Congress Calls Out Martha

A House committee on Tuesday asked the U.S. Justice Department to investigate whether the domestic goddess knowingly misled lawmakers as they conducted their just-concluded probe into insider-trading allegations.

This development comes as Stewart's camp, in its first at-length response to the scandal, acknowledged its homemaking chief is already under scrutiny from the feds at Justice, as well as the suits at the Securities and Exchange Commission, for the sale of 4,000 shares in the biotech company ImClone last December.

At issue is whether Stewart, 61, sold her stock (for about $228,000) based on a tip from her pal and ImClone's then chief executive officer Sam Waskal.

Stewart has maintained the sale was made as part of a pre-existing order to dump ImClone stock if its price dipped below $60 a share.

But Representative Billy Tauzin, the self-proclaimed "Cajun Ambassador to Congress," as well as a onetime Martha Stewart Living TV guest (he appeared in 2000 to promote his Cajun cookbook, Cook 'N Tell), told reporters at a press conference today that Stewart's story doesn't mesh with the evidence (phone records, mainly).

"This evidence raises a serious question as to whether Ms. Stewart's accounts were false, misleading and designed to conceal material facts," Tauzin, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said.

Stewart's camp responded, calling the doyenne of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia the victim of a "prejudiced" proceeding.

"I'm glad that the political aspects of this matter will now terminate and am confident that the investigation will lead to Ms. Stewart's exoneration," attorney Robert Morvillo said in a statement.

Stewart also found a friendly sound bite today from a congressman who sat in on the House probe.

Representative Peter Deutsch, appearing on Stewart's old Early Show home on CBS, said Congress has bigger fish to fry--like the Enron scandal and endangered 401ks--than a single Martha Stewart stock sale.

"Our job is to deal with systemic issues in the country," Deutsch said.

The encouraging comments from Deutsch, a Democrat, compared to the harsher ones from Tauzin, a Republican, raise questions as to whether the home-and-hearth expert is being targeted by the GOP because she's a big-time Democratic donor. (Per Opensecrets.org, Stewart has made $143,666 in political contributions--99 percent of them to Democratic contenders--this year, through June.)

But Ed Henry, senior editor of Capitol Hill's Roll Call Newspaper, isn't buying the conspiracy theory.

"If there's a reason for targeting for her, it's because she's famous," Henry says.

While Henry acknowledges Republicans "have been a little more excited about this investigation," he points out that the leading Democrats on Tauzin's House committee--Deutsch, included--signed off on today's letter to the Justice Department.

Since the ImClone scandal broke in June, Stewart has been named in two class-action lawsuits from investors in her own company, pulled from The Early Show and seen shares in her company sink as low as $6.29 (from a 52-week high of $20.93).

Through it all, Stewart has tried to concentrate on her salad (as she infamously did during one of her last Early Show appearances).

Said Stewart's legal counsel in a statement today: "During the past several months, Ms. Stewart has been the subject of numerous leaks, unfair innuendo and thunderous headlines, none of which merit reply."

Well, not a reply that any self-respecting domestic goddess would be caught saying in public, anyway.