A House leadership aide on Wednesday said Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) “went too far” in characterizing comments Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) made about Rangel’s ability to remain chairman of the Ways and Means Committee.

Rangel on Tuesday boasted to reporters that Pelosi had pledged to support him as chairman despite an ethics probe and various media articles that have negatively portrayed the New York lawmaker.

But one House Democratic leadership aide said Rangel “went too far at interpreting what she said” publicly.

The staffer referred to comments Pelosi made at a forum at Hunter College in New York on Monday.

“As you know, the particulars of Chairman Rangel’s case are before the ethics committee now,” she said. “We had been assured early on that they would have their work finished by the end of this Congress, which is just a few more weeks. And I think Mr. Rangel, who is a Korean War hero, who has been a great public servant in our country, deserves the opportunity to have his case heard and resolved by the ethics committee. And that, as I say, is not a long way off. It’s just a matter of weeks.”

Asked if Rangel would lose his gavel after the ethics panel report is released, Pelosi said she would have to review what the committee finds.

Pelosi then added, “I don’t foresee that.”

It’s unclear whether there was any recent private conversation between Rangel and Pelosi about her level of support for him. Rangel seemed to be referring to a discussion he had with Pelosi because he used the words “she told me” in his Tuesday comments. The Democratic leadership aide’s account, that Rangel was inflating public comments, appears to knock down any notion of a private expression of full support. 

The differing Pelosi- Rangel accounts come after Rangel suggested last month that the Speaker’s silence on the Energy and Commerce Committee race between Reps. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and John Dingell (D-Mich.) indicated she favored the liberal lawmaker from her home state.

“I assume that not playing a role is playing a role,” Rangel, a Dingell backer, said.

Pelosi aides had repeatedly claimed that the Speaker was neutral in the Waxman-Dingell showdown, which Waxman won.

Meanwhile, Rangel on Wednesday squared off with The New York Times, which has published a series of stories focused on ethical issues surrounding Rangel.

The Times posted a letter from Rangel criticizing the paper’s coverage on its website early Wednesday afternoon, next to a detailed point-by-point defense of its Nov. 25 story in the paper.

The point-counterpoint comes as Pelosi faces GOP pressure to remove Rangel from the chairmanship.

The Times article chronicled Rangel’s role in preserving a tax loophole for an oil and gas company at the same time its chief executive officer was pledging $1 million to the congressman’s pet project, the Charles B. Rangel Center for Public Service at City College of New York.

The story, which included a detailed account of two meetings that occurred on the same morning in February 2007 between Rangel, the chief executive of the company, and a lobbyist, was the latest in a series of troubling ethics allegations that have piled up around the Harlem Democrat in recent months.

The article escalated concerns about Rangel’s ethics woes in the House Democratic Caucus, which have thus far resisted calls for him to give up the chairmanship of the powerful Ways and Means panel.

Still, Rangel remained defiant in his letter to the Times.

“The recent inflammatory articles by David Kocieniewski attempting to link my position on retroactive tax legislation affecting United States companies that incorporate abroad (inverted companies) to support for the Rangel Center at C.C.N.Y. echoed in your editorial, reflect willful blindness to the history of that legislation and a fundamental ignorance of the legislative process that produced it,” he wrote.

Rangel claimed it was his Republican predecessor as chairman, former Rep. Bill Thomas (Calif.), and the Finance panel, its Senate counterpart, which preserved the tax loophole in 2004 for companies who moved offshore before March 2003.  He said Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Max Baucus (D-Mont.) tried to reopen the issue in 2007.

Rangel wrote that he worked on a bill to provide tax relief for small business, and a different Senate version of the bill originally had language that would close the loophole. The Times article asserted that Rangel “defended” the loophole in order to benefit Nabors Industries.

Rangel called that assertion “patently false,” and stated that his opposition to revising the legislation years after the original version was "consistent" with his position against retroactive tax law changes.”

“My support for this bill demonstrates that my prior opposition to a retroactive increase in taxes is a consistent, principled stance that has nothing to do with Nabors Industries,” he wrote. “It is absurd to suggest there was ever a change in my position in connection with a pledged donation to C.C.N.Y.”

The Times was equally vehement in its defense of the story. In its response, the paper said the Nov. 25 report was the result of weeks of reporting, “extensive” review of congressional records, public statements and news media accounts of the legislation, as well as interviews with dozens of people involved in the creation of the law.

In 2007, the Times reported that the Senate passed a bill that would close the loophole for Nabors, among other things. The Ways and Means Committee, which Rangel chairs, then offered a competing bill that left the loophole intact.

“Furthermore, the paper contended,” interviews with lawmakers, lobbyists who worked on the legislation and Congressional staff members, including aides to the top Senate Democrat – made clear that the objections that killed the move to end the tax loophole came from Rangel himself.”

It also explained that Rangel first met with Nabors chief executive, Eugene Isenberg, in September 2006 about donating to the Rangel Center. He pledged $1 million and made a $100,000 that was deposited into the school’s account on Feb. 23, 2007. The original report noted that Isenberg said he wrote the check on Feb. 7, 2007 but could not recall when or how it was delivered to the college.

On Feb. 12, 2007, the Times reported that Rangel had two morning meetings. Isenberg, Rangel and New York District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, a Rangel friend and ally and longtime supporter of the school, attended the first meeting and discussed the C.C.N.Y. donation. Immediately afterward, the paper reported, Rangel then met with Ken Kies, Nabors’s lobbyist, and Kies and Rangel discussed the tax loophole concerns for about eight minutes.

Kies has since taken issue with the assertion that Isenberg was present for both meetings. Kies told The Hill Tuesday that he and Isenberg were waiting for Rangel and Morgenthau to come over and talk to them after that pair had breakfast. He said the donation did not come up during Kies’s or Isenberg’s discussions with Rangel on Feb. 12, 2007.

The Times counters that Isenberg was quoted in the story acknowledging that the two meetings took place in succession on the same day. Morgenthau also confirmed the two meetings in the original story.

The Times also argued that it gave ample attention to Rangel’s claim that he did not support revisiting the tax loophole because he has long opposed retroactive changes to tax policy. The paper noted other arguments Rangel made, that the proposal to close the loophole for Nabors was never considered by the Ways and Means Committee and that the Senate had abandoned efforts to close the loophole without any involvement from the House, were either addressed by Rangel’s lawyers, directly contradicted by our reporting or both.”