Rangel's lawyer tried to settle but was rebuffed. The man who writes the tax law you must follow:

A House investigative committee has charged New York Rep. Charles Rangel, the former chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, with multiple ethics violations. The charges were announced Thursday. The panel's actions sends the case to a trial on the allegations. A separate ethics panel will decide whether the alleged violations can be proved by clear and convincing evidence. The Democrat led the tax-writing committee until he stepped aside last March after the ethics committee criticized his conduct in a separate case.

The kind of violation will be clear next Thursday at his appearance in front of a rare meeting of a subcommittee of the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct:

Congressional officials knowledgeable with the ethics process said the exact nature of the violation – or violations – won't be publicly revealed until Rangel goes before an eight-person adjudicatory subcommittee of the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct next Thursday to state his case. The formation of subcommittee, which will consist of four Democrats and four Republicans, is rare. The last time one was convened was in 2002 to handle the case of former Rep. James Traficant, D-Ohio, who was under investigation in connection with bribery, racketeering and tax evasion convictions. Traficant was expelled from Congress, served seven years in prison and unsuccessfully tried to get on the ballot to run for the House this year.