“The Senate Ethics Committee has worked diligently for 22 months on this matter and will complete its work in a timely fashion,” Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), chairman of the panel, and ranking member Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.) said in a statement. The senators are traveling together through China as part of a 10-senator delegation. 
 
 Since June 2009, the committee has been reviewing Ensign’s affair with Cynthia Hampton, his former political treasurer, and his decision to dismiss her and her husband, Doug Hampton, who served in his legislative office until the firings in 2008. Ensign’s parents then gave $96,000 to the Hamptons in gift money, and the senator also helped Doug Hampton land lobbying work with his political supporters back in Las Vegas. 
 
 Legal experts could not think of a case in recent decades in which either the Senate or House ethics committees continued their work and issued a report after a lawmaker had left office. The Ethics Committee has several options, including releasing a short statement summarizing the case or a more detailed statement that could include allegations of violations by Ensign. 
 
 Another possible route would be to send the evidence and testimony gathered in the case to the Justice Department, which has been conducting a parallel criminal inquiry. “They don’t lose the jurisdiction to make a referral,” ethics lawyer Stanley Brand said Friday. 
 
 Ensign could have been in a legal vise grip. In his resignation statement Thursday, Ensign cited “further rounds of investigation, depositions, drawn out proceedings, or especially public hearings” as his rationale for quitting to spare his family from further public humiliation. 
 
 However, during an investigation of a different lawmaker, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in 2009 that testimony from a House member before its ethics panel could be sent to Justice for a criminal case, although the judicial panel was not unanimous in the case. 
 
 Earlier this year Ensign released a statement saying the Justice Department had ended the criminal investigation into his case, although Justice has never publicly confirmed that. Last month federal prosecutors brought charges against Doug Hampton, accusing him of violating federal laws that required him to not lobby Ensign for a year after leaving his office. 
 
 Prosecutors were likely to have a keen interest in whatever Ensign told the committee while under oath. Now that testimony will never take place. 
 
 Ensign’s attorney, Robert Walker, declined to comment on the case, as did Ethics Committee staff members. The Justice Department declined to comment. 
 
 Doug Hampton has alleged in media interviews that the $96,000 was severance pay, not a gift, and has said that Ensign knew Hampton was lobbying during what should have been his cooling-off period. Prosecutions for violations of the federal lobbying restrictions are rare, but associates of infamous lobbyist Jack Abramoff pleaded guilty to violating their cooling-off period. In addition, among other crimes, former representative Robert Ney (R-Ohio) pleaded guilty to helping Abramoff’s associates violate those lobbying laws. 
 
 Before the affair became public, Hampton and Ensign tried to come to an additional seven-figure settlement, which was being negotiated by Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), a close friend of Ensign’s and a former roommate in a Capitol Hill townhouse. 
 
 Those talks fell apart, and Hampton began contacting media outlets about the affair, prompting the once-rising Nevada political star to fly home and announce the affair himself. He resigned from his GOP leadership post, and, after trying to start a re-election campaign, gave up that effort last month. 
 
 Ethics watchdogs said Friday that Boxer and Isakson must make some public accounting for the work they have done behind closed doors. “It is critically important that the Ethics Committee follow through on their statement to complete this investigation so that the accurate, complete story can be made public. Otherwise, the mud will have been swept under the rug,” Meredith McGehee, policy director for the Campaign Legal Center, said. ||||| Sen. John Ensign abruptly announced his resignation after it grew increasingly clear to him that he would not be able to avoid a public review of the sordid allegations surrounding his sex scandal, including the open airing of details from his nine-month extramarital affair with a former campaign aide, according to people familiar with the matter. 
 
 Carol Elder Bruce, the special counsel appointed in February by the Senate Ethics Committee to handle the Ensign case, has not completed an internal report on the case. Ensign also had not been deposed, according to sources close to the investigation, although the New York Times reported Friday that the deposition was scheduled for May 4, one day after his resignation will now go into effect. 
 
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 Ensign announced his May 3 resignation on Thursday night. 
 
 The Ethics Committee is still in the “preliminary inquiry phase” of its investigation, which means that any formal charges against Ensign – or a committee vote on whether to have open hearings on the scandal – were still weeks away. No such charges can be made until Bruce issues a report to the secretive, six-member ethics panel. 
 
 But Ensign told associates that he was “100 percent certain” the Ethics Committee would hold public hearings into the scandal, turning a private matter into a media-free-for-all, one of his friends said. 
 
 The ethics panel is still likely to issue a public report laying out its findings, regardless of whether Ensign stayed in the Senate, a further source of embarrassment for the 53-year-old Ensign. 
 
 Ensign even referenced the potential for public hearings in his statement to the media Thursday night. And in a surprisingly strong statement from the leaders of the Ethics Committee, they signaled that Ensign made the right move in immediately giving up the Senate seat he won in 2000. 
 
 “The Senate Ethics Committee has worked diligently for 22 months on this matter and will complete its work in a timely fashion,” said a statement from Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.), chairman and ranking member of the panel. “Senator Ensign has made the appropriate decision.” 
 
 “That says it all,” said one person familiar with the probe said in reference to the Boxer-Isakson statement. 
 
 With Ensign now scheduled to resign, the committee cannot bring any formal charges against him, nor can it hold public hearings. It can, however, issue a report on its findings, or it can refer the matter for criminal investigation to the Justice Department. 
 
 The Justice Department already has indicated to Ensign’s lawyers that he was not going to be charged in the case. Ensign paid for lawyers for his former aides, and at least one ex-Ensign staffer declined an offer of immunity if he testified against Ensign, according to a source familiar with the investigation. 
 
 Ensign could also assert his constitutional privilege under the “Speech or Debate Clause,” which prevents lawmakers and staff from facing legal action over legitimate legislative activities. Assertion of that privilege would make it more difficult for federal prosecutors to move against Ensign, although it has been overcome in numerous criminal cases involving members and senators.
– John Ensign may have quit to avoid further scrutiny of his peccadilloes, but the Senate ethics investigation into his affair with a campaign staffer will go on, reports the Washington Post. “Senator Ensign has made the appropriate decision," said a statement from Sens. Barbara Boxer and Johnny Isakson, who are leading the inquiry. However, “The Senate Ethics Committee has worked diligently for 22 months on this matter and will complete its work in a timely fashion." Ensign will step down May 3, notes Politico, a day before he was to be deposed. The ethics panel loses jurisdiction when Ensign leaves office, notes the Post, but could still release a report of its findings—precisely the sort of further embarrassment Ensign was seeking to avoid. It could also refer the case to the Justice Department, which has been conducting a criminal investigation. Click for more on Ensign's career and scandal.