U.S. Scrutinized Ensign, but Senate Dug Deeper

By ERIC LICHTBLAU and ERIC LIPTON
NYT

WASHINGTON — Justice Department officials investigating Senator John Ensign spent many hours last year in a Las Vegas office interviewing his ex-aide, Douglas Hampton, as they scrutinized e-mails, handwritten notes and the aide’s detailed recollections about payoffs, secret lobbying and hush money over a disastrous affair.

Then they charged the aide with breaking the law.

On Thursday, a unanimous Senate Ethics Committee — in a rare public report that corroborated virtually all of Mr. Hampton’s central assertions — said it found compelling evidence that Mr. Ensign had not only broken the law, but that he could have been expelled from the Senate had he not made the decision last month to quit first.

But the Justice Department has yet to take any action against Mr. Ensign nearly two years after allegations of impropriety first surfaced. In fact, they told his lawyers last December that they were not pursuing criminal charges against him at the time.

(More here.)