Alcee Hastings: I’m An Innocent Victim of Politics - Byron York

“Should impeachment in and of itself prevent me from being chair of a committee in Congress?” asks Rep. Alcee Hastings, the man who, as a federal judge, was charged with conspiring to solicit bribes and then impeached and removed from office. In a “Dear Colleague” letter sent last week to all Democratic members of the House, Hastings, now in line to run the House Intelligence Committee, answers his own question with a resounding No.

"There are several reasons why it should not,” Hastings writes. The first and most important is that Hastings, while convicted in the Senate in 1989, was acquitted in a criminal trial on similar charges several years earlier. “It is amazing how little importance is given to this fact,” Hastings writes. “It is also baffling.”