The cloud of scandal did not lift until Nov. 20, 1991, when he was exonerated by the Senate Ethics Committee after an investigation that included weeks of televised hearings. The committee found that Mr. McCain had ''exercised poor judgment'' in attending, with four other senators, two meetings with federal banking regulators, but it found no improper action on his part.
''I found nothing in my investigation which caused me to question Senator McCain's integrity,'' said Robert Bennett, the Washington lawyer who was special counsel to the ethics panel during what is called the Keating Five investigation. Mr. Bennett, more recently, has been one of President Clinton's lawyers.
Senator McCain had taken $112,000 in Keating-related campaign donations, trips aboard Mr. Keating's corporate jet and family vacations at the executive's Bahamas hideaway. While legal, these gifts made his attendance at the meetings with federal regulators all the more questionable. (The other four senators had also taken large contributions from Mr. Keating, some of them far more than Mr. McCain.)
He survived and was re-elected easily in 1992 and again, with almost 70 percent of his state's vote, in 1998. Three other members of the Keating Five were more seriously rebuked by the ethics panel and all of them retired rather than face difficult re-election battles. John Glenn of Ohio, who was exonerated with Mr. McCain, was also re-elected in 1992, but retired in 1998.
Non-Issue...or at the very least completely investigated...unlike all of Obama's skeletons.
