WASHINGTON — She might be the most powerful woman in America, but House Speaker Nancy Pelosi played dumb yesterday about the extraordinary two-year investigation into Rep. Charlie Rangel.
“I’m totally out of the loop,” she said, insisting that the House ethics committee is finally free of the partisanship that has dogged the panel for years.
“It is independent. It is confidential, classified, secret, whatever,” Pelosi said on ABC’s “This Week” yesterday. “We don’t know what it is, but we do respect the work that the members of the committee do.”
Privately, Republicans rolled their eyes at Pelosi’s claim to be at arm’s length from the committee. One GOP aide described her claim as “deeply dubious.”
The committee is headed by Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a longtime Pelosi loyalist and, like her, a California Democrat.
At the time Pelosi installed Lofgren, it was widely viewed as a way the speaker could keep tabs on the panel charged with investigating members of Congress.
The bipartisan panel’s long investigation into Rangel appears to have ended many years of stalemate on the committee since Republicans were last in control of Congress.
Rangel took to his Twitter account yesterday to thank supporters and declare, “I just won’t stop fighting.”
Pelosi declined to rule out the possibility that Rangel may return to the chairmanship of the powerful Ways and Means Committee, where he has written tax laws and steered billions of tax dollars over the years.