Washington, DC - All five Republicans on the House ethics committee and the panel’s ranking Democrat withdrew from a long-standing investigation of Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters of California on Friday to avoid further questions about their impartiality.

The extraordinary development came more than two years after the panel began examining whether Waters tried to steer money from the 2008 financial bailout to a minority-owned bank while her husband was a shareholder and board member of the institution.

The mass recusal came in one of the committee’s most troubled cases, after past allegations of bias by Republican members forced the panel to hire an outside lawyer last July to investigate the committee and its handling of the Waters case.

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