Federal Lawmakers From Coast to Coast Are Under Investigation

WASHINGTON, July 26 — The way Representative John T. Doolittle has been talking about it back home in California, his indictment on federal corruption charges is only a matter of time.
Mr. Doolittle acknowledges that the Justice Department pressed him this spring to accept a plea bargain and confess to criminal charges involving his relationship with the corrupt lobbyist Jack Abramoff; he says he refused the deal. His public relations situation has become so desperate that he and his wife, Julie, went on a local talk-radio show in Sacramento several weeks ago to describe, in detail, the four-hour F.B.I. raid that was carried out in April on their Virginia home.
Mr. Doolittle, a former member of the House Republican leadership, said the raid was an effort to coerce him to “admit to a crime that I did not commit.”
Among members of Congress, Mr. Doolittle is far from alone in feeling heat from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Justice Department. More than a dozen current and former lawmakers are under scrutiny in cases involving their work on Capitol Hill.
And that number may be less extraordinary than the number of separate corruption investigations into which they have been drawn. In earlier Congressional scandals, like those that resulted from the Abscam bribery sting in the 1980s and disclosure of financial abuses at the House post office in the 1990s, several members came under scrutiny together in a single investigation. Now, however, there are several seemingly unrelated criminal inquiries, from here in Washington, where federal prosecutors are continuing to pursue the Abramoff investigation, to Alaska, where two of the three members of that state’s Congressional delegation are being investigated over accusations that they accepted illegal gifts from an oil services company.
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