Waters Vows to Fight Ethics Charges

Maxine Waters isn’t rolling over for the House Ethics Committee. “The case against me has no merit,” the Los Angeles Democrat declared in a statement, promising to prove as much at trial. “I don’t think she’s going to be very diplomatic about this,” a source close to Waters tells Politico. “She’s going to call them out in very stark terms.”

The case against Waters revolves around a meeting she arranged between Treasury officials, a banking association, and a bank that her husband holds stock in. The committee says it has “substantial reason to believe” Waters violated ethics rules in setting the meeting up. The potential back-to-back trials of Waters and Charles Rangel could ignite long-standing tensions between the ethics committee and the Congressional Black Caucus, which believes that its members are disproportionately investigated. (More Maxine Waters stories.)