Embarrassing John Conyers?

 

By Joel Thurtell

 

Sam Riddle thinks the FBI wants to embarrass U.S. Rep. John Conyers Jr. He’s convinced that’s why the feds reportedly are investigating the congressman’s wife, Detroit City Councilwoman Monica Conyers.

 

No, Sam, I don’t think so.

 

Riddle said in today’s (July 1, 2008) Detroit Free Press that “I’m firmly convinced that there are elements in the U.S. Attorney’s Office who would love to make a case against anyone whose last name is Conyers, if for no other reason than to embarrass the chairman of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee.”

 

Riddle added a punch line: “Councilwoman Conyers can do that on her own without the assistance of the FBI. She’s demonstrated that time and time again.”

 

Riddle should know. Until recently, he was Monica’s chief of staff. He was her spokesman when we called her office two years ago to comment before the Detroit Free Press ran our March 2, 2006 story detailing how, at hubby’s behest, Monica had congressional staffers chauffeur her and her kids, babysit her kids sometimes in the congressman’s office in the Detroit federal building and once for weeks at a time in her Detroit house while she was in Oklahoma attending law school.

 

And she had lawyers on hubby’s staff and lawyers on the House Judiciary Committee staff tutor her for her law school classes.

Riddle’s job then was to deny the nannygate report, which he did.

 

The tutoring, by the way, didn’t take: To date, Monica has sat for the Michigan bar exam — required to hold a license to practice law — four times, most recently in July 2007. And all four times, she has flunked the test, according to the Board of Law Examiners.

 

I don’t believe the FBI is out primarily to embarrass Congressman Conyers, because if that were their wish, they’ve had plenty opportunity before this. You might think they, or the Bush administration, might long ago have wanted to bring Conyers down a notch. After all, he was thundering at one time about holding hearings into the impeachment of President George W. Bush.

 

The government could have stigmatized Conyers with a probe as early as 2002, when one of his staffers presented the Justice Department with what she was persuaded was ample evidence of potential wrongdoing.

 

The babysitting and tutoring of his wife are cases in point. It is illegal as well as a violation of House ethics rules for a congressperson to order his aides to do non-government, personal work on the federal dime.

 

Period.

 

Is the FBI investigating that?

 

Not that I’m aware.

 

The feds knew about the babysitting in 2002. They knew about lots more serious allegations, too. One of my sources for the stories I wrote about Congressman Conyers’ abuse of staffers was Deanna Maher, chief of staff of his Downriver office then in Southgate. Maher took her concerns to the FBI in late 2002 around the time the FBI raided the offices of the late Ed McNamara, then Wayne County chief executive.The FBI could have embarrassed Conyers plenty then, but they weren’t interested in what Maher showed them.

 

Frustrated, she turned to the newspapers, talking to reporters at both Detroit papers.

 

In late 2002, my editors at the Free Press assigned me to work on the McNamara story. I learned from then Free Press reporter Dennis Niemiec, my partner on that project, that Maher was claiming Conyers was making his aides from Detroit and Washington, D.C. and lawyers from the Judiciary Committee illegally work on his pals’ and his wife’s political campaigns.

 

You can read about what Conyers did by turning to the “Conyers Series” or “JC & Me” categories in joelontheroad.com.

Niemiec pitched the Conyers story to his editor. No interest.

 

Niemiec left the Free Press to become an aide to Wayne County Executive Bob Ficano early in January 2003. It happened that I knew Maher from my days before the 2005 Detroit newspaper strike, when I covered Wayne County governbment. I knew she was credible. I thought her story was big.

 

Incidentally, I want to emphasize that the main story was not about babysitting. It was about Conyers’ insistence that all staffers drop constituent and other services and work on campaigns during office hours while collecting their federal salaries.

I pitched the story about Conyer’s abuse of staffers to my editor. No interest.

Maher got no bites at the News, either.

 

Three strikes: The FBI spurned her. So did the Free Press. And the News.

 

Late in the summer of 2003, I got a call from Chris Christoff, a reporter in the Free Press Lansing Bureau. Did I know about Conyers using federally-paid staffers as political hacks?

 

I outlined what I knew and arranged for Chris to meet Maher. He was impressed with her and with her case. He persuaded his editor, Bob Campbell, that the story was important. We were in business.

 

Our Nov. 21, 2003 main story and sidebar prompted the House Ethics Committee to begin investigating Conyers.

 

It was Page One in the Free Press, but for some reason, the mainstream media left it alone. The New York Times reported Ethics Committee probes of mainly Republican congressmen during that time, but never mentioned Conyers, though the case was widely known on Capitol Hill. The Washington Post gave it a few paragraphs three and a half years later, in 2006, when stories about the Conyers’ using staffers as nannies were published.

 

In 2006, The Ethics Committee decided not to discipline Conyers. That same year, Conyers announced he was dropping his plan to impeach Bush.

 

I can see no evidence that the FBI targeted Conyers over any of this.

 

So no, Sam, you’re wrong. The FBI’s purpose now is not to embarrass John Conyers. If that had been their aim, they could have humiliated him plenty based on the information from Maher and other staffers six years ago, or they could have launched a probe using our 2003 Free Press reports as a roadmap.

 

They wouldn’t need to get at hubby through Monica. They could have pounced on the man himself.

 

Contact me at joelthurtell(at)gmail.com