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WASHINGTON — Fresh off his House censure last year, Rep. Charlie Rangel is shooting for a 22nd term in Congress.
The 80-year-old Harlem Democrat filed a 2012 statement of candidacy this week with the Federal Elections Commission — more than a year before the filing deadline.
Rangel, who last year suffered a humiliating censure for multiple ethics violations, has recently talked candidly about his age, prompting speculation that he was headed for retirement.
But now he’s rushing onto the campaign trail yet again.
“I think the filing speaks for itself,” Rangel told The Post.
His campaign spokesman, Bob Liff, was more to the point: “He is running for re-election.”
Rangel enters the race with nearly $100,000 in his campaign war chest, according to federal reports filed last month.
He also enjoys widespread popularity in his district, despite the censure.
A run by the undisputed dean of the New York delegation could cool the ambitions of several pols angling for the House seat Rangel has occupied for nearly 41 years.
Rangel had even floated the names of some possible successors when he was thought to be heading for retirement, including state Sen. Adriano Espaillat and Assemblymen Keith Wright and Robert Rodriguez.
The House voted 333-79 on Dec. 2 to censure Rangel, making him the first congressman in 27 years to endure the humiliating rebuke by his colleagues. Only expulsion from Congress would be more severe.
It was just the 23rd time the House has resorted to censure in its 222-year history, with most of the cases occurring during the Civil War against members who pledged loyalty to the Confederacy.
An ethics panel last November convicted Rangel on 11 of 12 charges after a two-year investigation found a “pattern” of rule-breaking, including dodging taxes, concealing assets and misusing his post to raise money for the City College center that bears his name — all first reported by The Post.
The rule-breaking and censure have not yet taken a political toll on Rangel, who at the height of the scandal last year won re-election with 80 percent of the vote.
The two-year ethics probe and ensuing House trial did hit Rangel in the wallet.
He said he spent more than $2 million on lawyers, who ultimately quit in the midst of his House trial because he ran out of money to pay them.
After his censure, Rangel had to hire another DC lawyer, Bill Oldaker, to fend off a new legal problem.
The Federal Elections Commission is investigating a complaint that Rangel improperly used his National Leadership PAC to pay his attorneys in the ethics case.
The FEC is acting on a complaint by the National Legal and Policy Center filed after The Post first reported last month that Rangel paid almost $400,000 from his PAC.
Rangel insists he has done nothing wrong.
He set up a defense fund in December to help pay the mountain of legal bills.
The Rangel campaign yesterday was not ready to disclose how much money the defense fund has raised or how much money Rangel still owes his lawyers.