WASHINGTON — The Office of Congressional Ethics has found enough evidence of wrongdoing to recommend further investigation of three House members who held fund-raising events just days before they voted on financial regulatory legislation last year.
The referrals to the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct came at the same time as the office recommended dismissing investigations of five other lawmakers, whose fund-raising just before the December 2009 vote had also come under scrutiny.
The investigation focused on lawmakers who raised money from lobbyists or executives of financial firms that had objected to provisions of the legislation.
Each of the three House members still being targeted — John Campbell, Republican of California, Joseph Crowley, Democrat of New York, and Tom Price, Republican of Georgia — criticized the referrals on Tuesday, with two of them saying that the quasi-independent ethics office has not produced evidence of wrongdoing.
“How the O.C.E. arrived at their recommendation is truly a mystery,” Mr. Price said in a statement. “There being no evidence of any wrongdoing or any inconsistency in my policy position, one can only guess as to the motive behind their decision or even why they chose to initiate a review in the first place.”
The cases, according to lawyers involved in the matter, are built at least in part around an accusation that the lawmakers violated rules that prohibit them from creating an appearance of a conflict of interest.
In Mr. Crowley’s case, for example, he attended a fund-raising event at the home of a financial-industry lobbyist on the same evening that he voted on the House floor against a series of amendments to the regulatory overhaul bill that would have required greater transparency in trading of financial instruments known as swaps, or banned certain kinds of swaps altogether.
“Congressman Crowley has always complied with the letter and spirit of all rules regarding fund-raising and standards of conduct,” his office said Tuesday in a statement.
A spokesman for the Office of Congressional Ethics declined to comment on the case. But one of the notices sent recommending a dismissal gave a hint of the investigators’ strategy, saying that the lawmaker would have done wrong if he “solicited or accepted contributions in a manner which gave the appearance of special treatment or access was being provided to donors or the appearance that the contributions were linked to an official act.”
The notices of dismissal were sent to Representative Jeb Hensarling, Republican of Texas; Earl Pomeroy, Democrat of North Dakota; Christopher Lee, Republican of New York; Frank D. Lucas, Republican of Oklahoma, and Melvin Watt, Democrat of North Carolina.
The House ethics committee must now decide if it will formally investigate the other three cases. It could be several months before any public statement is made about the matter. A committee spokesman declined to comment on the referrals.
Mr. Lucas expressed relief over the dismissal, but said the investigation alone had already caused him and his staff a great deal of stress and political damage. And he questioned what he said was a new standard that the ethics office appeared to be trying to impose on House members.
“If holding a general fund-raiser while Congress was in session voting on legislation that went through one of my committees is in violation of House ethics rules, then that is a broad new limitation on members’ fund-raising activities,” he said in a statement.
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