Neither my staff nor I engaged in any improper behavior,” said Ms. Waters, a California Democrat, in a sometimes testy exchange with reporters. “And we did not influence anyone and we did not gain any benefit.”
She also presented a PowerPoint review of documents — essentially a preview of the defense she will offer at her ethics trial. The documents, Ms. Waters argued, proved that any federal assistance provided to OneUnited, the Massachusetts bank her husband still owns stock in, was based on the merits, not any intervention by her office.
“If someone is accused and simply goes into the back room and agrees to some violation even if they are not guilty of it, it would avoid all of the public press, it would be easy on the committee itself,” she said, referring to the House ethics committee. “That is how it normally works. But we feel very strongly we cannot do that.”
The committee has filed three charges against Ms. Waters, accusing her office of intervening on behalf of OneUnited at the height of the recession, after it had lost $50 million on an investment it held in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the federal housing finance agencies. No date has been set for a trial, and that angers Ms. Waters, who has requested that her case be resolved before the November election.
Ms. Waters acknowledged Friday that she called Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. in early September 2008, just after Fannie and Freddie were taken over by the federal government, creating the $50 million losses for OneUnited, and asked him to arrange a meeting with minority bankers to discuss the crisis.
But she said the request was on behalf of all minority banks — not just OneUnited, even if most of the bankers that showed up for the meeting were from OneUnited. That frustrated Mr. Paulson, who later called Ms. Waters back to complain. At that meeting, OneUnited executives made an unusual request for a special $50 million bailout, ethics investigators have charged.
Ms. Waters said regardless of how the meeting turned out, her intent was to help minority banks nationwide.
“For the past 34 years I have served in elected office both at the state and national level, and I have made one of my top priorities opening doors and providing access for small, minority and women businesses,” she said.
Ms. Waters also presented her case that a conversation she had with Representative Barney Frank, Democrat of Massachusetts, about OneUnited took place in late September 2008, after her call to Mr. Paulson, rather than in early September, as ethics investigators have suggested. The ethics investigators have reported that Mr. Frank told Ms. Waters during that conversation to stay away from the matter.
Ms. Waters said that she realized she had a conflict and approached Mr. Frank only when OneUnited officials appealed to her for help in getting funds from the bank bailout program, which was first proposed by Mr. Paulson on Sept. 19.
“I realized that if they were asking for money that perhaps I should take a distance from that,” Ms. Waters told ethics investigators in a transcript of her interview that her office released Friday. “I told Barney, I can’t deal with that.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/14/us/politics/14waters.html?ref=us
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