ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1995, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, December 12, 1995 TAG: 9512120069
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: SALT LAKE CITY
SOURCE: Associated Press
For more than 4 1/2 hours, tears running down her face, Rep. Enid Greene Waldholtz bared her emotions and her finances in an extraordinary bid to save her career Monday, blaming the financial mess surrounding her campaign on the ``teddy bear'' husband she says proved to be a con artist.
Publicly addressing the scandal for the first time, the freshman Republican said Joe Waldholtz falsified documents, stole money from the campaign and lied to her at nearly every turn.
``When you go home tonight, and you're with the person you love most in the world, and they're holding you as you go to sleep and they tell you that they love you and that you're the love of their life, ask yourself if they're capable of what I've just told you,'' she said through tears.
Waldholtz, 37, said she won't resign from Congress because she didn't do anything wrong or try to cover up her husband's alleged misdeeds. She said she hasn't decided whether to seek re-election.
``I believe I was tricked. I don't believe I was negligent,'' she said. ``I found everything I thought I knew about Joe Waldholtz, that I knew and trusted, was a lie.''
Joe Waldholtz, 32, is the subject of a federal investigation into a $1.7 million check-kiting scheme involving two of the couple's bank accounts. The congresswoman's lawyers also say he may have embezzled tens of thousands of dollars from her 1992, 1994 and 1996 campaigns.
Joe Waldholtz, who fled when the allegations surfaced, later surrendered and was released to the custody of an acquaintance in Pennsylvania. No charges have been filed. He has declined to comment.
After Waldholtz vanished, his wife filed for divorce and demanded that he be tracked down and prosecuted.
Enid Waldholtz said she will testify before the federal grand jury in Washington that is investigating her husband. She said she is not a target of the investigation.
Asked why she had tried to keep the child-custody portion of her divorce filing sealed - she is seeking sole custody of their 3-month-old daughter, Elizabeth - she said, ``Over the last four weeks, besides financial misdoings, I have found evidence of other questionable lifestyle choices ... I will not discuss them today.''
The documents unsealed later Monday shed no further light on that statement.
Waldholtz said an investigation found that her husband had spent campaign money ``for a variety of personal purposes," and that he provided false information to an independent accounting firm brought in to clear up problems with her 1994 campaign.
Perhaps the most pressing question is the source of the $1.8 million in supposedly personal money that she spent on her 1994 campaign, including a late-hour campaign blitz used to defeat incumbent Democrat Karen Shepherd.
At the time, Waldholtz would say only that she and the man she married in 1993 had ``been blessed'' financially.
Monday, she said she has since learned the $1.8 million came from her father. She said that her husband obtained most of the money from her father by promising him the income from nonexistent property in return.
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