Charlie Rangel, Corrupt Deadbeat, Is Bailed Out by Taxpayers

Communist-affiliated congresscritter Charlie Rangel (D-NY), who is so conspicuously corrupt he was censured even by fellow Democrats, does not seem to have been chastened:

State taxpayers were stiffed out of at least $87,000 when Rep. Charles Rangel stopped paying for the district office he rents in Harlem’s Adam Clayton Powell Jr. State Office Building [in NYC], records :­obtained by The Post show. …

Rangel paid $7,253 in monthly rent on the 125th Street office he has rented since 2000, expense reports from 2012 show. But the payments stopped for all of 2013.

Incredibly, instead of demanding payment of the back rent and late fees from its deadbeat legislative tenant, the state cut him a huge rent break.

The state says it allowed Rangel in March 2013 to enter into a new sweetheart deal in which he could postpone paying six months of rent. That “abatement” money has still not been paid, nor has the other six months of missed rent from 2013, [an Office of General Services] official said.

The state comptroller approved a $101,000 lease between Rangel and OGS on Dec. 26, 2013, retroactively covering the period back to April 2013 and future months through December 2014, records show. The 21-month deal resulted in a deeply reduced rent of $4,809 a month.

But Rangel has not one but two good excuses for not paying his rent: it was the fault of the Republican sequester, no wait, it was because he lost the lease. At least he didn’t say his dog ate the lease.

Rangel is no stranger to real-estate problems. Congress censured the 22-term legislator in 2010 after the Ethics Committee found him guilty of 11 violations – including dodging taxes on the rental of his Dominican Republic villa.

The then-chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee – he lost the powerful post due to his censure – was also forced to request an ethics probe into himself for his campaign’s use of one of four rent-controlled Harlem apartments that Rangel rented. Financial-disclosure forms show Rangel was worth between $566,000 and $1.2 million at the time.

People get the government they deserve — or at least, the government they are willing to tolerate.

On a tip from Jeff R. Cross-posted at Moonbattery.

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