DOJ Investigates Congressman, but Congressman Controls DOJ Budget

Yesterday I opened up my Washington Post and found a story discussing whether Members of Congress should recuse themselves from votes based on their stock portfolios. Today we've gone one step further, should a Member of Congress control the budget of the agency that is investigating him? The Department of Justice has been investigating Representative Alan Mollohan for the last three years. Mollohan is a Democrat from West Virginia whose finances and efforts to create and fund non-profits in his District have been called into question. Mollohan chairs the Appropriations subcommittee that oversees the budget for the Department of Justice and FBI.

For three years, Rep. Alan Mollohan has chaired the important Appropriations subcommittee that controls the Justice Department's $65 billion budget. At the same time, he has been under a Justice Department investigation, according to documents and two sources briefed on the probe. The investigation has centered on the West Virginia Democrat's finances and nonprofits he created and helped fund in his district, and has put him in the unusual position of wielding control over an agency at the same time it is probing his conduct and contractors he helped while in office. Some congressional watchdog groups, including the one whose complaints about Mollohan triggered the probe, think the House leadership has created a clear conflict of interest by allowing Mollohan to continue to chair the subcommittee.

"There are a hundred ways he can influence what happens with the department's funding -- without one vote. Everything goes through his committee," said Ken Boehm, chairman of the National Legal and Policy Center, a conservative watchdog group that alleged in a complaint that the congressman had not reported the nature and increasing value of his real estate investments. "If that's not a conflict of interest, I don't know what is."

Read the full story here.