Activist groups helped Newman knock pro-life Democrat Dan Lipinski from his House seat. Now, it appears Newman may have violated federal campaign law.
Activist groups helped Newman knock pro-life Democrat Dan Lipinski from his House seat. Now, it appears Newman may have violated federal campaign law.
B ack in October, the Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE) unanimously recommended that the House Ethics Committee investigate Representative Marie Newman (D., Ill.) “because there is substantial reason to believe that Rep. Newman may have promised federal employment to a primary opponent for the purpose of procuring political support.”
The facts the OCE outlined don’t look good for Newman. Promising employment in exchange for political support is a clear violation of both federal law and ethics rules, and investigators have pretty solid documentary evidence that Newman did that.
Newman first ran for the seat she now holds in 2018, but lost in the Democratic primary. When she sought the seat again in 2020, it seems that progressive academic Iymen Chehade was also considering a run. On October 27, 2018, Chehade reportedly sent an email to Newman proposing an agreement whereby “Chehade agrees not to announce or submit his candidacy. . . . In exchange, Newman will hire Chehade as her Chief Foreign Policy Advisor.” Newman told the OCE she was “outraged and incensed” at Chehade’s suggestion and “she sternly communicated her negative reaction to Mr. Chehade’s language in the proposal over a telephone conversation.”
But the report says that Newman’s account “is not supported by the documentary evidence.” In fact, the evidence contradicts Newman’s account: “In an email dated November 2, 2018, Rep. Newman responded to Mr. Chehade’s proposal email without outrage, explaining ‘most of it looks good’ and her concerns were about ‘phraseology.’”
The report reproduces a four-page employment contract that Newman entered into with Chehade on December 26, 2018. According to the report, the contract stipulated that “should [Newman] be elected to office, she would employ Mr. Chehade as Chief Foreign Policy Advisor, and either District Director or Legislative Director, with a start date of January 3, 2021 and continue [sic] as long as Rep. Newman remained in Congress. The contract specified the salary would be between $135,000 and $140,000 per year.” The contract also guaranteed Chehade at least three weeks’ vacation each year and obligated Newman to “use her best efforts” to give Chehade his own private office.
The contract was signed by both parties and was in effect when Newman won the March 2020 Democratic primary, a race in which Chehade was not a candidate. The OCE report says that Newman met with Chehade in June 2020 and told him she did not intend to hire him after all. After Newman was sworn into office in January 2021, Chehade filed a lawsuit saying Newman wasn’t upholding her side of the contract.
It was at this point that the OCE began investigating. Newman’s attorneys requested that the suit be dismissed. They argued that the contract is void on grounds of public policy, since promising employment in exchange for political support is illegal. That’s a perfectly fine defense against the civil lawsuit alleging breach of contract, but it won’t fly before the House Ethics Committee. The OCE says that Newman’s attorneys’ brief does not address “the propriety of a promise of congressional employment in exchange for an agreement not to run for office,” which is what’s at issue in the ethics investigation.
Chehade and Newman ended up settling the civil suit out of court in the summer of 2021. The terms of the settlement weren’t disclosed, but just days after it was reached, according to the Daily Beast, Chehade started receiving thousands of dollars from Newman’s campaign, ostensibly for work as a foreign-policy adviser:
Chehade has received a total of $54,000 since the second half of 2021, mostly in salary installments of $7,500 a month, but sometimes with additional $2,000 payments. According to the FEC filings, the disbursements to Chehade began on July 1, 2021, just two days after both sides reached a deal to resolve the lawsuit.
That salary appears to make Chehade far and away the highest-paid employee on the congresswoman’s team during the filing period, though Newman’s team now claims campaign manager Ben Hardin has since surpassed Chehade’s salary. . . .
Newman does not serve on any foreign policy committees in the House, though she has partially blamed her 2018 failure to unseat then-incumbent Dan Lipinski on a lack of knowledge of Israeli-Palestinian issues. Still, it is highly unusual for a campaign to hire a foreign policy adviser, particularly one that is the highest-paid employee for any period of time.
“Illinois Democrat at Center of Ethics Concerns” is a story that could be written on any day ending in a “y.” But the circumstances of Newman’s alleged misbehavior make it more noteworthy. Her primary opponent in 2018 and 2020 was incumbent Dan Lipinski, who was, as our John McCormack wrote in March 2020, “the last liberal pro-life Democrat in Congress.”
Lipinski had represented the third district since 2005, and was, as John J. Miller wrote in November 2020, a pretty typical Chicago-area Democrat except on the issue of abortion: pro-union, pro–gun control, anti–Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, anti-Trump. But that wasn’t good enough for the abortion lobby. Every pro-choice group in America put its weight behind Newman as she tried to unseat Lipinski. Bernie Sanders, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Pramila Jayapal endorsed both of her primary campaigns, and Elizabeth Warren and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez backed her the second time around. In 2018, Lipinski managed to squeak by in the primary before cruising to victory in the general election. But in 2020, Newman defeated Lipinski, 47–45, with two spoiler candidates combining for 8 percent of the primary vote. In the general election, she did 17 points worse than Lipinski had in 2018 but still managed to defeat the Republican candidate.
In short, progressives did everything they could to replace Lipinski with a worse-performing candidate in a state that was set to lose a district due to population loss anyway — all because of abortion. Now that that candidate appears to be corrupt, you’d think they’d have some regrets. But according to a February 2 Rolling Stone piece, not one progressive group that has endorsed Newman’s 2022 campaign is backing away from her. As one group’s executive put it, “We appreciate her taking down one of the biggest Democratic villains in the country.”
Lipinski generally toed the Democrats’ party line on everything except abortion, and became a villain to the Left; Newman appears to have blatantly violated federal campaign law, and the Left is standing by her.
This is your brain on progressivism, boys and girls.