US: The FBI says it filmed him accepting $100,000 in bribe money and later found $90,000 in cash in his apartment freezer, wrapped in aluminium foil and hidden in food containers. But Louisiana congressman William Jefferson has no intention of resigning his seat and expects to stand for election again in November, insisting that he can explain everything.
"There are two sides to every story; there are certainly two sides to this story. There will be an appropriate time and forum when that can be explained," he said.
Mr Jefferson, a Democrat from New Orleans, was speaking outside his Capitol Hill office, which FBI officers raided last weekend, triggering a heated debate in Washington over America's constitutional separation of powers between the executive and legislative branches of government.
The Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, Dennis Hastert, issued an angry statement about the raid, declaring that, regardless of Mr Jefferson's alleged wrongdoing, the Justice Department should not have ordered the search.
"Insofar as I am aware, since the founding of our Republic 219 years ago, the Justice Department has never found it necessary to do what it did Saturday night, crossing this separation of powers line, in order to successfully prosecute corruption by members of Congress. Nothing I have learned in the last 48 hours leads me to believe that there was any necessity to change the precedent established over those 219 years," Mr Hastert said.
The FBI says that Mr Jefferson sought the $100,000 as part of a deal to bribe a high-ranking Nigerian official in connection with a high-tech business deal in that country. A woman involved in the deal agreed to record conversations with the congressman after she started to suspect him of defrauding her of a $3.5 million investment in the project.
An affidavit claims that Mr Jefferson sought a share of the profits from the deal for his children, and told the investor that his Nigerian contact had to pay bribes to ensure the deal's success.
"We need him. We got to motivate him really good. He's got a lot of folks to pay off," Mr Jefferson is quoted as telling the informant.
Mr Jefferson has not been charged and has denied any wrongdoing, but two of his associates have pleaded guilty to bribery-related charges. Pleading guilty to bribery-related charges in January, former congressional aide Brett Pfeffer said Mr Jefferson demanded money in exchange for help in brokering two African telecommunications deals.
Vernon Jackson, chief executive of iGate Inc, the Louisville, Kentucky, telecommunications firm at the centre of the allegations, has also pleaded guilty to bribery, saying he paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to Mr Jefferson and his family members in exchange for help in securing business deals in Nigeria, Ghana and Cameroon.
Congressional Democrats have distanced themselves from Mr Jefferson, fearing the allegations against him could undermine their claim that Republicans have introduced a "culture of corruption" to Washington.