Members slide

House Ethics Committee let members slide on disclosure rules

By Paul Singer

The House Ethics Committee failed to follow its own rules requiring lawmakers to seek pre-clearance for privately funded travel in 2013, records show, a lapse that now may have the committee in the peculiar position of investigating itself.

House rules created in December 2012 require all members who want to go on trips paid for by private groups, not the government, to seek clearance from the Ethics Committee at least 30 days before the trip. But records analyzed by USA TODAY show that when 10 members and their staffers went on a May 2013 trip to Azerbaijan, the committee was not enforcing that standard.

The Ethics Committee approved the travel for these members but is now investigating whether the trip was improperly funded. Public records suggest the committee may not have required all of the travelers to comply with the pre-travel approval rules.

One pre-travel form on file for a staff member on the Azerbaijan trip was signed by his boss, Rep. Hank Johnson, D-Ga., on May 23, 2013, the day before the staff member traveled. A pre-travel form on file with the clerk of the House for Rep. Danny Davis, D-Ill., for the same Azerbaijan trip was signed June 13, and the pre-travel form for his staff member was signed June 11 — both more than a week after they returned from the trip.

The public files for Rep. Yvette Clarke, D-N.Y., who was at the time and still is a member of the Ethics Committee, do not include a pre-travel form at all.

In another trip approved at the same time, Rep. Robert Aderholt, R-Ala., was given permission to travel to Kosovo on the tab of a faith-based group despite not meeting the 30-day filing deadline.

"Despite your failure to do so in this instance, given the newness of the rule, we are approving your current request," Rep. Michael Conaway, a Texas Republican and then committee chairman, and Rep. Linda Sanchez, D-Calif., wrote to Aderholt on May 23, 2013. "However, any future requests should adhere to the 30-day requirement."

The pre-travel forms require members and staff to disclose who is paying for their trip, explain why they were invited and vouch that the trip is for official, not recreational, purposes.

The Azerbaijan trip was first investigated earlier this year by the Office of Congressional Ethics — a separate panel created to refer matters to the Ethics Committee — but the committee asked OCE to shut down its investigation, apparently the first time it has made such a request since OCE was created in 2007.

The Washington Post reported in May that the OCE has concluded the trip, which was described as being sponsored by several Turkish- and Balkan-American non-profits, was in fact improperly paid for by the state-owned oil company of Azerbaijan. The company has said it had no intent to hide its support for the conference, and in the future it will work with other non-profits that are better equipped to arrange congressional travel in compliance with the rules.

Members said the Ethics Committee approved the trip before they traveled, and the committee said June 22 that in each case it "reviewed the materials submitted by the Member and sponsor and approved the Member to accept the travel before the trip began." But the committee also said it is conducting its own investigation of questions that have arisen about the trip since the lawmakers and staff returned.

Lawmakers must deliver travel documents for each trip to the clerk of the House after the trip is over, where the documents become public record. It is possible that Davis and Clarke filed travel forms on time with the Ethics Committee and then failed to deliver the proper copies to the clerk's office after they returned. But neither the committee nor Davis' office would produce documents showing the pre-travel forms had been filed on time, and Clarke's office did not respond to multiple requests for information about the Azerbaijan trip.

On June 12, 2013, Conaway and Sanchez, the panel's ranking Democrat, told House members they needed to meet the deadlines for submitting requests for approval of privately funded travel. "The Committee is issuing this reminder," they wrote, "that absent extraordinary circumstances, travel requests submitted fewer than 30 days before the start of a trip will be denied for that reason alone, even if other individuals have been approved to participate in the trip."

That's when "we got serious about the 30-day rule," said Dan Schwager, who was then the committee's staff director. "There was a six-month learning curve for members to get used to the fact that they really had to do that," he said. Schwager said he could not discuss the specifics of the Azerbaijan trip, but he said that the committee has "a pretty extensive review process for all this paperwork," including checking the itinerary and the sponsors for the trip.

The existence of a six-month grace period was news to ethics watchdogs, said Meredith McGehee of the Campaign Legal Center, who has helped draft previous congressional travel rules. "They just kind of made an executive decision that they weren't going to enforce the rule."

As long as Congress lets private organizations pay for congressional travel, taxpayers "are supposed to take it on faith" that the committee has determined the trips are being paid for by legitimate groups for legitimate purposes, McGehee said. "The paperwork certainly doesn't provide confidence that's happening."

The committee's failure to detect the real source of money for the Azerbaijan trip "did a tremendous disservice to these members of Congress," who went on the trip, she said. "They allowed the members to be embarrassed because the Ethics Committee did not do its due diligence," McGehee said.

"The Committee only approves requests to accept privately sponsored travel after it has received and reviewed completed paperwork for each traveler," said the committee's staff director, Tom Rust, who took over from Schwager in 2014. Eight of the ten current Ethics Committee members were on the committee in 2013 as well.