House

Lawyer: ‘Conyers is not going to resign’

by Olivia Beavers - 11/22/17 9:26 PM ET

An attorney for Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) says the longtime lawmaker will not resign from his post amid a House Ethics Committee investigation into allegations of sexual misconduct.

“Mr. Conyers is not going to resign,” Conyers’ attorney, Arnold Reed, told CNN on Wednesday.

“If everybody that was facing ‘allegations’ — including the President, members of the House and Senate — resigned, we’d have a lot of unemployed people walking around,” he said, adding that the congressman is taking the allegations against him “very seriously.”{mosads}

Reed denied the allegations against Conyers, the longest-serving member of the House.

“At the end of the day, Mr. Conyers is not guilty of harassing these women who have come forward. It didn’t happen,” he told the news outlet.

The attorney’s remarks fall on the heels of a report that includes new allegations against Conyers in which a D.C.-based ethics lawyer alleges the lawmaker harassed and verbally abused her while she worked for him in the 1990s.

Melanie Sloan, who formerly led Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, told The Washington Post that Conyers had invited her to his office where she found him wearing nothing but underwear.

Reed dismissed Sloan’s claims, questioning “why it’s a story.”

“One of the things that comes to my mind is I’m not even sure why it’s a story, because the individual admits that my client didn’t harass her from a sexual perspective.”

Reed also challenges Sloan’s story that Congressional leadership would not listen to her or intervene on her behalf.

“When you read what is being said here juxtaposed to how powerful she was and how she initiated investigations on other people she mentioned in the story, … it is fundamentally incongruous with her statements,” he told CNN.

The Ethics Committee opened an investigation into Conyers after BuzzFeed News reported that he had settled a wrongful dismissal complaint in 2015 with a former staffer who accused him of sexual harassment.

Conyers “vehemently” denied the accusations of wrongdoing and he did not admit to guilt as part of the settlement.

Tags John Conyers