{"id":1239,"date":"2004-02-12T10:19:24","date_gmt":"2004-02-12T15:19:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/1239.html"},"modified":"2004-02-12T10:19:24","modified_gmt":"2004-02-12T15:19:24","slug":"ethics-committee-starts-hearings-today-in-the-nick-smith-bribery-scandal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/ethics-committee-starts-hearings-today-in-the-nick-smith-bribery-scandal\/","title":{"rendered":"Ethics Committee starts hearings today in the Nick Smith bribery scandal"},"content":{"rendered":"

After months of resistance and delays, the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct (aka the “House Ethics Committee”) will start hearings today<\/a> into whether Rep. Nick Smith (R-Mich.) was illegally offered a bribe on the House floor in November in exchange for his vote on Bush’s Medicare bill.<\/p>\n

If the process proceeds as it’s supposed to, we won’t hear much of anything about what happens at the hearings. They’re strictly confidential — unless someone leaks something. I’ll let you know.<\/p>\n

In the meantime, Smith wants absolutely nothing to do with his earlier, unequivocal statements. He sat down with the Detroit News<\/a> yesterday for a detailed interview in which he insisted that he was not offered a bribe, despite saying the opposite just a couple of months ago.<\/p>\n

Asked to explain the obvious inconsistencies, Smith simply said, “I’m going to leave this up to the ethics committee.”<\/p>\n

To help the Ethics Committee along, here’s Smith’s flip in a nutshell:<\/p>\n

Smith, yesterday<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Nobody mentioned any dollar amount. Members of Congress are really too smart to come up to you on the floor and say, “We’ll give you so many dollars for this.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Smith, two months ago<\/a>:<\/p>\n

[T]he first offer was to give [Smith’s son] $100,000-plus for his campaign and endorsement by national leadership. And I said, “No, I’m gonna stick to my guns on what I think is right for the constituents in my district.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After months of resistance and delays, the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct (aka the “House Ethics Committee”) will start hearings today into whether Rep. Nick Smith (R-Mich.) was illegally offered a bribe on the House floor in November in exchange for his vote on Bush’s Medicare bill. If the process proceeds as it’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1239","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1239","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1239"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1239\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1239"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1239"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1239"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}