Senator Says It’s Packwood’s Move Committee Sends Evidence And Timetable For Response

Sen. Bob Packwood soon will receive a major delivery from the Senate ethics committee - reams of evidence it gathered over 30 months on his alleged sexual misconduct, improper use of influence with lobbyists and obstruction of its own inquiry.

The next move is up to him, ethics committee Chairman Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said Thursday.

“I think it’s safe to say that the ball is now in Sen. Packwood’s court,” McConnell said at a news conference with the committee’s vice chairman, Sen. Richard Bryan, D-Nev.

Packwood, a five-term Oregon Republican who chairs the Senate Finance Committee, can request a meeting with the committee. He can also ask for a public hearing.

But if he asks the committee to conduct all its further proceedings behind closed doors, he may not get his wish. The committee’s three Democrats and three Republicans don’t need his approval to choose to question him in public.

Open hearings have been the norm in the committee all the way back to those that led to the Senate condemnation of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, R-Wis., in 1954, Bryan said.

Bryan and McConnell said there was no set schedule by which Packwood must respond to the committee’s evidence. However, committee staff said Packwood will be presented with an expected timetable when he receives the evidence.

The day after making public an explicit list of allegations against Packwood, including 18 reported cases of sexual misconduct with 17 different women, McConnell and Bryan discussed what had gone into their findings.

The two senators said committee staff members have spent more than 11,000 hours since December 1992 looking into the allegations against Packwood, interviewing or taking testimony from more than 260 witnesses and reviewing more than 16,000 pages of documents. They also mailed some 300 questionnaires to female former staffers of Packwood and compared more than 2,600 pages of Packwood’s diary transcripts with 350 original audiotapes.

The inquiry was delayed by about a year as Packwood fought in court to keep his diaries private.

But all that wasn’t the hard part, said Bryan, who called the case “really without precedent in the annals of the ethics committee.”

“This is a difficult case,” he said. “Any time that you’re required to pass judgment upon a colleague with whom you have a close personal working relationship day by day, it’s very difficult.”

Neither McConnell nor Bryan would comment on the proceedings in the investigation that ultimately could lead to Packwood being publicly rebuked, stripped of the Finance Committee chairmanship or even expelled from the Senate.

Asked whether Packwood could stop the process by reaching a private settlement with the committee, Bryan said that others had done so. He declined to name them.

Wednesday, the ethics panel said it had substantial cause to continue investigating allegations that Packwood committed 18 incidents of sexual misconduct from 1969 to 1990 toward his own and colleagues’ staffs, a hotel desk clerk, a babysitter, a campaign worker, and others.