Prosecutors Chase Ney on Lie to Senate Investigators

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If Rep. Bob Ney (R-OH) woke up this morning wondering if his choice to quit his congressional race was the right thing to do, Roll Call‘s Paul Kane confirmed it for him.

On top of Ney’s other Abramoff-related worries, Justice Department prosecutors are now working to see if they can bust Ney on false statements charges, Kane reports (sub. req.). The prosecutors are compiling evidence that Ney lied to the Senate Indian Affairs Committee. That’s a felony, and a charge for which another Abramoff casualty, David Safavian, was convicted in June.

Ney met with representatives of the Texas Tigua tribe, an Abramoff client, in August of 2002. They’re pictured here (Ney is sunburned from the recent golf junket to Scotland, which Abramoff arranged and funded with his clients’ money):

Despite ample evidence that Ney had met with the tribe and promised to slip a provision into the Help America Vote Act that would reopen the tribe’s casino, Ney told Senate investigators that he’d never heard of the Tigua.

And as if that weren’t enough, he tried to push responsibility for the measure on to Sen Christopher Dodd (D-CT):

The lawmaker was interviewed by committee staffers on Nov. 12, 2004, at which point he told them the only reason he agreed to the provision benefiting the Tigua tribe of El Paso was because Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) — then the Rules chairman in 2002 — was pushing it. Ney told the committee he believed it was to benefit a Connecticut tribe….

Four days after interviewing Ney, committee aides interviewed at least two top staffers to Dodd, who contradicted many details of Ney’s testimony. The aides testified that no version of the election bill had ever crossed Dodd’s desk with the tribal provision, and one Dodd staffer specifically said it was Ney’s staff that pushed the issue.

Put this together with the various allegations in the five separate guilty pleas implicating Ney, and it looks like we’re heading to a fairly lengthy indictment.

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