that did not reflect creditably on the House of Representatives in violation of Clause 1 of the Code of Official Conduct, former Rule 43 (now Rule 24) of the House of Representatives. As part of a negotiated settlement you admitted, under penalty of perjury, to the Statement of Alleged Violation. By voluntarily admitting to the Statement of Alleged Violation, you agreed that your conduct did not reflect creditably on the House of Representatives through five areas of conduct.
The Statement of Alleged Violation to which you admitted provides that your conduct did not reflect creditably on the House of Representatives in the following manner:
After considering the Report of the Investigative Subcommittee and your Views regarding the Report, the Committee determined that the five separate areas of misconduct that you admitted to in the Statement of Alleged Violation constitute a significant violation of former Rule 43, Clause 1 of the House of Representatives. Further, the Committee determined that each of the five separate areas of conduct you admitted to constituted misconduct which cannot be described accurately either as technical or de minimis, as you attempt to do in your Views submitted in response to the Subcommittee’s Report. We address the five areas of conduct below.
The first area of misconduct to which you admitted, constituting conduct that did not reflect creditably on the House of Representatives, involved your pattern and practice of knowingly allowing your former chief of staff, Ann M. Eppard, to appear before or communicate with you in your official capacity, during the 12-month period following her resignation, in a manner that created the appearance that your official decisions might have been improperly affected. The Investigative Subcommittee determined that this pattern of conduct by you involved numerous and regular communications and appearances by Ms. Eppard that created the appearance that your official decisions might have been improperly affected. The public elects Congress to do the public good and to act in the public interest. Confidence in this institution is damaged if Members of the House create even the appearance that special access or influence on official matters has been granted to employees who have recently left their employ to represent private interests for profit.
We note that in your Views submitted in response to the Investigative Subcommittee’s Report you state that the "Subcommittee concluded that Representative Shuster did not violate Section 207." This is not accurate. In fact, the Investigative Subcommittee actually stated in its Report that it had "not here determined," and had "not here reached the issue of," whether you or any other person violated or participated in the violation of 18 U.S.C. § 207.
The second area of misconduct to which you admitted involved your violation of former House Gift Rules in December 1995 and January 1996 in connection with your acceptance from private parties of expenses incurred by you and your family during a trip to Puerto Rico. The record establishes that the primary purpose of this trip was recreational. Your participation in extremely limited officially related duties during this trip did not reasonably justify your acceptance of the expenses received from private sources in connection with this trip. Your attempts, in your Views, to minimize the expenses you accepted on this trip are not well founded. Specifically, you state in your Views that, while your family accompanied you on the trip, "the cost of the accommodations provided was comparable to the cost of a hotel room at an area resort, and thus [the sponsors] did not incur any significant additional expense as a result of the family members sharing his accommodations." According to the Subcommittee’s Report, however, your sponsors paid for not just a single hotel room but for lodgings that included both a four-bedroom villa and a two-bedroom villa; we find it telling that in your Views you do not actually deny this description of the accommodations provided to your family during this trip.
The Committee determined that this was a significant violation of former Rule 43, Clause 4 of the House of Representatives and former Rule 52 of the House of Representatives. Members of the House are paid an annual salary and are prohibited from accepting gifts other than as outlined in the House Gift Rule (now Rule 26). When Members violate this rule it undercuts public faith in the institution most important to American representative government. The American people should not be made to question whether, through gifts or favors, the public interest has been subordinated to those with business before the House.
The third area of misconduct to which you admitted, and which constitutes conduct by you that did not reflect creditably on the House of Representatives, involved your violation of former House Rule 45 by authorizing and/or accepting Ms. Eppard’s scheduling and advisory services involving your official schedule for approximately 18 months after she resigned from your congressional office. The repeated and prolonged nature of this conduct merits the determination that this violation was significant. The Committee determined that 18 months is not a transitional period, as you suggested in your Views to the Investigative Subcommittee’s Report, but instead extends far beyond any reasonable period of transition. Further, we emphasize that the Statement of Alleged Violation to which you have admitted states unequivocally that you authorized and/or accepted Ms. Eppards’ scheduling and advisory services, not that you "supposedly" did so, as you suggest in your Views.
The fourth area of misconduct to which you have admitted involved the conduct of your congressional employees while under your supervision and control. The Committee determined that this was a significant violation of former Rule 43, Clause 1 of the House of Representatives. We address later in this letter some of the erroneous assertions made in your Views regarding this violation.
The fifth area of misconduct to which you have admitted, and which constitutes conduct that did not reflect creditably on the House of Representatives, concerned the appearance that certain expenditures by your campaign committee may not have been attributable to bona fide campaign or political purposes. The laws and standards applicable in this area appropriately allow great deference to the decisions made by individual Member candidates in the conduct of political campaigns. These decisions often involve political speech protected under the First Amendment; further, the conduct of campaigns is an essential part of our representative democracy. Nevertheless, federal laws and House Rules do impose some restrictions on the use of campaign funds by Member candidates. Clause 6 of the Code of Conduct of the House of Representatives, Rule XLIII at the time of the conduct at issue, provided, in pertinent part, that a "Member shall convert no campaign funds to personal use in excess of reimbursement for legitimate and verifiable campaign expenditures and shall expend no funds from his campaign account not attributable to bona fide campaign or political purposes." (Emphasis added.) Thus, while, as noted in the House Ethics Manual, at 271, Members generally have wide discretion as to what constitutes a bona fide political purpose, they may not convert campaign funds to personal uses exceeding reimbursement for campaign expenditures that are not only legitimate, but that are also capable of being verified as such.
The Committee has found nothing in your Views submitted in response to the Investigative Subcommittee’s Report that gainsays the Subcommittee’s underlying factual findings in this area, that is, that between January 1993 and December 1998, you and/or representatives of your campaign committee used campaign funds to pay for disbursements, described as "political meetings" or with related terms, on more than 675 occasions, totaling approximately $300,000. In addition, the Investigative Subcommittee determined that during the period in question you and/or representatives of your campaign committee used approximately $400,000 in campaign funds to pay for private chartered airplane flights for transportation. We have also found no support in the record before us for your claim that the Investigative Subcommittee faulted you for failing to maintain "detailed documentation regarding each political expense" by your campaign committee during the years in question. First, far from applying a requirement of "detailed" documentation, the Subcommittee noted that your campaign committee did not make "even the most minimal effort to document or verify that the expenditures were related to legitimate campaign activity. . . ." (Emphasis added.) Second, as the Subcommittee’s report makes clear, this clause of the Statement of Alleged Violation is based only on the expenditures by your campaign committee "for meals designated as ‘political meetings’ and for transportation on chartered airplane flights," not for any other political or transportation expenses incurred by your campaign committee during the period at issue. The Subcommittee deferred to your judgment regarding other disbursements made by your campaign committee.
The Committee determined that through your campaign committee you engaged in significant misconduct by failing to keep records adequate to verify the legitimacy of an extraordinarily high number and dollar amount of expenditures for certain "political meetings" and/or "political meetings and meals" and for certain chartered airplane flights. Reasonable people—members of the public and Members of the House alike—reviewing the hundreds of thousands of dollars spent by your campaign in expensive restaurants and on chartered air travel, might well ask whether such expenditures were for personal purposes rather than for bona fide campaign purposes. The Subcommittee clearly and forthrightly states in its Report that the evidence before it did not meet the burden of proof—that is, substantial reason to believe—that these campaign funds actually were converted to personal use (thus proving false the claim in your Views that the Subcommittee has unfairly shifted the burden of proof on this issue to you). However, and just as clearly in our view, in admitting to the Statement of Alleged Violation in this matter you admitted that the reasonable questions raised about your campaign’s expenditures may and should be ascribed to your failure to properly verify the campaign purposes of these expenditures.
As we have stated, the Committee has adopted the Report of the Investigative Subcommittee in this matter. The Committee has also, of course, given full consideration to the Views submitted by you in response to the Subcommittee’s Report. Those Views call for more direct attention and discussion.
The Committee finds the Views submitted by you, through your counsel, to be rife with patently inaccurate and misleading statements of the applicable laws, rules, standards of conduct and Committee guidance. For example, the discussion of 18 U.S.C. § 207 in your response cites to a regulation of the Office of Government Ethics (5 C.F.R. § 2637.204(d)) which was superceded in 1991 and which interprets § 207 (c ) of the statute not as it was worded at the time of your conduct in this matter but as it was worded before 1991; the differences in wording are significant and material and your discussion is, as a result, grossly misleading. You also cite an "11/5/96 OGE Letter" which interprets subsection (a) of § 207, not subsection (e), the subsection discussed by the Investigative Subcommittee. Even a cursory reading of the OGE letter you cite, together with a reasonably attentive reading of the law, would show that the letter cited simply does not apply to the concerns raised by your and Ms. Eppard’s conduct. You invoke the untimeliness of an October 1998 Memorandum issued by the Committee on post-employment concerns, yet fail to note that substantially and materially similar guidance appears in the House Ethics Manual, published in 1992, well before Ms. Eppard left her position in your office. You attempt to confuse the entirely irrelevant standards set forth in the Lobbying Disclosure Act with the relevant standards, discussed in the Subcommittee’s Report, applicable in situations raising concerns as to potential post-employment conflicts of interest.
You incorrectly assert in your response that there is no clearly phrased prohibition against congressional employees performing campaign work in a congressional office. We refer you again to the Ethics Manual, 1992, at 216, which contains the following clear and straightforward language: "Anything supported with official funds is an official resource, including congressional offices. . . .[A]s is true of all official resources, congressional offices may not be used for the conduct of campaign activity." In the testimony of witnesses, cited in the Investigative Subcommittee’s Report, as well as in your response, it was asserted that your congressional employees took so-called "administrative leave" to work on your political campaigns. Upon inquiry the Subcommittee discovered that in your office the term "administrative leave" simply described the situation where employees working on your campaign nonetheless received full pay from your congressional office. This political work by your congressional employees occurred both outside of the premises of the House of Representatives and within the House itself. Despite the attempt to do so in your Views, unacceptable conduct cannot be made acceptable simply by labeling it as such.
Lastly, as to this portion of the Statement of Alleged Violation, your assertion that it is "unfair" to hold you responsible for the activities of your employees as set forth in the Statement of Alleged Violations simply ignores the following plain statement in the Ethics Manual, at 320 and citing to two Committee reports: a "Member is responsible for assuring that his or her employees are aware of and adhere to these and other rules, and for assuring that resources provided for support of official duties are applied to the proper purposes."
Your response also contains irrelevant or misleading discussions of other matters investigated and/or reported upon by the Committee in the past. The absence of specific mention in this letter of those discussions, or of the many other distortions of the findings of the Investigative Subcommittee or of the other incorrect statements about applicable standards which fill your Views, should not be taken in any way as a sign of this Committee’s agreement. Indeed, the Committee here cautions all other Members, Officers and employees of the House that they should not look to your Views in any way for guidance as to the standards applicable to their conduct. Members, Officers and employees should turn to the Office of Advice and Education of this Committee for accurate and authorized guidance.
The Committee is disturbed not only by the content of your response but by its tone. It is one of blame-shifting about and trivializing of misconduct to which you have admitted and which this Committee does not and can not characterize as de minimis or technical, either in whole or in part. You committed substantial violations. That the Committee has decided, nonetheless, to accept the Investigative Subcommittee’s recommendation and resolve this matter by imposition of the sanction of a Letter of Reproval is due in part to the Committee’s respect for the thorough, fair and thoughtful work done by the Investigative Subcommittee. The Committee believes that the House of Representatives and the public are best served by the repudiation of your conduct and that this Letter of Reproval accomplishes that goal efficiently. Further, you have agreed that your misconduct did not reflect creditably on the House of Representatives.
A Letter of Reproval is a Committee imposed sanction. Unlike a reprimand, or other more severe sanction, a vote of the entire House of Representatives is not required for a Letter of Reproval to be imposed and published. You should understand, however, that the Investigative Subcommittee was accurate when, in its Report, it stated: "[I]t should be emphasized that a Letter of Reproval itself is intended to be a rebuke of a Member’s conduct issued by a body of that Member’s peers acting, as the Committee on Standards of Official Conduct, on behalf of the House of Representatives."
In our free and democratic system of republican government, it is vital that citizens feel confidence in the integrity of the legislative institutions that make the laws that govern America. Ultimately, individual Members of Congress can undermine respect for the institutions of our government when they engage in official misconduct. You have engaged in serious official misconduct through the violations to which you have admitted under penalty of perjury. Those violations cause this Committee formally and publicly to reprove you for conduct that reflected discredit on the House of Representatives and violated former House Rule 43, Clause 1.
Sincerely,
|
/s Lamar Smith, Chairman |
/s Howard L. Berman, Ranking Minority Member |
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