Aqui Tu Mundo Digital: Rangel culpable de 11 cargos

WASHINGTON — A House ethics panel has found Democratic Rep. Charles Rangel of New York guilty on 11 counts of breaking House rules.

The full ethics committee will next conduct a hearing on the appropriate punishment for the former chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. The committee will then make a recommendation to the House.

Possible punishments include a House vote deploring Rangel's conduct, a fine and denial of privileges.

The eight-member ethics panel had sat as a jury to judge Rangel's conduct. The 80-year-old congressman from Harlem was charged with 13 counts of financial and fundraising wrongdoing.

Rangel walked out of the trial on Monday, pleading unsuccessfully for time to hire new lawyers. He said his former lawyers abandoned him after he paid them some $2 million, but that he could no longer afford them.

The official acting as prosecutor of the ethics committee — made up of four Republicans and four Democrats — said the facts were so clear in the case that there was no need to call witnesses, and panel members agreed.

If the panel members decide Rangel violated any House rules, the full committee will hold a hearing on how he should be punished. The most likely sanction would be a House vote deploring his conduct.

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Advertisement | ad infoAdvertisement | ad infoRangel, a 20-term congressman representing New York's famed Harlem neighborhood, implored the ethics panel for further delay, saying that "50 years of public service is on the line." But the panel basically decided that the 2½-year-old case had gone on long enough — and Congress had little time left to deal with it in the lame duck session that commenced Monday.

Rangel said he had run out of money after paying his previous attorneys some $2 million and needed time to set up a legal defense fund to raise an additional $1 million.

Until last spring, Rangel had wielded great influence as chairman of the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee, a gravelly voiced, outgoing figure who raised millions for fellow lawmakers' campaigns. He relinquished that chairmanship in March after being admonished by the ethics committee for taking two corporate-paid trips to the Caribbean in violation of House rules. There was no further punishment for that, but the current charges are another matter.

After Rangel left Monday's hearing, House ethics committee chief counsel Blake Chisam pushed for a decision on the 13 counts of fundraising and financial conduct that allegedly violated House rules. Chisam, assuming the role of prosecutor, played a video of Rangel's speech on the House floor in August in which the congressman acknowledged that he'd used House stationery to raise money for a college center named after him, and that he'd been tardy in filing taxes and financial disclosure statements.

He said then that he never intended to break any rules.

Cliff Owen / AP
Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., chair of the Committee on Standards of Official Conduct committee opens adjudicatory hearings into Rep. Charles Rangel's alleged ethics violations on Capitol Hill on Monday. Chisam told the panel of four Republicans and four Democrats that there were no questions "as to any material facts in this case. As a result the case is ripe for a decision."

Chisam also said, "I see no evidence of corruption" by Rangel. Rather, he suggested, the congressman was "overzealous" and "sloppy in his personal finances."

Chisam said Rangel could have legally raised money for the Charles B. Rangel Center at City College of New York by asking the ethics committee for permission to solicit nonprofit organizations. However, he would not have been able to use congressional letterheads or employees in the fundraising, as he is charged with doing.

Story: Rangel: 'I look forward' to ethics fight
The counsel also said Rangel used a subsidized apartment in New York City as a campaign office when the lease required that it be for residential use only.

"At the same time, the landlord was evicting other tenants at an increased rate" for failing to follow the same lease terms, Chisam said.

Several members of the panel criticized Rangel's lawyers for leaving the case just weeks before the hearing.

Vermont Democratic Rep. Peter Welch said that no law firm should be "taking the money ... and kicking their client by the side of the road."

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Advertisement | ad infoAdvertisement | ad infoRangel's former law firm of Zuckerman Spaeder disputed his assertion that he was abandoned.

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