Howard Berman: “I want to talk about the quote ``rush to judgment.'' Quite a long time ago, well over a year and a half ago, the Chair…”

“I want to talk about the quote ``rush to judgment.'' Quite a long time ago, well over a year and a half ago, the Chair and the ranking member of the committee and the staff of the committee were aware of articles talking about indictments, investigations, facts for which there would have been ample evidence for the committee to proceed at that time to investigate totally separate from the criminal justice process. The committee chairman and the ranking member said no, let us wait; let the criminal justice system work. Let us not rush and push this. We know the complications when there is a dual-track investigation, and we refrained from acting. There was a trial and there was a conviction, and the only thing this committee did was to make sure they gathered the information and the transcripts from the trial as that trial went on. Now the conviction comes in; and many Members of this body, either proposed or wanted to propose privileged resolutions essentially saying we have a Member of our body, a colleague of ours who has been convicted of 10 felony counts. This is intolerable, we want to expel, and they could have brought a privileged resolution to this floor. We went to those colleagues, and we persuaded them to defer to this process.”