In that “fair and balanced” way, the AP’s John Solomon has been trying like hell to find a way to pin Abramoff on the Democrats - especially Sen. Harry Reid.

Now he catches Harry taking free tickets to a boxing match. Oh, the horror! From Josh Marshall:

That sounds pretty bad.

Only, there is an exception for gifts from governmental agencies (like the Nevada Athletic Commission) in the Senate ethics rules. So there is nothing untoward about Reid having accepted the free tickets.

But it would still seem pretty bad if Reid had accepted the tickets and then stumped shamelessly for the commission.

Only, he didn’t. As was the case with Abramoff and the Marianas, Reid voted against the peddler’s interest. As Solomon admits in the piece, Reid was advocating “the creation of a federal boxing commission that Nevada’s agency feared might usurp its authority.” Reid never changed his position. And this was a dramatically uncontroversial piece of legislation largely preoccupied with ensuring the safety of boxers by creating the United States Boxing Administration. It passed the Senate unanimously.

Now, Solomon puts all these facts in his piece. So he’s not covering up a key piece of information like he did last time. He seems to realize that he doesn’t have any real story. So Solomon argues that Reid, out of an abundance of caution, should have paid for the tickets to avoid the appearance of impropriety.

To justify this stance, the piece launches into a nuanced dissection of the ethics rules that I will not resurrect here. The upshot is that Reid is guilty of not interpreting the ethics rules in the most restrictive manner possible. Solomon is unsurprisingly able to martial three (which he describes in the piece as “several”) ethics experts to back him on this. Well, actually I should say two, since one of them only goes so far as to recommend that the rule exempting gifts from governmental agencies should be changed.

UPDATE: Aravosis has more.