No Charges for Ex-Head of Housing Under Bush

[Ardent15]

"WASHINGTON — The Justice Department has decided not to file charges against Alphonso R. Jackson, the former secretary of housing and urban development in the Bush administration, over allegations that he improperly steered federal contracts to friends, his lawyers said Monday.

Mr. Jackson’s lawyers said that Peter Koski, a lawyer at the Justice Department’s public integrity unit, informed them late last week that it was closing its investigation into Mr. Jackson, who resigned under pressure in 2008.

“We presume that after a full, fair and comprehensive investigation that spanned over a three-year period, they came to the conclusion that their allegations were without support,” said one of the lawyers, Steve Cousins.

A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment. But Mr. Jackson’s lawyers said they had argued to prosecutors that rather than improperly steering contracts to friends, Mr. Jackson had been seeking to increase minority participation in Department of Housing and Urban Development contracts.

“He’s been involved in the housing industry for so long that he knew almost everybody within the housing industry, so you can’t have a HUD contract that doesn’t sometimes go to people he knows and has a relationship with,” said Jim Martin, another of Mr. Jackson’s lawyers.

A third lawyer, Stephen Braga, said that the Justice Department had been unable to find evidence that Mr. Jackson received any benefit in exchange for his office’s recommendation that certain firms receive contracts, and that “when that quid pro quo is missing, it takes away any motivation for improper steering.”

Mr. Jackson had also attracted attention after he said at a public forum in Dallas in 2006 that he had canceled a government contract to a business run by a man who said he disliked President George W. Bush. Mr. Jackson later claimed that he had made that story up.

The department also investigated Mr. Jackson for perjury over his testimony to Congress that he never “touched” department contracts, Mr. Braga said, but that allegation was undermined by competing interpretations about what Mr. Jackson had meant.

Investigators argued that because Mr. Jackson’s office had recommended that certain businesses receive contracts, he had misled Congress. But his lawyers argued that Mr. Jackson had meant only that he never rescinded any contracts for political reasons.

Given that there were two plausible interpretations of Mr. Jackson’s remark, Mr. Braga said prosecutors had evidently decided they could not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Mr. Jackson had committed perjury.

The former housing secretary, who now teaches at Hampton University, a historically black college in Virginia, was “very happy” about the outcome of the investigation, Mr. Cousins said."

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/04/us/politics/04jackson.html

[Historic NY]

1. Just remember this come election time in NY state...it will sound familar.