Law School Grad Charged With Corruption

Rep. William Jefferson, a 1972 graduate of Harvard Law School who became infamous when the FBI found $90,000 in his home freezer in August 2005, was charged with 16 corruption-related felonies in Virginia on Monday.

Jefferson, a Louisiana Democrat, is accused of seeking millions of dollars in bribes from companies doing business in the United States and Africa. The 94-page indictment—which charges Jefferson with bribery, racketeering, money laundering, and obstruction of justice, among other things—said that he used his position as a member of the House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Trade to promote the companies’ ventures in exchange for money.

“The charges in the indictment against Congressman Jefferson are extremely serious,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said in a statement released by her office. “While Mr. Jefferson, just as any other citizen, must be considered innocent until proven guilty, if these charges are proven true, they constitute an egregious and unacceptable abuse of public trust and power.”

Jefferson’s office has declined requests for comment over the past two days.

He is not expected to resign on account of the indictment announced Monday, though he did resign his seat on the Small Business Committee—the last committee seat he held—yesterday.

Jefferson, a graduate of the historically-black Southern University, came to Cambridge in the fall of 1969, overlapping his time at the Law School with future Rep. Thomas H. Allen (D-Maine) and Sen. Charles E. Schumer ’71 (D-N.Y.).

Jefferson has retained strong ties to the University since he graduated: his three daughters—Jamila E. Jefferson ’94, Jalila Jefferson-Bullock ’97, and Jelani F. Jefferson ’01—are all alumns of both the College and the Law School.

“We’ve had a steady trek back and forth to this school, and for us, it’s more than a school that I went to,” the congressman told the Harvard Gazette at a black alumni reunion the Law School held in 2000. “It’s a school that my family has been involved with since I left here.”

Apart from the investigation and the implications for Jefferson’s own political career, the case has generated controversy in others ways.

An FBI raid on Jefferson’s congressional office last May set off a row between the Congress and the White House, with then-House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) and then-Minority Leader Pelosi issuing a rare joint statement condemning the raid as a violation of the doctrine of separation of powers. And Jefferson’s allies in the Congressional Black Caucus later criticized Pelosi for removing him from his seat on the Ways and Means Committee, often considered one of the most powerful committees in the House.

Additionally, Republicans have accused Democrats—who ran successfully last November on a pledge to end the “culture of corruption” created by 12 years of Republican rule in D.C.—of being hypocritical when one of their own was accused of ethical lapses. Republican leader John A. Boehner of Ohio has already taken steps to move for Jefferson’s expulsion from the House.

Jefferson’s dramatic rise from a hardscrabble youth—the son of a sharecropper who never graduated from high school, he grew up in poverty with nine other siblings—has won him many admirers over the years, propelling him to become the first black individual from Louisiana elected to Congress since Reconstruction.

Some political analysts blamed the fact that Jefferson succumbed to bribes on the poverty he escaped.

Allan Katz, a New Orleans-based political consultant who has known Jefferson for more than 30 years, told The Boston Globe last year: “His perceived flaw among his peers has always been that, shaped by his humble beginnings, Bill loved money and desperately wanted to be a rich man.”

—Staff writer Paras D. Bhayani can be reached at pbhayani@fas.harvard.edu.