The investigation into Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-CA) lives! Or at least investigators were doing some investigating this summer. Roll Call reports (sub. req.) that an FBI agent peeked at Lewis' personal financial records in July of this year, along with those of former aides.

The FBI also took a look at Rep. Ken Calvert's (R-CA) personal records, as they did once before, about a year ago.

The apparently stalled probe of Lewis has focused on his relationship to buddy and lobbyist Bill Lowery. Roll Call notes that the feds pulled records for two of Lowery's lobbyists, Jeffrey Shockey and Letitia White. Both once worked to Lewis, but moved over to work for Lowery. Shockey has since moved back to Lewis again. The feds also pulled records for Lewis' wife, his chief of staff Arlene Willis.

As for Calvert, it's unclear just what the feds are scrutinizing (one of his "honest graft" schemes?) or even if he's the focus of a full-blown investigation:

His trouble started last May, when the Los Angeles Times reported that he and a partner pocketed a profit of nearly a half-million dollars in less than a year on a land deal. The report found that while he owned the land, Calvert earmarked $1.5 million for commercial development nearby and $8 million for a freeway exchange 16 miles away.

About a week later, the California FBI agent pulled Calvert’s financial disclosure forms for 2000 through 2005. Calvert never retained legal counsel, but buzz over the issue compelled GOP leaders to skip over him last year when a slot opened on the Appropriations panel....

In July, a local FBI agent pulled Calvert’s financial disclosure forms for 2006 and 2007. Rudman said the lawmaker welcomes the scrutiny. “As far as we know, there is no investigation. He has no problems whatsoever and any time they want to look at any publicly available documents, that’s completely fine with him.”

Maybe the feds are just curious?

It would be wrong to call the House ethics committee incompetent. Because, really, it ably strives to make itself as irrelevant and impotent as possible.

Please take a moment out of your day to appreciate its efforts.

From Roll Call (sub. req.):

The House ethics committee has declared that an earmark requested by Rep. Ken Calvert (R-Calif.) to build a commuter transit center near a handful of properties he owns would not be an impermissible financial conflict because any benefit to Calvert would be shared by other similarly situated landowners.

Just let that sit a little bit. Calvert used his power as a lawmaker to appropriate $5.6 million in taxpayer dollars to build a transit center that's within walking distance of seven of his properties (ranging from office and/or retail buildings to a storage facility). But there's no conflict there, mostly because any financial benefit Calvert achieved “would be experienced as a member of a class of landholders in the vicinity of the transit Center.” You can read the ethics committee's opinion letter here. Here's a map of Calvert's properties (click to enlarge):

In other words, because Calvert's aren't the only buildings that might financially benefit from the transit center, there's no conflict. Or as the committee puts it in its own artfully contorted language: "We conclude that it is within your discretion for you to conclude that your properties do not constitute a financial interest in the earmark supporting the Corona Transit Center."

OK, so let's just say that I'm a property-rich lawmaker who wants to push the boundaries and play the earmark game for all its worth. What would it take for me to get into trouble? Just how self-serving of a project would actually garner the House ethics committee's disapproval?

“You’d have to be remodeling your kitchen,” Keith Ashdown of Taxpayers for Common Sense told me.

The committee's ruling is great news for Calvert (whose earmarking shenanigans have attracted attention before) and the growing group of lawmakers in the "honest graft" game (Justin had a great round-up over at ABC yesterday). And it's yet another indication that the House ethics committee actually has a lower standard for wrongdoing than our criminal justice system, which is why far more lawmakers have come under federal investigation in the past several years than have been investigated by the ethics committee (Calvert is no exception).

It has been nearly five months since Justice Department prosecutors working the Duke Cunningham corruption case first requested information from three key House committees. To date, they haven't got a scrap of paper in return, nor a single interview with a staffer, Roll Call's John Bresnahan reports today.

In May, if you recall, anonymous Hill denizens whined to the media that if they really tried to comply, Congress would "shut down."

DoJ wants information stretching back to 1997, and requests that broad could lead them to knock on many new doors. Independent reports have already confirmed that as offshoots of the Cunningham probe, the DoJ is looking into Reps. Jerry Lewis (R-CA), Duncan Hunter (R-CA), Ken Calvert (R-CA), Katherine Harris (R-FL), and possibly others, as well as former Rep. Tom DeLay (R-TX) -- and, of course, Cunningham himself.

What would ten years of records and information about a corrupt congressman uncover? Apparently, that's for Congress to know, and the rest of America to wonder about -- for a while. Congress' August recess is coming up, which provides another reason for them to do nothing. Will Justice let them get away with it?

Rep. Ken Calvert (R-CA) is the next name to surface as a subject of scrutiny by federal investigators, Roll Call reports today. Late last month, the FBI pulled his financial disclosure records from Congress. The paper says the inquiry is an outgrowth of the Cunningham investigation.

Calvert told Roll Call he welcomes the inquiry. “I assume the FBI is just doing their due diligence in looking at government agencies and officials from our area. I have not been contacted by the FBI,” he told the paper in a statement.

Calvert accompanied former Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham on a trip to Saudi Arabia in December 2003. He got some bad press recently from the Los Angeles Times, which revealed he had profited from land deals whose value increased as a result of his legislative actions. The FBI searched his financial records eight days after that story broke, Roll Call reports.

The probe is particularly bad news for Calvert, because he was widely considered to be the top choice to replace soon-to-be-former Rep. Tom DeLay (R-TX) on the House Appropriations Committee.

The paper also found that the FBI had looked at financial disclosure records for House Appropriations Chair Jerry Lewis (R-CA), Lewis' wife and staff director, Arlene Willis, and his two aides-turned-lobbyists, Jeffrey Shockey and Letitia White.

To date, five congressmen have been identified as subjects of investigators' interest as part of the Cunningham probe: Lewis, Calvert, Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA), DeLay, and Cunningham himself. All are Republicans; all but DeLay represent California districts.

Ah, California, land of ethically challenged congressmen.

The Los Angeles Times reports this morning on another California rep and another questionable real estate deal. No, this one doesn't feature a crooked defense contractor.

Rep. Ken Calvert (R-CA), it turns out, is quite the real estate mogul. Only it seems he has something of an unfair advantage over the average investor. Being a member of Congress, he has the power to earmark funds for transportation projects that just happen to run near his investments:

Last year, [Calvert] and a partner paid $550,000 for a dusty four-acre parcel just south of March Air Reserve Base. Less than a year later, without even cutting the weeds or carting off old septic tank parts that littered the ground, they sold the land for almost $1 million....

During the time he owned the land, Calvert used the legislative process known as earmarking to secure $8 million for a planned freeway interchange 16 miles from the property, and an additional $1.5 million to support commercial development of the area around the airfield.

A map of Calvert's recent real estate holdings and those of his partner shows many of them near the transportation projects he has supported with federal appropriations. And improvements to the transportation infrastructure have contributed to the area's explosive growth, according to development experts.