US Congressman owned home with another man, took DC tax deduction while voting in NC

Jennifer Gorski, Kathleen Kirst and Youmna Salameh alleged in affidavits that Stewart made frequent unwanted sexual advances and regularly spoke obscenely to and about female employees. They also alleged Stewart authorized the use of several thousand dollars in GOP funds to pay for his and others’ personal expenses, such as cellular telephone bills, plane tickets and campaign mailings.

Gorski was an office manager who was fired by Stewart last year. Kirst was an intern in 1999. Salameh worked at another RNC-affiliated organization next door to the college Republicans.

Their accusations did not result in Stewart’s ouster at a college Republicans meeting in New Orleans in mid-November, so they took their sworn statements to the Republican National Committee in January.

In mid-February, the RNC promised prompt action but then postponed the case by referring its six-week inquiry to the law firm.

The College Republican National Committee has raised $6.3 million this year through an aggressive and misleading fund-raising campaign that collected money from senior citizens who thought they were giving to the election efforts of President Bush and other top Republicans.Many of the top donors were in their 80s and 90s. The donors wrote checks - sometimes hundreds and, in at least one case, totaling more than $100,000 - to groups with official sounding-names such as “Republican Headquarters 2004,” “Republican Elections Committee” and the “National Republican Campaign Fund.”

But all of those groups, according to the small print on the letters, were simply projects of the College Republicans, who collected all of the checks.

And little of the money went to election efforts.

Of the money spent by the group this year, nearly 90 percent went to direct-mail vendors and postage expenses, according to records filed with the Internal Revenue Service.

Some of the elderly donors, meanwhile, wound up bouncing checks and emptying their bank accounts.

By MARK LEIBOVICH

Published: January 18, 2007
Washington

SOME of the most powerful Democrats in America are split over a most incendiary household issue: rodents.

“I once had to pick up a mouse by the tail that Durbin refused to pick up,” complained Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, referring to his roommate Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois.

This characterization is not fair to Mr. Durbin, interjected another tenant in the Capitol Hill row house, Representative Bill Delahunt of Massachusetts. For starters, it overlooks Mr. Durbin’s gift for killing rats. “He will kill them with his bare hands,” Mr. Delahunt marveled.

“Oh, will you stop with the rats,” said the annoyed fourth roommate, Representative George Miller of California. He owns the house and is sensitive to any suggestion that he harbors pestilence. It’s dicey enough that he harbors politicians.

Think MTV’s “Real World” with a slovenly cast of Democratic power brokers. While Washington may have more than its share of crash pads for policy-debating workaholics, few, if any, have sheltered a quorum as powerful as this one. About a quarter-mile southeast of the Capitol, the inelegantly decorated two-bedroom house has become an unlikely center of influence in Washington’s changing power grid. It is home to the second- and third-ranking senators in the new Democratic majority (Mr. Durbin, the majority whip, and Mr. Schumer, the vice chairman of the Democratic caucus) and the chairman of the House Democratic Policy Committee (Mr. Miller).