House Eyes Ethics Probes on 30 Members

As the House ethics committee yesterday was voting to go forward with full investigations of Democratic Reps. Maxine Waters and Laura Richardson, it was putting out a bigger fire started when an internal document revealed more than 30 lawmakers were under scrutiny was leaked on the Internet. “No inference should be made as to any member,” Zoe Lofgren said of the report, which she said was preliminary.

The document shows that 33 representatives have been looked at over concerns about corporate and defense lobbying, the Washington Post reports. The ethics committee said in a statement that a staffer had mistakenly put the file into a publicly accessible file-sharing system, and that the staffer has been fired. The inquiries into Waters and Richardson, meanwhile, involve private financial matters.
(More House Ethics Committee stories.)