Longtime New York congressman Charles Rangel is fighting to hold onto his congressional seat after being hit with charges that he violated House ethics rules earlier this week. Rangel’s lawyers are negotiating with the ethics panel in an attempt to spare their client the indignity of a trial that could end with him doing time as pressure mounts for Rangel to resign.
Rangel’s sizable legal bills have been covered in this space over the past year-and-a-half. (Click here, here, here, and here for previous posts on the representative’s legal troubles.) But with a congressional salary of just $174,000, Rangle has had to dip into his campaign fund to cover the tab for his defense team.
According to Federal Election Commission filings, Rangel’s campaign fund holds a healthy $2.3 million in cash. Since the beginning of the year, FEC records show he’s spent nearly $230,000 on legal bills. Of that amount, $182,000 has gone to Zuckerman Spaeder and partner Leslie Kiernan, the head of Rangel’s legal team. Oldaker, Belair & Wittie, a Washington, D.C.-based law and government relations firm, received roughly $28,000 for its services. And John Kern III, a solo practitioner in the District, received another $14,283 for tax work for Rangel.
Oldaker employs lobbyists with long-standing ties to Rangel, notes the Washington Examiner, and the firm helps the congressman raise money from political donors. Among those contributors are political action committees from a dozen Am Law 200 firms.
FEC records show that PACs for Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, Baker & Hostetler, Dickstein Shapiro, DLA Piper, Hogan Lovells, Holland & Knight, McDermott Will & Emery, McKenna Long & Aldridge, Miller & Chevalier, O’Melveny & Myers, Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker, and Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal have raised $24,750 for Rangel since January 2009. (Patton Boggs‘s PAC also donated to Rangel, but the $3,000 contribution appears to have been withdrawn.)
PACs for McKenna and O’Melveny each made donations of $1,000 to Rangel this year, just when the ethics storm surrounding him heightened. Akin Gump kicked in another $750 in March. Altogether, FEC filings show that PACs accounted for $878,000 of the nearly $2.3 million in Rangel’s campaign fund.
Individual Rangel donors have thrown in an additional $808,161–many of these contributors are lawyers at the firms mentioned above. In all, attorneys from both private firms and those with in-house or government positions donated a total of $58,000 to Rangel since early 2009. (The largest individual lawyer-donors with $4,800 each in contributions are Anderson Kill & Olick founding partner Eugene Anderson, former New Jersey congressman Frank Guarini, and Glen Morgan, a name partner at Beaumont, Texas-based Reaud, Morgan & Quinn.)
That comes to $82,750 in donations to Rangel by lawyers and law firms to help fund, well, other lawyers and law firms.
Rangel has served as a member of the House since 1971. He stepped down as chairman of the powerful Ways and Means Committee in March as a result of the ongoing investigation by a House subcommittee into his tax and financial dealings.
This article first appeared on The Am Law Daily.
