The House Ethics Committee refused to punish Rep. McDermott after he leaked a conference call of Republican leaders back in 1996. But, a court ordered him to pay damages and interest to Rep. Boehner:

A federal judge in Washington has ordered Democratic Rep. Jim McDermott to pay more than $1 million in attorney’s fees awarded to Minority Leader John A. Boehner as part of a protracted lawsuit involving an illegally taped cell phone call.

U.S. District Judge Thomas P. Hogan ruled that McDermott, D-Wash., must pay $1,053,181, plus $520,761 in interest to Boehner, R-Ohio.

The payment order, issued Monday, stems from an unusual member-vs.-member case that Boehner filed long before he became the House Republican leader.

Boehner sued McDermott in 1998, accusing him of leaking the contents of a conference call that a Florida couple had illegally taped from Boehner’s cell phone in 1996.

In the call, Republican leaders, including then-Speaker Newt Gingrich of Georgia (1979-99), discussed responding to ethics allegations against Gingrich, who served as Speaker from 1995 to 1999.

McDermott at the time was the ranking Democrat on the House ethics panel.

The attorney’s fee payment comes on top of $60,000 in damages that McDermott already has paid Boehner out of his legal expense fund.

Tim Starks at CQ Today (sub. req. but the full article is here) reports that even top Republicans on the Intelligence Committees in both the House and Senate won't comment on what Rep. John Boehner said about FISA.  CREW believes Boehner may have violated federal law by leaking classified information and must be investigated.  While Boehner's office denies the charge, the actions of his colleagues who serve on the Intel committees is certainly interesting: 

Boehner's office mains that he was alluding to an earlier, January ruling by the secret court that had been previously discussed in public forums. Although details of that ruling are classified, administration officials have acknowledged that it was a decision placing the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretapping program under the purview of the FISA court.

When questioned by reporters, several lawmakers, including the top Republicans on the Senate and House Intelligence committees, Christopher S. Bond of Missouri and Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, respectively, have declined to say what Boehner was referring to on Fox.

Today's NY Times intimates that Representative John Boehner, the Republican Minority Leader, gave information about a classified ruling to FOX News.  CREW wants an investigation of Boehner to determine if he did, in fact, violate the law by releasing that classified nformation:

The calls for legislation were made more urgent last week by the disclosure that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the secret tribunal whose warrants are ordinarily required for the government to eavesdrop domestically in a national security case, issued a classified ruling some months ago saying interception of foreign-to-foreign communication passing through American soil could require such a warrant. Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, the House Republican leader, alluded to the ruling last week on Fox News in arguing for swift passage of the surveillance legislation as a way of fixing that intelligence gap.

A private watchdog group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, called on the Justice Department on Monday to investigate whether Mr. Boehner improperly disclosed classified material during his television appearance. But administration officials declined to say whether they would pursue an investigation.

Today, CREW filed a complaint with the Department of Justice asking that the Counterespionage Section of the National Security Division initiate an investigation into whether House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-OH) violated the law by leaking classified information. Our complaint can be found here.

In a July 31, 2007 interview with Fox News anchor Neil Cavuto, Rep. Boehner disclosed an aspect of a Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court’s decision regarding warrantless wiretapping:

There's been a ruling, over the last four or five months, that prohibits the ability of our intelligence services and our counterintelligence people from listening in to two terrorists in other parts of the world where the communication could come through the United States.

By telling a reporter that a FISA court has restricted the U.S. intelligence community's surveillance of suspected terrorists overseas, Rep. Boehner appears to have transmitted information relating to the national defense in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 793(d).

18 U.S.C. § 793(d) provides that anyone with lawful possession of information relating to the national defense, which could be used to the injury of the United States, who willfully communicates that information to any person not entitled to receive it, is subject to up to ten years imprisonment.

Rep. Boehner apparently made his remarks to Mr. Cavuto in an effort to blame Democrats for failing to pass legislation overriding the court's decision:

The Democrats have known about this for months. We have had private conversations, we have had public conversations that this needs to be fixed. And Republicans are not going to leave this week until this problem is addressed.

Boehner has previously expressed strong concerns over illegal leaks for political gain. In discussing a long-running court case regarding an illegally intercepted phone call that Rep. Jim McDermott (D-WA) released to the media, Rep. Boehner stated:

When you break the law in pursuit of a political opponent, you’ve gone too far. Members of Congress have a responsibility not only to obey the laws of the country and the rules of our institution, but also to defend the integrity of those laws and rules when they are violated.

When CREW filed the complaint, Melanie Sloan made this statement:

By revealing classified information, the Minority Leader of the House of Representatives appears to have compromised national security for partisan political gain. We urge the Justice Department to immediately commence an investigation.

Stay tuned.

The Politico reports that on-going ethical scandals continue to haunt the House GOP caucus and its leader, John Boehner.   Apparently, political spending concerns are preventing Boehner from purging the party of ethically challenged members like Rick Renzi (AZ) and John Doolittle (CA):

House Minority Leader John A. Boehner took his job last year with a pledge to cleanse his party's scandal-stained reputation on Capitol Hill. In recent weeks, Boehner has been getting an unpleasant education in how hard that turns out to be.

When Reps. John Doolittle (R-Calif.) and Rick Renzi (R-Ariz.) became the subjects of FBI raids, Boehner pushed them to give up their committee assignments. But party operatives said Doolittle and Renzi are not facing pressure to resign from the House for now -- in part because the House GOP campaign committee does not want the expense of competing to keep their seats in a special election.

And Boehner is coming under fire from his own members over the decision to replace Doolittle on the House Appropriations Committee with Rep. Ken Calvert (R-Calif.). Calvert himself is facing ethics scrutiny over a land deal in his Southern California district.

The Calvert decision underscores the complexity of Boehner's task, as he tries simultaneously to clean house and keep peace within his own caucus. The California delegation was insistent that the coveted Appropriations seat go to one of their own, following long-standing custom. But the move has upset other GOP members and some conservative bloggers, who fear that Calvert's alleged problems will feed the party's reputation for corruption.

If only John Boehner the Republican leader would act like John Boehner the leadership candidate, the Republican Conference would be in a much stronger position," said a House Republican aide who works for a lawmaker upset with Boehner's move. "Decisions like the Calvert appointment cripple our party's ability to be associated with reform, and until our leadership changes direction, they are leading this conference even further into the political abyss."

The Republican House caucus took a beating on ethics in the 2006 elections. Roll Call (sub. req'd but the full article can be found here) reports that Minority Leader John Boehner is trying to change the ways his caucus deals with unethical behavior. In previous sessions, Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham and Rep. Bob Ney, both of whom are now in prison, faced no repercussions for their ethical transgressions. With the recent developments in cases against Reps. Rick Renzi (R-AZ), Jerry Lewis (R-CA) and John Doolittle (R-CA) that new standard will be put to the test:

That tolerance has now evaporated, and leaders have made a concerted effort to let it be known.

“Our whole Conference is trying to demonstrate we’re taking these things seriously,” National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Tom Cole (Okla.) said Friday. “The actions speak for themselves.”

Boehner told reporters that his discussions with Members were “to keep them on the straight and narrow path” and said it was more than just a leadership prerogative. “We have a job to do, not just us but the Members,” he said.

While not all Members under investigation have stepped aside, they are facing greater scrutiny. A senior Republican, who asked not to be identified because Steering Committee discussions are private, said Boehner had reassured the panel earlier this year that Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-Calif.) should get the ranking member slot on Appropriations despite also being under investigation by the Justice Department.

Boehner said he met privately with Lewis for three hours to have the 15-term lawmaker assure him that there would be no problems. He got the post, but outside ethics advocacy groups have decried the decision.

The liberal watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington reiterated that call last week. “Raids of a member’s home or business cannot be the new standard for what compels a member to step down from a committee post,” CREW Executive Director Melanie Sloan said in statement. “Rep. Lewis, as the top Republican appropriator, is responsible for funding all federal agencies, including the Justice Department. ... It is well past time for Rep. Lewis [to] relinquish his seat on the Appropriations Committee pending the outcome of the ongoing investigation.”

Renzi, Lewis and Doolittle were named as three of the 20 most corrupt members of Congress in our September 2006 report, Beyond DeLay.

The House ethics rules were just changed in January. There is an ethics task force already studying ways to change the current system. But apparently none of that is enough for the Minority Leader. Roll Call (sub. req'd) reports that Boehner now wants a task force to sort through what the ethics rules mean:

House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) wants to create a bipartisan task force to assess and clarify the chamber’s “hopelessly broken” ethics rules, he said today in a letter to Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).

“Members on both sides of the aisle are understandably frustrated because they know you can’t ‘clean up Congress’ with confusing rules that are as difficult to comply with as they are to enforce,” he wrote, referencing part of the Democrats’ campaign message from last year.

Boehner is proposing a working group made up of six to eight Members from both sides of the aisle with an even partisan split, “including a member of the ethics committee from each party (but neither its chairman nor ranking minority member), one elected leader from each party, and one or two additional Members from each side of the aisle,” he wrote. Boehner said the group should report back recommendations by July 1 to consider the potential reforms before the August break.

The last time the House created a successful bipartisan ethics task force was in 1997, headed up by then-Reps. Bob Livingston (R-La.) and Benjamin Cardin (D-Md.).

Republicans have criticized Democratic reforms enacted earlier this year in the House Rules package for being unilaterally and sometimes hastily written. Some of the new rules have caused consternation on both sides of the aisle, but Democrats have defended the reforms as keeping good on their effort to end a “culture of corruption” in the House under 12 years of Republican control.

Here's an idea for the House. Enforce the existing rules. There are several members of Congress facing serious legal issues, yet not one ethics complaint has been filed against any member.

Robert Novak reports that House Minority Leader John Boehner has full confidence in the ethical purity of two ethically challenged members of his caucus -- Jerry Lewis and Gary Miller.   Novak's version is that Boehner has basically exonerated them of any wrongdoing.  However, in reality, Boehner isn't the final authority on such matters:

House Minority Leader John Boehner, addressing Tuesday's closed-door conference of Republican House members, gave a clean bill of health to two California colleagues under federal investigation: Representatives Jerry Lewis and Gary Miller.

If he were not convinced of Lewis' integrity, Boehner told the conference, he would not have approved his continuation as top Republican on the Appropriations Committee. Lewis is being investigated for helping a lobbyist direct millions of dollars in earmarks for clients.

Lewis did not address the conference, but Miller pleaded innocent of wrongdoing in California land transactions. That won Miller a standing ovation, but a few colleagues noted the resemblance to a similar speech to the conference last year by then Rep. Bob Ney of Ohio. On Jan. 19, Ney was sentenced to 30 months in federal prison after pleading guilty to conspiracy in the Jack Abramoff influence-peddling scandal.