By Joel Thurtell
All of a sudden, journalists are dissing John Conyers. Time was when no reporter in his or her right mind would criticize the congressman from Detroit, the second-most-senior member of the U.S. House of Representatives. Time was when editors wouldn’t let reporters pursue investigations of Conyers.
Someone just sent me a column by Ray McGovern published in antiwar.com: “John Conyers Is No Martin Luther King.”
Right on. As unlike as John Conyers is to King, he is similar to another Detroit congressman. Excuse me, a late and former congressman. One who went to prison after being convicted of fraud for, among other things, assigning congressional staffers to work in his family’s Detroit funeral home.
I’m thinking of Charles Diggs.
I looked into Diggs’ career back in 2003 when I investigated Conyers’ abuse of his congressional staffers. I was looking for parallels between Diggs and Conyers, and I found them. My reporting, followed by a set of Detroit Free Press stories on Nov. 21, 2003, prompted the House Ethics Committee to probe Conyers. That investigation lingered until 2006, when the committee quietly made a deal and Conyers skated clear of the allegations of his staffers that he forced them to do personal work for him on the federal dime.
Long before the Ethics Committee dropped the ball, my Free Press investigation was derailed. I simply couldn’t get editors interested, somehow. One top editor told me all congressmen do what Conyers did. If everyone stinks, nobody stinks.
Early in 2006, I wrote an op-ed column comparing Conyers and Diggs. I submitted it to the Free Press editorial page, and never got a reply. Eventually, a top metro editor sent me this note:
Joel:
I’m afraid you’re going to hear an answer that you’d rather not hear. I don’t think we can publish this. Here’s why.
Even though you don’t cover Conyers as a daily part of your responsibilities at the Free Press, the fact remains that you have written extensively about him. We want readers to be assured that our reporters are covering stories without bias. Publishing an opinion piece by you would conflict with that mission and would taint our earlier reporting. Beyond that, there’s a possibility that you could end up writing about Conyers again someday. You couldn’t very well do that if you had openly criticized him.
For these reasons, I would not give my OK for you to freelance this, either. You’re welcome to run the question up the line to Caesar or Paul, but I’d be willing to bet that you’ll hear the same answer.
This missive was signed by another of the Free Press high honchos.
I appealed up the line, but got the same answer. Not only would the Free Press not publish my viewpoint piece, but I was forbidden to send it to another publication.
So what did I do?
I sent it to the New York Times op-ed page.
Never heard back. No surprise. To date, the Times has published zero, zilch on Conyers’ ethics problems. It’s not that they don’t know about it. Conyers was notorious for making staffers do campaign work as well as chauffeur his kids, babysit and tutor his kids, coach his wife in her law school studies, do his laundry and housekeeping and more. Our story made waves, big waves, on the Hill.
Somehow, from the press, he got a free ride.
Well, I dug up that 2006 op-ed piece. Things have changed since Free Press editors suppressed my Conyers reports. I took a buyout from the Free Press last November. The editor who wrote that memo censoring my work is no longer my boss. My new boss has encouraged me to publish that essay. Who is my new boss? Me!
For a deeper understanding of who John Conyers is, you may read my Free Press stories about the man in the “Conyers stories” category of this blog. General articles about John and Monica Conyers are to be found under the “JC & Me” heading.
What do you think? Would this essay have “tainted,” ex post facto, my earlier reporting on Conyers? And of course, as to the editor’s carrot, holding out the possibility I might write more Free Press stories about Conyers, well, it never happened.
It’s happening now, only because I cut loose from the Free Press.
Tomorrow, I’ll publish the essay the Free Press editors didn’t want to see the light of day — anywhere. It’s called “The Ethics ‘Paralysis’ Charade.”
Stay tuned.
Here’s the piece the Free Press stifled:
The Ethics “Paralysis’ Charade
By Joel Thurtell
The new Democratic Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, has promised us “the most honest, most open and most ethical Congress in history.”
But Democrats are not serious about that promise now any more than they have been for the last several years. If they really took ethics reform seriously, Democrats would long ago have moved decisively for an investigation of one of their most senior and prominent members.
John Conyers, I believe, is the simple reason why Democrats are pulling their ethics punch. They could have done something about ethics long before now. No new rules or laws are needed to deal with members like Conyers. Even as the minority party, Democrats had parity with Republicans on only one committee in all Congress. That’s on the so-called Ethics Committee, officially the Committee on Standards of Official Conduct. Yet Democrats allowed Republicans for the past two years to paralyze the Ethics Committee.
Or so it would seem.
All along, there has been Democratic complicity in the committee’s lethargy. An article in The Nation on Feb. 6, 2006 suggested that Democrats are reluctant to file complaints against Republican members for fear of reprisal complaints aimed at Democrats. Hence a “truce” that in effect has stymied, the magazine argued, the committee from investigating new cases. In fact, there may be far more complicity on the part of Democrats than commentators acknowledge.
More than two years ago, on Nov. 21, 2003, the Detroit Free Press published a pair of articles exposing longstanding abuses by U.S. Rep. John Conyers of Detroit. The Free Press stories revealed that Conyers had routinely assigned not one, not two, not three, but ALL of his congressional staffers to do campaign work on government-paid time. The work was done not only for Conyers’ own re-election campaigns, but for others, including his wife and various local, state and national Democratic candidates whose elections Conyers thought crucial. I’m one of the reporters who worked on these stories. At one point in November 2003 I reached a Conyers staffer by telephone where he sat working in the Chicago presidential campaign office of Carol Moseley Braun. He was being paid to be in Detroit, organizing a universal health insurance symposium for constituents, except that Conyers had assigned him to work for Braun. The staffer was collecting pay for congressional work others were obliged to do for him, I confirmed through congressional payroll records. Not only office time was squandered, but office phones, fax machines, photo copiers and computers were used for political campaigns, notwithstanding that misuse is contrary to House ethics guidelines and in some cases illegal.
Soon after our articles were published, I was told the Ethics Committee had opened an investigation into the abuses we outlined regarding Conyers. I reported that. But the committee has not acted. It has been paralyzed, seemingly by obstruction from Republicans.
John Conyers has been a member of Congress for 42 (now 44) years. Among black people in Detroit, he is an icon. He espouses liberal causes that make him the darling of the left and of labor unions. He is the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee. He has called for the impeachment of President Bush, and if there were to be an impeachment case, Conyers, as ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, would have a powerful say in how it’s run.
Those are potent reasons why Democrats might not want a probe of the dean of black congressmen.
But it could be worse than that. Some years ago, another Democratic congressman from Detroit, Charles Diggs, was convicted of fraud and served prison time for ordering House legislative aides to work at his family funeral home on government time. Recently, the indictment of U.S. Rep. Tom DeLay and the convictions of members like Randy Cunningham and Bob Ney are proof that congressmen who play fast and loose with House rules and with the law often are a short step from indictment.
A proper investigation of John Conyers in the Ethics Committee would have no trouble finding plenty of witnesses who would testify that as congressional employees hired by Conyers to work for constituents they instead were ordered by the congressman to do personal work for him resembling those funeral parlor assignments of Charles Diggs: They worked as chauffeurs for Conyers and his wife and kids, they were full time babysitters in the Conyers home or staffers’ own homes. Conyers’ former general counsel Sydney Rooks says Conyers assigned her to tutor Conyers’ oldest son — a daily chore that took place in the office during regular business hours with the use of the congressman’s fax machine to receive the boy’s daily homework assignments. Despite the supposed Ethics Committee inquiry, Conyers continued to assign his staffers to do personal chores like driving him in their own cars, babysitting his kids and picking up his meal tabs, according to Deanna Maher, who retired May 31, 2005 as chief of staff of Conyers’ Southgate, Mich. Office.
It may beat messing with dead bodies in a funeral home, but assigning staffers to work in a Chicago politician’s office and assigning aides to baby sit your kids and then representing to the congressional payroll office that these people were doing bona fide constituent work so they can cash government paychecks seems on a par with Charles Diggs’ duping the government into covering the payroll for his funeral parlor.
Could John Conyers be the reason the Ethics Committee — not to mention any move to strengthen ethics laws — is in limbo?
Contact me at joelthurtell(at)gmail.com
