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Rangel sells house in Dominican Republic; did he make the restitution?

Rangel sells the Dominican villa that earned him an ethics conviction

Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) sold his villa in the Dominican Republic that played a role in his conviction on ethics charges last year, according to his financial disclosure forms released Wednesday.

Rangel received between $250,001 and $500,000 from the sale of his beach villa in Punta Cana.

The former Ways and Means Committee chairman was sanctioned for committing 11 violations of House ethics rules, including improperly using his office to solicit donations for an educational center in his name and filing incorrect financial disclosures and tax forms that failed to list income earned on his Dominican villa.

The 81-year-old lawmaker was also ordered to pay restitution to the government.

Has he?

And exactly for how much did he sell it? Did he pay taxes on that?

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This just in: Rangel guilty

Fresh from the WaPo,
Committee finds N.Y. Rep. Charles Rangel guilty of ethics violations

Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) was found guilty Tuesday of breaking 11 separate congressional rules related to his personal finances and fundraising efforts for a New York college.

A House ethics subcommittee that handled the trial now sends the case to the full committee for the equivalent of sentencing.

Also at the WaPo, Foreclosure mess could upend housing market

House Panel Finds Rangel Broke Ethics Rules

The panel reached its decision after a second day of closed-door discussions about the case. Mr. Rangel walked out of the disciplinary proceeding early Monday, protesting his lack of a lawyer and saying he could no longer afford one and shouldn’t be forced to proceed without one.

Later that day, the panel accepted as fact the entire prosecution case against Mr. Rangel, indicating that he would almost certainly be found to have violated some ethics rules.

On Tuesday, the panel of eight lawmakers announced they had concluded his actions were violations of ethics rules regarding the use of congressional staff and stationery, as well as requirements to accurately report his assets and improperly using a rent-stabilized residential apartment as a campaign office.

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Rangel to be prosecuted for ethics violations

Was high time,
Rep. Charles Rangel broke ethics rules, House panel finds (emphasis added)

A House ethics subcommittee announced Thursday that it found that Rep. Charles B. Rangel violated congressional ethics rules and that it will prepare for a trial, probably beginning in September. The panel is expected to make the details of his alleged violations public next Thursday.

Rangel’s one of the most deeply corrupt Dems in office,

Rangel (D-N.Y.) has been under the House ethics committee’s microscope since early 2008 after it was reported that he may have used his House position to benefit his financial interests. Two of the most serious inquiries have focused on Rangel’s failure to declare $239,000 to $831,000 in assets on his disclosure forms, and on his effort to raise money for a private center named after him at City College of New York using his congressional letterhead.

In March, Rangel reluctantly stepped down as chairman of the Ways and Means Committee — a week after the ethics panel ruled in a separate case that he had broken congressional gift rules by accepting trips to conferences in the Caribbean that were financed by corporate interests. The panel said that, at a minimum, Rangel’s staff knew about the corporate backing for the 2007 and 2008 trips — and that the congressman was therefore responsible.

Meanwhile, young Luke Russert dared question Rangel on this issue and was patronized and told not to ask dumb questions:

You gotta love Russert’s expression: he knows he’s got good stuff right there,

Can you imagine if Rangel had realized that was Tim Russert’s kid? I would have loved to have heard him say, “you’re dad would be ashamed of you”.

The WaPo blog report starts with “Embattled Rep. Charlie Rangel”, embattled, as if Rangel was in the middle of a natural disaster,

Embattled Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-N.Y.) had a few choice words for MSNBC’s Luke Russert Thursday afternoon. Russert asked the 80 year-old House veteran if he might lose his job over the House panel finding that he violated ethics rules.

“Well, you’re young, I guess you do need to make a name for yourself,” Rangel told the reporter. ‘Basically you know it’s a dumb question and I’m not going to respond to it … It doesn’t really sound like NBC — asking these dumb questions. It just shows what happened to a channel that did have some respect.”

“It doesn’t really sound like NBC”?

It doesn’t really sound like the House ethics committee, either.

But they do.

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Still don’t know how to pay for that “free” healthcare,

but it will involve soaking the rich, as if we couldn’t have guessed:
Leaders in House Seek to Tax Rich for Health Plan (emphasis added):

House Democrats will ask the wealthiest Americans to help pay for overhauling the health care system with a $550 billion income tax increase, the chairman of the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee said Friday.

The proposal calls for a surtax on individuals earning at least $280,000 in adjusted gross income and couples earning more than $350,000, said the chairman, Representative Charles B. Rangel of New York.

I wonder if many of Mr Rangel’s supporters saw it coming when they donated to his campaign. This means a tax-and-tax again deal, with no end in sight:

But emerging from daylong committee negotiations Friday, Mr. Rangel said the income surtax would take effect in 2011 and begin at 1 percent of adjusted gross income — earnings before deductions like those for mortgage interest and charitable contributions — and would apply to individuals earning more than $280,000 and couples earning more than $350,000.

The surtax would be increased for individuals earning more than $400,000 and couples earning more than $500,000, and step up again for individuals earning over $800,000 and couples earning above $1 million. The precise extent of these increases has not been announced.

Mr. Rangel’s committee is also planning to insert language that would raise the surtax in 2013 if expected cost savings in the health care system do not materialize.

Countries like France that have enacted “rich surtaxes” have found that the rich moved to friendlier environments, such as Lichtenstein. Any “rich surtax” generates a substantial flight of capital from the country issuing it. During a recession, the Dems generate proposal after proposal making the American economy less competitive in the world market.

But hey, Charlie’s looking at “generating billions”:

It would generate about $550 billion over 10 years to pay about half the cost of the legislation, Mr. Rangel said. As the proposal envisions it, the rest of the cost would be covered by lower spending on Medicare, the government health plan for the elderly, and other health care savings.

It’s not clear what Rangel means by “other health care savings,” but the Medicare deal involves stealing from Peter to give to Paul.As I was saying the other day, “lower spending on Medicare” means a combination of

  • Cutting down on services covered
  • Reducing payments to providers who already don’t cover their expenses with Medicare’s payments
  • Increasing Medicare deductibles and patients’ out-of-pocket
  • Raising the age one becomes eligible for Medicare

Free?

How are you paying for it, Charlie?

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And now for Daschle – and the Google warning?

What’s with the Democrats and taxes?
There’s Charlie Rangel
Tim Geithner
Caroline Kennedy

Now, former Senator Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D

The controversy deals with a car and driver lent to Daschle by a wealthy Democratic friend — a chauffeur service the former senator used for years without declaring it on his taxes.

Never mind the corruption question for the in-kind services,

After being defeated in his 2004 re-election campaign to the Senate, Daschle in 2005 became a consultant and chairman of the executive advisory board at InterMedia Advisors.

Based in New York City, InterMedia Advisors is a private equity firm founded in part by longtime Daschle friend and Democratic fundraiser Leo Hindery, the former president of the YES network (the New York Yankees’ and New Jersey Devils’ cable television channel).

That same year he began his professional relationship with InterMedia, Daschle began using the services of Hindery’s car and driver.

The Cadillac and driver were never part of Daschle’s official compensation package at InterMedia, but Mr. Daschle — who as Senate majority leader enjoyed the use of a car and driver at taxpayer expense — didn’t declare their services on his income taxes, as tax laws require.

During the vetting process to become HHS secretary, Daschle corrected the tax violation, voluntarily paying $101,943 in back taxes plus interest, working with his accountant to amend his tax returns for 2005 through 2007.

Once he got found out,

Daschle reimbursed the IRS $31,462 in taxes and interest for tax year 2005; $35,546 for 2006; and $34,935 for 2007, a Daschle spokesperson said, adding that Daschle had asked his accountant to look into the tax implications of the car and driver five months before Obama won the presidency.

James Joyner notices

A later Tapper report, however, is more problematic:

Mr. Daschle also didn’t report $83,333 in consulting income in 2007.

The Senate Finance Committee Report also notes that during the vetting process, President Obama’s Transition Team “identified certain donations that did not qualify as charitable deductions because they were not paid to qualifying organizations. Daschle adjusted his contribution deductions on his amended returns for 2005, 2006 and 2007 to remove these amounts and add additional contributions.” This adjustment meant a reduction in the amount he contributed to charitable foundations of $14,963 from 2005 through 2007.

These two omissions are much harder to dismiss. Indeed, they look like actual tax fraud — an attempt to conceal a substantial amount of obvious income and to claim deductions to which he wasn’t entitled and which his accountant could easily have verified. He’ll need a humdinger of an explanation.

Well, at least it wasn’t pay-to-play, like Bill Richardson, Blago, Anibal Acevedo & the Philly fundraisers and Jim McGreevey.

But fear not: Jake Tapper assures us that, if Daschle doesn’t get the health and human services post, he’ll still be director of the new White House Office on Health Reform.

The fact that his wife is a lobbyist whose company “does represent numerous health interests” presents no problems at all.

And now for a side note on the Google warning:
While I was researching this post, the search daschle’s wife lobbyist yielded results which carried “This site may harm your computer” warnings, which in turn directs to a Google warning page. To get the Washington Post link I used, I had to cut & paste the link.

It reminded me of how quickly Google defused the Obama google bomb, but it’s also happening with searches involving Republicans. What’s going on?

UPDATE
Here’s the Google explanation, via Sissy,

If you did a Google search between 6:30 a.m. PST and 7:25 a.m. PST this morning, you likely saw that the message “This site may harm your computer” accompanied each and every search result. This was clearly an error, and we are very sorry for the inconvenience caused to our users.

What happened? Very simply, human error. Google flags search results with the message “This site may harm your computer” if the site is known to install malicious software in the background or otherwise surreptitiously. We do this to protect our users against visiting sites that could harm their computers. We work with a non-profit called StopBadware.org to get our list of URLs. StopBadware carefully researches each consumer complaint to decide fairly whether that URL belongs on the list. Since each case needs to be individually researched, this list is maintained by humans, not algorithms.

We periodically receive updates to that list and received one such update to release on the site this morning. Unfortunately (and here’s the human error), the URL of ‘/’ was mistakenly checked in as a value to the file and ‘/’ expands to all URLs. Fortunately, our on-call site reliability team found the problem quickly and reverted the file. Since we push these updates in a staggered and rolling fashion, the errors began appearing between 6:27 a.m. and 6:40 a.m. and began disappearing between 7:10 and 7:25 a.m., so the duration of the problem for any particular user was approximately 40 minutes.

Thanks to our team for their quick work in finding this. And again, our apologies to any of you who were inconvenienced this morning, and to site owners whose pages were incorrectly labelled. We will carefully investigate this incident and put more robust file checks in place to prevent it from happening again.

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