Rep. Bob Ney (R-OH) rolled the dice with prosecutors and won!… sort of.
Bob Ney is off the hook for charges relating to the SunCruz portion of the Jack Abramoff investigation (again, with a huge caveat), as the statute of limitations relating to those charges last night, Roll Call reports. Prosecutors had a choice: either get an agreement from Ney to extend the statute, or indict him then and there. Well:
According to a source close to Ney, the Ohio Republican denied a new Justice request to provide another extension of the statute of limitations, gambling that Justice would not indict on the SunCruz allegations.
And they didn’t. But prosecutors have already signalled in a big way that they’ll be going after Ney for his shilling for Abramoff on the SunCruz deal – Ney’s speeches in the Congressional Record on Abramoff’s behalf were specifically mentioned in Abramoff’s guilty plea. So rather than charging Ney directly for those actions, they’re likely to hit him with a conspiracy charge, as they did Abramoff, Michael Scanlon, and Tony Rudy:
…federal prosecutors, in charging Abramoff, Mike Scanlon and Tony Rudy, have used the criminal conspiracy counts against them. In so doing, that has allowed prosecutors to charge the men with one long criminal act, encompassing a long series of actions designed to be hidden from law enforcement.
This has allowed the Justice Department to charge Abramoff and the two former DeLay aides with actions that took place long ago, well past the normal five-year statute of limitations. Under the conspiracy count, it is considered one criminal act that doesn’t end until the conspiracy ends.
If the prosecutors eventually do try to indict Ney on the other, non-SunCruz issues, they may try for a conspiracy charge – at which point, if they could prove it was criminal, they could also bring in the SunCruz issues.
