McCain Campaign Denies Wrongdoing in Keating Five Scandal

John McCain’s lawyer in the Keating Five scandal pushed back Monday against Democratic attacks, saying that the Republican didn’t do anything wrong.

John Dowd, who represented McCain during 1989 Senate Ethics Committee hearings, dismissed accusations that McCain violated Senate rules or exercised poor judgment by meeting with regulators on Charles Keating’s behalf. Dowd said that McCain’s inclusion in the hearings, alongside with four other Democratic lawmakers, was a “classic political smear.”

“Probably the key points for John is he was the only Republican in that hearing, and so it had some political overtones, given that a number of Democrats were in deep trouble,” Dowd said.

He added: “And the bottom line was that John had not violated any rule of the Senate or any law of the United States.”

McCain himself has said that the appearance of meeting with regulators of Keating’s bank while he was a friend of Keating was wrong.

“It’s a wrong appearance when a group of senators appear in a meeting with a group of regulators because it conveys the impression of undue and improper influence,” McCain said. “And it was the wrong thing to do.”

The Senate committee found that McCain hadn’t broken any rules, but it did criticize him for “poor judgment.”

Dowd, in a conference call with reporters Monday, went further than McCain, denying that he had exercised bad judgment.

“This was an embarrassing and humiliating matter,” Dowd said. “But we should forget that John is the only senator among all the senators that essentially threw Charlie Keating out of his office and broke off all relations with him. And he did that before there was any accusations of impropriety or bad judgment.”

The conference call came after Barack Obama’s campaign launched a new website Monday highlighting McCain’s role in the scandal.