A House Ethics Committee investigation concluded that Rep. Jamaal Bowman’s explanations for pulling a Capitol fire alarm in September were “misleading,” but stopped short of probing the matter further.
Bowman pulled a fire alarm shortly before the House of Representatives passed a stopgap spending measure to avert a government shutdown on Sept. 30. The Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE) said that Bowman was not on his way to a vote, but to a meeting of the House Democratic Caucus when he pulled the fire alarm in its report.
Any further investigation into Bowman’s conduct “would be moot,” as the House already voted to censure the Democrat in early December, the committee concluded in a press release.
“The OCE finds the explanation provided by Rep. Bowman’s official statement and those published by his staff to be less than credible or otherwise misleading,” the report says.
Bowman claimed he was in a hurry to get to the vote when he pulled the alarm.
“Today as I was rushing to make a vote, I came to a door that is usually open for votes but today would not open,” Bowman said in a statement released after the incident.
OCE outlined Bowman’s actions and cited evidence from text messages from around the time of