Rep. Gregory Meeks Assailed by NY Post as Meeks Attacks NLPC

The New York Post today published an editorial titled “Greg Meeks – Again” regarding the allegations in our Complaint filed with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) on October 28.

Meeks apparently had not yet received a copy of the Complaint at the time he wrote a column published last week in the Queens (New York) Tribune. In the column, Meeks characterized us as “right wing” and (again) blamed us for his ethics problems. I can’t wait to see his reaction to our new Complaint.

In the Tribune, Meeks omitted mention of his friend Edul Ahmad, from whom he secured an unsecured and unreported $40,000 personal loan, now the subject of an investigation by the House Ethics Committee. In July, Ahmad was taken off a Guyana-bound airliner in handcuffs by the FBI and charged in a $50-million mortgage fraud scheme.

Here the Post’s editorial today on our new allegations against Meeks:

Another week — another set of troubling questions about the ethics of Rep. Greg Meeks, a Queens Democrat.

The latest? A DC-based campaign-watchdog group — the National Legal and Policy Center — filed an official complaint last week against Meeks with the Federal Election Commission.

The group charges that the congressman used his Build America PAC to double-count donations to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee — possibly to hide unrelated irregularities.

It seems the PAC made out checks to the DCCC in the early 2000s, which the group duly deposited. For some reason, though, Meeks’ PAC listed one such check as voided in January of this year — nearly a decade later.

“How do you void a check many years after it cleared?” the NLPC asks in its letter to the FEC.

On top of raising questions about the PAC’s check activity, the NLPC charged that Ponzi-scheme billionaire Allen Stanford made illegal in-kind contributions to Meeks’ campaign in 2008.

As The Post reported last month, Stanford threw a lavish fund-raiser for Meeks, for which the congressman’s campaign apparently reimbursed him barely a fraction of the cost — a possible attempt to skirt campaign-finance laws.

There’s good reason to trust the NLPC on these charges, too: Last year, its research into Meeks’ dubious purchase of a $1.2 million Queens home led to FBI and House Ethics Committee investigations.

The House probe, by the way, is tackling several notable Meeks issues — including his role in a possible Katrina-related charity scam, first reported by The Post, in which tens of thousands of dollars raised for New Orleans seem to have mysteriously vanished.

With the NLPC complaint, the committee might have yet another worthwhile lead to follow up.