Opinion

No victory for Greg Meeks

The clueless House Ethics Committee decided Thursday to let Rep. Greg Meeks (D-Queens) off the hook regarding a dubious “loan” he took from an even more dubious felon.

“I am glad that this matter is now closed,” offered a clearly elated Meeks that night.

Case closed? Hardly.

The Meeks murk began when he bought a $1.2 million mansion in Jamaica at a fishily deflated price (just $830,000) but still couldn’t pay off all he owed on the house. So he took a $40,000 check from Queens businessman Edul Ahmad, who has since been convicted of running a $50 million mortgage-fraud scheme.

As the Ethics Committee admits, there’s no paperwork in existence even suggesting that the $40,000 check was meant to be a loan — in fact, Meeks only repaid Ahmad after the FBI discovered the gift.

What’s more, Meeks hid the “loan” from his financial-disclosure forms for years, and the arrangement would still be secret if not for the work of the FBI.

Seems open-and-shut, but House investigators gave up when Ahmad refused to testify, vowing that if he were subpoenaed by the committee, he would take the Fifth and refuse to speak for fear of incriminating himself — unless he got immunity.

Sounds to us like Ahmad was worried he’d be found guilty of another crime.

And where there’s smoke, there’s fire — which is probably why the FBI is also investigating Meeks for steering hundreds of thousands of dollars toward questionable nonprofits in Queens.

But the bumbling Ethics Committee chose not to subpoena Ahmad and decided that the missing testimony spelled the end of its investigation.

The dismissal of Meeks’ case is a mark of shame for the House, not a measure of Meeks’ virtue.

It’s up to the FBI to figure that out.