Ex-aide of Conyers’ wife claims fed probe is way to get the congressman. Is he right?

[COMMENTARY] Is Sam Riddle right? I don’t think so.

He thinks the FBI wants to embarrass U.S. Rep. John Conyers Jr. by investigating his wife.

He’s convinced that’s why the feds reportedly are investigating Detroit City Councilwoman Monica Conyers, as part of a larger corruption probe into how the city entered a new $47 million sewer sludge-processing contract. Riddle used to be Monica’s chief of staff.

Continued -Last weekend, the Free Press reported that the FBI is investigating how the Detroit City Council came to award a sludge contract to a Houston firm, Synagro Technologies. The FBI reportedly is investigating Monica Conyers among others involved in the contract. She had at first opposed awarding the contract to Synagro, then voted with the 5-4 majority for the deal.

The widening investigation, the Freep reports, extends to at least four council members, staffers and others — with several people allegedly caught on FBI audio and videotape accepting payoffs from a Synagro official.

Sam Riddle is a man in the middle. He apparently is not a target of the public corruption investigation, although the FBI reportedly has tapped his phone for about a year.

He said in Tuesday’s Free Press that “I’m firmly convinced that there are elements in the U.S. Attorney’s Office who would love to make a case against anyone whose last name is Conyers, if for no other reason than to embarrass the chairman of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee.”

Riddle is no apologist for his former boss. He added a punch line: “Councilwoman Conyers can do that on her own without the assistance of the FBI. She’s demonstrated that time and time again.”

No, Sam, I don’t think the feds are after her husband. They could have gone after him years ago for other things.

To be sure, the feds don’t like John Conyers. He does continue to make headlines out of his opposition to the Bush administration.

But if that had been the feds’aim here, they could have humiliated him plenty based on information I and others — including the FBI — learned from a whistle blower, beginning about six years ago, or they could have launched a probe using 2003 Free Press reports detailing the misuse of congressional staffers as a road map.

Sam Riddle was the councilwoman’s chief of staff when I and other reporters from the Free Press called her office two years ago requesting comment on a story we were about to publish. The story, which appeared on March 2, 2006, detailed how Monica Conyers misused her husband’s congressional staffers by making them chauffeur her and babysit her kids for weeks at a time, while she was in Oklahoma attending law school. Among local newspaper readers, it became known, inevitably, as “Nannygate.”

Riddle’s job was to deny the story — which he did. The story faded. Monica had her own embarrassments. Four times she took the Michigan bar exam — which is required to hold a license to practice law — and four times she has flunked the test, according to the Board of Law Examiners. Her husband made headlines with so-far unfulfilled promises of starting impeachment proceedings against President Bush. He also made headlines last week by using his committee’s subpoena power to force David Addington and John Yoo, architects of the Bush administration’s torture policy, to testify in front of television cameras.

As a reporter, I always felt the real story was not about babysitting. It was about John Conyers’ insistence that all staffers drop constituent and other services and work on campaigns during office hours while collecting their federal salaries. In 2006, the House Ethics Committee decided not to discipline Conyers. That same year, Conyers announced he was dropping his plan to impeach Bush.

I can see no evidence that the FBI is targeting Conyers now.

If federal law enforcement officials want to go after John Conyers, they don’t need to go through Monica. They could have pounced on the man himself.

Contact me at joelthurtell(at)gmail.com