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(CNN) — Longtime Democratic Rep. Charles Rangel of New York will be the subject of the House ethics committee’s first corruption trial in almost a decade unless his attorneys reach an agreement to settle his charges.

The House ethics committee on Thursday will make public a report of Rangel’s alleged violations. After a nearly two-year investigation of Rangel, the committee’s report could bring a trial by a panel subcommittee in September.

A formal hearing would be a trial-like session involving formal charges with lawyers for the House acting as prosecutors and Rangel’s attorneys defending him, but some experts don’t foresee Rangel making it to the trial stage.

“I think all sides are going to be motivated to reach some kind of resolution short of the public hearings,” said Robert Walker, former chief counsel and staff director of both the Senate and House ethics committees.

Rangel said he welcomes the trial. He has said that “sunshine will pierce the cloud of serious allegations.”

The outcome of the hearing could range from dropping all charges to reprimand to expulsion from the House of Representatives.

Video: Rep. Rangel addresses ethics charges

Video: Rangel: ‘I look forward to responding’

As a result of his 2002 corruption trial, former Rep. James Traficant, an Ohio Democrat, became the second member of Congress to be kicked out since the Civil War.

Charles Tiefer, a professor at the University of Baltimore School of Law, said Traficant’s case “hardly even counts as a serious precedent.”

At the time of his ethics hearing, Traficant already had been convicted of taking bribes and other charges in a court of law. He spent seven years in prison and was released last year.

“A trial, particularly of a senior congressman, on charges that have been headline news, would be one of the most striking committee proceedings the House can have,” said Tiefer, who was solicitor and deputy general counsel of the House for 11 years.

Rangel temporarily stepped down as Ways and Means Committee chairman following the announcement of an ethics investigation of several allegations, including failure to pay taxes on a home in the Dominican Republic.

The congressman has also admitted a failure to report several hundred thousand dollars in assets on federal disclosure forms. In addition, he is under scrutiny for the purported misuse of a rent-controlled apartment for political purposes, as well as for allegedly preserving tax benefits for an oil-drilling company in exchange for donations to a project he supported at the City College of New York.

The House ethics committee previously admonished Rangel for violating rules on receiving gifts. Specifically, the committee found that Rangel violated House gift rules by accepting reimbursement payments for travel to conferences in the Caribbean in 2007 and 2008.

Should Rangel face a trial, it would play out in what Walker described as a cross between a courtroom trial and a congressional hearing.

Both sides would deliver opening statements and present their cases. They could also call witnesses, who could be cross-examined by the other side.

In a public hearing, there is more leeway given to the committee in terms of admissibility of evidence, Walker said.

Following the evidentiary part of the process, there would be closing arguments, and the case would go back to the jury.

In a House ethics trial, the “jury” is made up of an eight-member adjudicatory subcommittee whose members are allowed to question witnesses.

The subcommittee that would consider Rangel’s case comprises four Democrats and four Republicans, according to the ethics committee document.

It said Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-California, is the panel’s chair. Other Democratic members are Reps. G.K. Butterfield of North Carolina, Kathy Castor of Florida and Peter Welch of Vermont. The four Republicans are Reps. Michael McCaul of Texas, Mike Conaway of Texas, Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania and Gregg Harper of Mississippi.

The jury then would have to determine whether each charge was proven by the standard of “clear and convincing evidence.”

“That is less than ‘proof beyond a reasonable a doubt,’ which would be the standard at a criminal trial, but it’s more than the standard of just ‘preponderance of the evidence, which would be the standard at a civil trial,” Walker said.

Despite the outcome, the trial phase could be detrimental to Rangel, Tiefer said.

“It hurts his public image to parade a sequence of witnesses who testify that he is guilty of receiving favors and so forth, and it also arguably hurts the image of those connected with him in his party delegation,” he said.

If he adequately disputes the facts, he could persuade the committee to moderate or even drop all of the charges, Tiefer added.

The whole matter could be dismissed with no further action if the subcommittee decides that no wrongdoing was proven, but if members decide punishment is warranted, they would then have to decide whether to sanction Rangel.

“If they determine that it was a technical violation, the committee could then issue what’s called a letter of reproval, which is not an actual sanction,” Walker said.

If the committee decides more serious punishment is in order, such as reprimand, censure or expulsion, the full House must vote on the issue.

A simple majority vote is required to reprimand or censure a member of Congress, while a two-thirds majority is required for an expulsion.

The House has expelled only five members of Congress. A number of members, however, have resigned before the House took formal action, according to the Congressional Research Service.

Rangel has served 20 consecutive terms in the House. He’s facing a September 14 Democratic contest with Adam Clayton Powell IV, the son of the late scandal-plagued congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr., who was ousted by Rangel 40 years ago.

Rangel’s other primary challengers include banker Vince Morgan, liberal activist Jonathan Tasini and Joyce Johnson, a field director for President Obama’s 2008 campaign.

Rangel said last week that he hoped the matter could be concluded in time for the September contest.

CNN’s Deirdre Walsh contributed to this report.

How Rangel’s ethics hearing could play out

By

Gail Russell Chaddock,

(CNN) — American officials from the president down tried Tuesday to downplay the leak of tens of thousands of documents about the war in Afghanistan, a disclosure experts are calling the biggest leak since the Pentagon Papers about Vietnam.

Pentagon officials have not found anything top-secret among the documents, a Defense Department spokesman said Tuesday.

“From what we have seen so far, the documents are at the ‘secret’ level,” Col. David Lapan said. That’s not a very high level of classification.

Lapan emphasized that the Pentagon has not looked at all of the more than 75,000 documents published on WikiLeaks.org on Sunday.

President Barack Obama said Tuesday that he is “concerned about the disclosure of sensitive information” about the U.S. mission in Afghanistan but asserted that the documents don’t shed much new light on the issue.

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry, D-Massachusetts, said Tuesday that the importance of the leak should not be overstated.

“I think it’s important not to overhype or get excessively excited about the meaning of those documents,” Kerry told the committee.

But, he said, the leak “breaks the law, and equally importantly, it compromises the efforts of our troops, potentially, in the field and has the potential of putting people in harm’s way,” he said.

The top-ranking U.S. military officer, Adm. Michael Mullen, said he was “appalled” by the leak but questioned the current significance of the documents, which date from 2004 to 2009.

Video: Congressmen talk WikiLeaks and the war

Video: Pentagon responds to WikiLeaks

“Much has changed since 2009, particularly with respect to our focus, our new strategy in Afghanistan and Pakistan,” said Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in Baghdad, Iraq. “A lot of it is focused on the past, and I am very focused on the future.”

Afghan President Hamid Karzai has ordered the Foreign Ministry and National Security Council to study the vast cache of documents, Karzai’s office said Tuesday.

The documents are divided into more than 100 categories. Tens of thousands of pages of reports document attacks on U.S. troops and their responses, relations between Americans in the field and their Afghan allies, intramural squabbles among Afghan civilians and security forces, and concerns about neighboring Pakistan’s ties to the Taliban.

The “direct fire” category accounts for the largest number — at 16,293 reports — while “graffiti,” “mugging,” “narcotics” and “threat” each account for one. And WikiLeaks has another 15,000 documents that it plans to publish after editing out names to protect people, according to the website’s founder and editor in chief, Julian Assange.

He said on CNN’s “Larry King Live” that the firsthand accounts represent “the cut and thrust of the entire war over the past six years,” through the military’s own raw data: numbers of casualties, threat reports and notes from meetings between Afghan leaders and U.S. commanders.

“We see the who, the where, the what, the when and the how of each one of these attacks,” Assange said. That includes, he said, possible evidence of war crimes by both U.S. troops and the Taliban, the Islamic militia that has been battling U.S. troops since 2001.

Assange said some events listed in the reports are “very suspicious,” such as reports of skirmishes in which “a lot of people are killed, but no people taken prisoner and no people left wounded.”

“In the end, it will take a court to really look at the full range of evidence to decide if a crime has occurred,” he said. But earlier, he noted, “This material does not leave anyone smelling like roses, especially the Taliban.”

CNN has not independently confirmed the authenticity of the documents, but neither the White House nor the Pentagon has denied that they are what WikiLeaks claims they are.

On Monday, the White House condemned the release of the documents as “a breach of federal law” but simultaneously dismissed them as old news.

“I don’t think that what is being reported hasn’t in many ways been publicly discussed — whether by you or by representatives of the U.S. government — for quite some time,” White House spokesman Robert Gibbs told reporters. But he said an investigation into the source of the leak had begun by last week.

“There is no doubt that this is a concerning development in operational security,” he said.

The reports tend to be filled with jargon, like this one that describes a border incident from September 4, 2005:

“The Pakistan LNO [liaison officer] reports that ANA [Afghan National Army] troops are massing and threatening the PAKMIL [Pakistani military] 12km NE of FB Lwara [Firebase Lwara, a U.S. military base] …”

And that’s not even the entire first sentence.

Assange said WikiLeaks withheld some documents that dealt with activity by U.S. Special Forces and the CIA, “and most of the activity of other non-U.S. groups.”

But he said the documents reveal the “squalor” of war, uncovering how a number of small incidents have added up to huge numbers of civilian deaths.

“What we haven’t seen previously is all those individual deaths,” he said. “We’ve seen just the number. And like Stalin said, ‘One man’s death is a tragedy; a million dead is a statistic.’ So, we’ve seen the statistic.”

The release of the documents is being called the biggest intelligence leak in history, drawing comparisons to the disclosure of the Vietnam-era Pentagon Papers.

“There hasn’t been an unauthorized disclosure of this magnitude in 39 years,” said Daniel Ellsberg, the onetime Pentagon official who leaked that multiple-volume secret history of the conflict.

Others disagreed with the comparison. Bruce Riedel, an analyst at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, noted that the Pentagon Papers were part of a document prepared for U.S. leaders that analyzed how the United States got into Vietnam, “which assessed successes and failures in a comprehensive way.”

“This is really the raw material of the war — unassessed, raw, fragmentary data that I think in each case, you have to be very careful how much of a larger picture you can conclude from these fragments and snippets,” Riedel said.

And CNN Terrorism Analyst Peter Bergen said the Pentagon Papers revealed “a huge disconnect between what the American government was saying officially and internally.”

“Here, all sorts of American government officials are saying the war is not going very well. No one is disagreeing with that,” Bergen said.

But Ellsberg said the documents, “low-level as they are,” raise the question of whether the United States has a winning strategy in Afghanistan and whether it should continue to pursue the war.

“They do give us the sense of the pattern of failure, of stalemate, and why we’re stalemated — civilian casualties that recruit for the Taliban … and raise the question of what we’re doing there,” he said.

The United States and its allies invaded Afghanistan in 2001 after the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington. The attacks were carried out by the Islamic terrorist network al Qaeda, which operated from bases in Afghanistan with the approval of the Taliban, the fundamentalist movement that ruled most of the country at the time.

The invasion swiftly toppled the Taliban, but al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar escaped and remain at large. Meanwhile, the Taliban regrouped along the rugged border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, which is now battling its own Taliban insurgency as well.

Gary Berntsen, who led a CIA commando team in Afghanistan in the hunt for al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, said on CNN’s “Rick’s List” that the documents “probably are accurate.” But Berntsen, now a Republican candidate for a U.S. Senate seat in New York, said the reports are likely to be a propaganda coup for the Taliban and “sap morale in the United States.”

“It does paint a bleak picture on this,” he said. “But it doesn’t mean this fight is less worth fighting and trying to make progress on.”

And Paul Rieckhoff, founder of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, said the information should be put “in context” and that journalists should avoid publishing anything that could harm U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Assange, he said, “is an anti-war activist who has repeatedly cast a very unfair light on the American military and on the American population in general.”

“There are American troops in harm’s way getting shot and killed,” Rieckhoff said. “If WikiLeaks is endangering them, we need to push back, and the American public needs to push back.”

Once the jargon of the report is pierced, the stories can be eye-opening.

In a February 5, 2008, incident, Task Force Helmand reported that an Afghan National Police officer — referred to as ANP — was in a public shower smoking hashish when two members of the Afghan National Army walked in.

“ANP felt threatened and a fire fight occurred,” the report says. “The ANP fled the scene and was later shot. ANP and ANA commanders held meetings to contain the incident.”

An October 15, 2007, incident describes an Afghan National Police highway officer’s shooting of another Afghan National Police officer in the shoulder and leg, not seriously. “The shooting was not accidental the policeman had been arguing with each other for a few days,” the report said.

In a March 19, 2005, incident, “FOB [Forward Operating Base] Cobra received a local national boy who had received a gunshot wound to his stomach,” another report said.

“He had been shot during a green-on-green [Afghans attacking Afghans] firefight in Jangalak Village. The boy and his older brother had heard shooting outside of their compound and went outside to check it out, at which point the boy was shot in the stomach. Another brother had also been shot and died at the compound. No adult males had accompanied the brothers, and only the older brother of the injured boy could provide information on the incident. The older brother explained that men in the village were having personal disputes with each other and had then began shooting at each ones’ compounds.”

Assange said the documents were “legitimate” but said it was important not to take their contents at face value.

“We publish CIA reports all the time that are legitimate CIA reports. That doesn’t mean the CIA is telling the truth,” he said.

He said his website is not campaigning against the war.

“WikiLeaks does not have an opinion whether the war in Afghanistan should continue or not continue. … It should continue in a just way if its to continue at all,” he said.

He declined to tell CNN where he got the documents and said the identities of his sources are less important than the authenticity of the documents they provide. And he denied that WikiLeaks has put troops in danger and said the documents’ publication will help people make informed decisions about whether to support the war.

Assange, an Australian, said the site is coming under “significant pressure” from authorities, including several recent “surveillance events.” But he said that due to the response the latest release has received, “It is not politically feasible to interfere with us at a high level.”

CNN Pentagon Correspondent Barbara Starr and CNN’s Atika Shubert, Richard Allen Greene, David DeSola, Adam S. Levine and Atia Abawi contributed to this report.

Pentagon: Leaked Afghan reports are not top-secret

By

Brad Knickerbocker,

Washington (CNN) — The Obama administration will push for letting tax cuts for wealthy Americans expire while extending them for the rest of the nation, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner said.

In interviews broadcast Sunday on ABC and NBC, Geithner called for a balanced approach as the economy recovers from the recession that started in 2008 while facing mounting federal debt.

That means pushing for measures designed to raise revenue, such as letting tax breaks from the Bush administration expire for families earning more than $250,000 a year while holding down spending and taking steps to encourage private sector job creation, Geithner said.

“We’re in a transition … from the extraordinary actions the government had to take to break the back of this financial crisis to a recovery led by private demand,” Geithner told the NBC program “Meet the Press”. “That transition is well under way. It’s going to continue and it’s going to strengthen.”

Along with letting the tax cuts for the wealthy expire, the administration also wants to “leave in place tax cuts that are very important to incent businesses to hire new employees and to invest and expand in output,” Geithner said on the ABC program “This Week.”

Republicans say letting tax cuts expire for wealther Americans will hurt economic growth as the nation recovers from the recession. In particular, GOP critics say the $250,000-a-year threshold means many small business owners would be included in the group seeing their tax burdens increase when the cuts expire at the end of 2010.

“The safest thing for America would be to have a provision passed this fall that said no tax increase of any kind in 2011,” former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a possible Republican presidential candidate in 2012, said on the “FOX News Sunday” program. “Everywhere I go — and I’ve been in 10 states in the last 14 days — business people say to me over and over again, ‘I will create no new jobs in this environment because the uncertainty is too frightening.’ “

Geithner said the plan is to extend the tax cuts for more than 95 percent of country while letting them expire for about 3 percent, which he called the “highest-earning Americans.”

Asked on the ABC show if letting any tax cuts expire would harm the recovery, Geithner said: “I do not believe it will have a negative effect on growth.”

“We think that’s the responsible thing to do,” Geithner said. “We need to make sure we can show the world that we’re willing as a country now to start to make some progress bringing down our long-term deficits.”

Video: Bush tax cuts: Time to expire?

Video: Have Dems’ econ policies failed?

Video: Obama’s economic plan

Overall, he said, the government was “making progress” in restoring private sector job growth.

“I think the most likely thing is you see an economy that gradually strengthens over the next year or two,” Geithner said on NBC. “You see job growth start to come back again; and again, investment expanding, manufacturing is getting a little stronger, exports better. Those are very encouraging signs. But we’ve got a long way to go still.”

President Barack Obama’s poll numbers for his handling of the economy have dropped into unfavorable territory, and Republicans have hammered the administration over continuing high unemployment despite last year’s $787 billion economic stimulus bill. Last week, the administration said it expects unemployment to remain above 9 percent through 2011.

Geithner said the government is moving from the emergency steps enacted to deal with the recession — such as bailing out big banks and automakers — to more long-term approaches for helping the private sector create jobs.

On NBC, he called completing projects under the stimulus bill and enacting proposals to help small businesses and teachers “sensible, good steps,” adding that the main goal is to “make this transition to a recovery led by private companies.”

“We have to make some choices, too, and we have to make sure we can continue to earn confidence around the world that we’re going to have the will as a country to bring these large inherited deficits down over time to a much more manageable level,” Geithner said.

Geithner: Let tax cuts for rich expire

By

Gail Russell Chaddock,

(CNN) — Congressman Charlie Rangel had a bad week.

Calls for the veteran Harlem politician’s resignation are increasing after the House Ethics Committee’s announcement Thursday that he will be the subject of its first corruption trial in nearly a decade. The last time the committee took such a step, in 2002, it led to a congressman’s expulsion.

Rangel says he welcomes the trial. He has said that “sunshine will pierce the cloud of serious allegations.”

But for the 80-year-old Rangel, the prospect of a trial by his peers threatens to overshadow an extraordinary career that led him from the poverty of the pre-war Bronx to the battlefields of Korea and ultimately the pinnacle of political power.

It’s also drawing more attention to what was already a marquee political fight: the September 14 Democratic primary between Rangel and the son of the late scandal-plagued congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., who was ousted by Rangel 40 years ago.

The notion that Rangel’s career could end in defeat or expulsion was once unthinkable.

The 20-term congressman had to claw his way to the top from the abyss of a rocky childhood. “My father was absolutely no good,” he wrote in his autobiography. “In my earliest memory of him … (he) was hitting my mother on the steps of some apartment-type building. I went and got a broom to hit my father. He started laughing at me.”

Rangel’s father eventually abandoned his family, and young Charlie moved in with an aunt and uncle.

In 1947, Rangel dropped out of high school — a step that led to his enlistment in an all-black battalion in the Army’s Second Infantry Division. Three years later, he found himself in the middle of the Korean War.

In November 1950, Rangel was wounded while helping to rescue 40 men behind Chinese lines in frigid temperatures near a place called Kunu-ri. For his efforts, Rangel received a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star for valor. The battle “was a waking nightmare becoming a reality,” he later wrote. “I haven’t had a bad day since.”

Video: Rangel to face ethics hearing

When Rangel returned from the war, he was able to use the G.I. Bill to earn a college degree from New York University and a law degree from St. John’s. After a stint as an assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, he was elected to the New York State Assembly in 1966.

He became active in the civil rights movement, participating in the mid-1960s marches in Selma and Montgomery, Alabama.

Four years later, he turned his sights to Washington, entering Harlem’s Democratic primary to take on Powell, one of the most prominent African-American politicians at the time. Powell had been weakened by charges of corruption, and Rangel edged him out.

Once inside the Beltway, Rangel rose rapidly through the Democratic ranks. He helped establish the Congressional Black Caucus and served on the House Judiciary Committee during its hearings on the impeachment of President Richard Nixon. In 1974, he got a seat on the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, responsible for oversight of the nation’s tax code.

Among other things, Rangel used his position in Congress to take a leading role in the fight against drug trafficking. He pushed for low-income housing tax credits, and authored a $5 billion Federal Empowerment Zone to support urban communities.

Rangel also became a leading voice against apartheid, authoring legislation in 1987 to strip certain tax deductions from U.S. companies invested in South Africa.

After Democrats won control of the House in 2006, Rangel became the first African-American chairman of Ways and Means.

Now, however, at what should have been the peak of his power, Rangel is fighting for his political life.

Rangel was recently forced to temporarily step aside as Ways and Means chairman following the announcement of an investigation of several allegations, including failure to pay taxes on a home in the Dominican Republic.

He has also admitted a failure to report several hundred thousand dollars in assets on federal disclosure forms.

In addition, he is under scrutiny for the purported misuse of a rent-controlled apartment for political purposes, as well as for allegedly preserving tax benefits for an oil-drilling company in exchange for donations to a project he supported at the City College of New York.

The House Ethics Committee previously admonished Rangel for violating rules on receiving gifts. The committee found that Rangel violated House gift rules by accepting reimbursement payments for travel to conferences in the Caribbean in 2007 and 2008.

In a document issued Thursday, the ethics panel appointed an eight-member adjudicatory subcommittee to determine if allegations against Rangel “have been proved by clear and convincing evidence.”

The subcommittee responsible for conducting the formal hearings on Rangel will have its first organizational meeting on July 29.

Charlie Rangel’s spectacular rise and fall

Washington (CNN) — A legislative win is a win — but not necessarily when it comes to swaying voters facing the worst economic conditions since the Great Depression.

High unemployment and fears over an ever-increasing federal debt are weighing heavily on Americans. That could drown out President Obama’s message as he heads out on the campaign trail to tout Democrats’ legislative wins: health care reform, financial regulatory reform and economic stimulus projects, among others.

“Right now he is facing an uphill battle,” said Vanderbilt University political scientist John Geer. “I don’t think there’s much that can be done about that. He’ll sharpen the message. But when economies are soft, incumbents have a tough time.”

And members of Congress, bracing for a tough election, got a frank assessment Wednesday of where the economy is headed.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke warned that the economic outlook remains “unusually uncertain.” But he said that while there are growing signs of weakness in the nation’s economic recovery, Bernanke and other top Federal Reserve officials still expect “continued moderate growth, a gradual decline in the unemployment rate, and subdued inflation over the next several years.”

Read more on Bernanke’s assessment

In addition to championing Democrats’ legislative wins, Obama is being urged to continue to go after Republicans — and lay out an argument that conditions in the country won’t improve if the opposition takes control of Congress after the midterm election.

So far, that strategy is being employed.

Video: Financial reform signed into law

Video: Obama urges Senate to act on jobs

Obama recently traveled to Missouri to help fellow Democrat Sen. Robin Carnahan in her crucial Senate race.

“The last thing we should do is go back to the very ideas that got us into this mess,” Obama said at the campaign event. “That’s the choice you are going to face in November. … a choice between falling backward or moving forward.”

A CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll would seem to support that strategy, according to CNN Polling Director Keating Holland.

The poll, released in late June, found that Americans are angry at both the Republican and Democratic parties for the economy, but they continue to blame the GOP slightly more than the Democrats for the country’s current economic woes.

Fifty-three percent said they are angry at both parties; only 7 percent are angry only at the Democrats and 9 percent are angry only at Republicans.

But that’s not necessarily good news for the Democrats, since an anti-incumbent mood tends to hurt the party with more incumbents. Some argue, however, that it suggests 2010 may not be a precise replay of 1994 when Republicans grabbed control of both legislative chambers from Democrats.

“Democrats are saying ‘Look, let’s make this a referendum on Barack Obama as the future and the Republicans wanting to go back to the past — and Republicans wanting more of the same policies that got us into the economic mess in the first place,’ ” CNN Senior Political Analyst Gloria Borger said.

That strategy worked for Democrats in 2006 and 2008, she said, when they told voters change was needed.

“It’s a very good decision on [Democrats'] part obviously, because that’s the way they get some of those voters back — particularly, independent white men who are deserting them,” Borger added.

Another problem for Obama’s legislative campaign tour? That those policies will be portrayed as big-government.

“It’s difficult in the economic environment because people are nervous,” she said. “Polls show that people are more worried about the deficit than getting tax cuts. They’re worried about government spending and worried about too much government. … So he wins Wall Street reform but doesn’t get credit for it because we’re in a different political environment.”

But that is the environment right now. What if the economy were to improve?

“If the economy right now was showing tremendous growth and jobs were being created, he’d have no problem making the argument [for Democrats to be re-elected]. But we’re not there right now,” Geer said.

Economic conditions are not just a product of policy — but also the natural economic cycle, he added.

“Ronald Reagan’s economy took off in part due to some policies he pursued but also because of natural business cycles just like for Clinton. So there’s a lot of it outside the control. Right now, I suspect Obama’s getting a little too much of the blame … we’ll see if he is successful.”

CNN Polling Director Keating Holland, along with CNNMoney.com’s Scott Spoerry and Chris Isidore, contributed to this report.

Can Obama sell Democrats’ legislative victories?

(CNN) — A black former Agriculture Department official who resigned under pressure after a video clip surfaced of her discussing a white farmer said Wednesday the agency’s decision to review her case is “bittersweet,” but said she isn’t sure she would accept her job back if it is offered.

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said early Wednesday that he will review the case of Shirley Sherrod, who resigned Monday after the video clip first appeared on a conservative website and later on Fox News.

In the video, Sherrod, the former USDA director of rural development for Georgia, seems to tell an audience at an NAACP function in March that she did not do her utmost to help a white farmer avoid foreclosure.

However, Sherrod later said the clip only shows part of her comments, and that she tells the story of her experience — from nearly a quarter century ago when she was not a federal employee — to illustrate the importance of moving beyond race.

“I am, of course, willing and will conduct a thorough review and consider additional facts to ensure to the American people we are providing services in a fair and equitable manner,” Vilsack said in a statement.

The USDA’s decision is “bittersweet,” Sherrod told CNN’s “American Morning” on Wednesday.

“If they had just taken the time to — even without looking at the tape — to look at me, to look at what I’ve stood for, to look at what I’ve done since I’ve actually been at the department, I don’t think they would have been so quick to do what they did and so insistent,” she said. “… To now come back and say, ‘Well, we’re willing to look at this,’ it definitely is a little bittersweet.”

Video: ‘I worked for fairness’

Video: Farmer on Sherrod criticism

Video: NAACP pres. explains reaction

Video: Who asked Sherrod to resign?

At the department, Sherrod said, “I didn’t make a lot of noise. … I worked for fairness for everyone.”

Asked whether she would accept her job back if the USDA offered it, she said, “You know, I’m just not so sure at this point. I really wonder, in light of how I was treated over the last two days, just what that relationship would be like for the future. Can they move beyond this?”

In the video, Sherrod can be heard telling an audience at a March 27, 2010, appearance before a local chapter of the NAACP that she had not given a white farmer “the full force of what I could do” to help him save the family farm.

But later in the tape, in the portion not originally posted, Sherrod says, “working with (the farmer) made me see that it’s really about those who have versus those who have not. They could be black. They could be white. They could be Hispanic.”

The video initially brought condemnation from the NAACP, which later retracted its statement and apologized to Sherrod after the context of the clip became clear. Also, the farmer and his wife Sherrod was discussing, Roger and Eloise Spooner, came forward Tuesday, saying they credited Sherrod with helping them save their farm and that she did not discriminate against them.

The NAACP, which initially called Sherrod’s statements “shameful,” said in a statement Tuesday that it was “snookered by Fox News” and conservative website publisher Andrew Breitbart. Breitbart originally posted the video, which was quickly picked up by Fox News.

“Having reviewed the full tape by Shirley Sherrod, who is the woman who was fired by the Department of Agriculture, and most importantly heard the testimony of the white farmers mentioned in this story, we now believe that the organization that edited the documents did so with the intention of deceiving millions of Americans,” the statement from NAACP President Benjamin Jealous said.

The organization had also urged Vilsack to reconsider Sherrod’s resignation from her post.

Sherrod said Wednesday she accepted the NAACP apology and is “ready to move on.”

Conservative media outlets tied the video to the NAACP’s recent resolution calling on the Tea Party movement to repudiate racist elements within it that have displayed such items as images of President Barack Obama with a bone through his nose and the White House with a lawn full of watermelons. The controversy has led one Tea Party umbrella group to oust another because of a blog posting by the second group’s leader.

Tea Party Express leader Mark Williams posted on his blog a faux letter from Jealous to President Abraham Lincoln in which Williams ridicules the organization’s use of “colored” in its historic name and uses multiple stereotypes to bolster his point. The National Tea Party Foundation expelled Williams’ organization from its coalition as a result.

Breitbart told CNN’s “John King USA” on Tuesday that releasing the video was “not about Shirley Sherrod.”

“This was about the NAACP attacking the Tea Party, and this is showing racism at an NAACP event,” he said. “I did not ask for Shirley Sherrod to be fired.”

Sherrod said Tuesday that she “went all out” to help the Spooners keep their farm in the 1986 incident, which occurred before she started working for USDA and was at the nonprofit Federation of Southern Cooperatives Land Assistance Fund. She said she resigned after receiving four phone calls Monday telling her the White House wanted her to step down.

“They asked me to resign, and in fact they harassed me as I was driving back to the state office from West Point, Georgia, yesterday,” she said. The last call “asked me to pull to the side of the road and do it [resign],” she said.

However, Vilsack told CNN on Tuesday that he “didn’t speak to anyone at the White House. … I made this decision, it’s my decision. Nobody from the White House contacted me about this at all.”

A White House official also told CNN that “the White House did not pressure her or the USDA over the resignation. It was the secretary’s decision, as he has said.”

Obama was briefed on the situation after Vilsack decided to seek Sherrod’s resignation, according to a White House official, who said the president fully supports the decision.

“I don’t know what brought up the racist mess,” Roger Spooner told CNN’s “Rick’s List” on Tuesday. “They just want to stir up some trouble, it sounds to me in my opinion.”

Spooner says Sherrod accompanied him and his wife to a lawyer in Americus, Georgia, who was able to help them file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, which ultimately saved their farm.

“If it hadn’t been for her, we would’ve never known who to see or what to do,” he said. “She led us right to our success.”

Eloise Spooner remembered Sherrod as “nice-mannered, thoughtful, friendly; a good person.”

She said that when she saw the story of the tape and Sherrod’s resignation on television, “I said, ‘That ain’t right. They have not treated her right.’ “

The poor-quality video shows Sherrod telling her audience that the farmer she was working with “took a long time … trying to show me he was superior to me.” As a result, she said, she “didn’t give him the full force of what I could do. I did enough.”

To prove she had done her job, she said, she took him to a white lawyer. “I figured that if I take him to one of them, that his own kind would take care of him,” she said.

But that lawyer failed to help, she said Tuesday. “I did not discriminate against [the farmer]. And, in fact, I went all out to frantically look for a lawyer at the last minute because the first lawyer we went to was not doing anything to really help him. In fact, that (first) lawyer suggested they should just let the farm go.”

Sherrod, who was appointed to the USDA position in 2009, said she first heard of the possible controversy when someone e-mailed her Thursday to taunt her about her comments. She immediately forwarded the e-mail to the USDA so the agency would be aware. She was told that someone would look into it.

She said it wasn’t until Monday that she heard back, and by then, she was being asked for her resignation.

Asked if she felt she had an opportunity to explain, Sherrod said, “No, I didn’t. The administration, they were not interested in hearing the truth. No one wanted to hear the truth.”

Vilsack said Tuesday that the controversy, regardless of the context of her comments, “compromises the director’s ability to do her job.”

“This isn’t a situation where we are necessarily judgmental about the content of the statement, that’s not the issue here. I don’t believe this woman is a racist at all,” he said. “She’s a political appointee, and her job is basically to focus on job growth in Georgia, and I have deep concern about her ability to do her job without her judgments being second-guessed.”

Ralph Paige, executive director of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives Land Assistance Fund, told CNN on Tuesday that Sherrod had garnered only praise during her time there and there were never any claims of discrimination against her.

“I can’t praise Shirley enough,” he said. “She holds no malice in her heart.”

Vilsack said in a statement Monday he had accepted Sherrod’s resignation, noting a “zero tolerance” policy for discrimination at the USDA. “I strongly condemn any act of discrimination against any person,” he said.

The first statement that the NAACP issued late Monday backed Vilsack’s decision.

“Racism is about the abuse of power. Sherrod had it in her position at USDA. According to her remarks, she mistreated a white farmer in need of assistance because of his race,” Jealous said. “We are appalled by her actions, just as we are with abuses of power against farmers of color and female farmers.”

But Tuesday evening, the NAACP said in another statement, “(Sherrod) was sharing this account as part of a story of transformation and redemption. In the full video, Ms. Sherrod says she realized that the dislocation of farmers is about ‘haves and have nots.’ ‘It’s not just about black people, it’s about poor people,’ says Sherrod in the speech. ‘We have to get to the point where race exists but it doesn’t matter.’ “

Earlier Tuesday, Sherrod called the NAACP “the reason why this happened. They got into a fight with the Tea Party, and all of this came out as a result of that.”

“When you spend your life helping others and see people try to turn that around to try to make it look like you’re a racist when that’s not been what your life has been about — that doesn’t feel good,” she said.

Sherrod and her family were part of a lawsuit filed in 1997 against the Agriculture Department that charged it discriminated against black farmers by denying them timely loans or debt restructuring. Complaints of discrimination began piling up after the Reagan administration shut down the department’s civil rights division in 1983, and the lawsuit covered the years between 1983 and 1997.

A district court judge eventually combined two such lawsuits into a class action, and the two sides reached a settlement in 1999. The agreement gave each plaintiff $50,000 plus loan forgiveness and tax offsets, provided the plaintiff met certain criteria (Track A), or the possibility of a larger amount by showing evidence of greater damages (Track B).

More than 22,000 farmers applied — far more than the 2,000 expected — and more than 13,000 were approved for the $50,000 award. Fewer than 200 farmers opted for the Track B process.

Sherrod and her husband were part of the lawsuit because of the land trust they started in the 1960s along with several other black families. Ultimately, their land trust — New Communities — was awarded $13 million, mostly for loss of land and loss of income and including $300,000 for the Sherrods, according to the Rural Development Leadership Network.

Vilsack, who is now the defendant in the lawsuit — Pigford vs. Vilsack — as final details are worked out, referred to the discrimination lawsuit and other similar suits in a statement announcing that he had accepted Sherrod’s resignation.

“We have been working hard through the past 18 months to reverse the checkered civil rights history at the department and take the issue of fairness and equality very seriously,” Vilsack said.

Vilsack to review ouster of USDA official

By

Howard LaFranchi,