What’s up with the federal investigation into Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-CA)? I chatted with Jerry Kammer, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the Copley News Service, whose work scrutinized Lewis’ dealings even before the probe was publicly known. He counseled patience and a long view. These things, he says, take time:
“I think when the investigators started on this stuff, they had to climb the learning curve, just like we’ve had to. When I wrote for The Arizona Republic, I got to know some of the people who worked on the Charles Keating task force — he was the symbolic central figure of the S&L scandal. It took them a while to get started, but once they got a head of steam they made a lot of progress.
“I’d never looked at a lobbying disclosure form or an appropriations conference report until last summer. I’d been writing about immigration. . . I would bet that the agents they brought in on this case had a similar learning process to undergo. They’d probably never pulled any of these documents before.
“As a matter of fact, I’ve wondered how they train the agents for a case like this. These are complicated investigations. They have to be able to take something to a jury against a very well-paid defense lawyer. I wouldn’t be surprised to see the investigation take six months or a year until we see any concrete results. And, of course, they might decide that they don’t have a case.
“[Reporters] can write about behavior that we think is questionable. That’s our standard. But [federal prosecutors] have to decide if that behavior violates a criminal statute. And in Washington, there are a lot of people who will tell you that the systemic scandal lies in what Congress allows to be legal.
“[In the Lewis probe] the issues are white collar issues, financial issues, which are notoriously difficult… And they may look at what they can get, and say, ‘this stinks, we don’t like it, but we don’t think we can indict anybody.’ I think that’s a distinct possibility.
“I think these things are very difficult, and when a defense attorney can put all of Congress on trial — ‘look at what congressman John Doe did. How can you criminalize what he did?’ Congress writes most of the rules here, and they have given themselves and the lobbyists a lot of running room.
“With that amazing thing called subpoena power, investigators can go pretty hard. It takes a while for them to get started, get their footing, get the agents in place. I think they’re working hard at it.
“Of course, things can [also] move quickly if a key figure admits to illegality and cuts a deal [with prosecutors]. We were all surprised at how fast [former Rep. Randy “Duke”] Cunningham went down. As we found out later, that was because Mitchell Wade went to the prosecutors after Marc’s [colleague Marcus Stern] first story, and Cunningham soon learned that they had the goods on him. There are so many variables in a complex investigation.”
