Officer escorts Hughes away from Capitol after argument

Rep. Greg Hughes was escorted away from the Capitol this week after getting in an argument with the House speaker's chief of staff, according to a Utah Highway Patrol incident report.

Hughes, R-Draper, told the Highway Patrol he wanted to confront some House members about some political issues, but chief of staff Chris Bleak apparently didn't want him to and tried to keep Hughes from entering the building on Tuesday.

The incident report says the two men were yelling, poking each other in the chest and pushing each other in an underground parking lot. No charges were filed.

When an officer escorted Hughes, a former boxer, to his car, he overheard Hughes tell Bleak that the issue was not over.

Bleak told officers he and Hughes were not fighting and that he was just trying to get Hughes off of Capitol Hill.

"There was no physical confrontation or animosity. There was no anger between he and I," Bleak told The Associated Press Thursday.

A meeting was held Tuesday discussing legislative ethics in which several lawmakers were shown a complaint against Hughes that accuses him of attempted bribery of a former colleague and extortion of lobbyists.

Hughes told officers he was concerned about what Rep. Phil Riesen, D-Salt Lake, who was one of the legislators who filed the complaint, had been saying about him and, the report said, that "things are being made up about him and his family because it is close to election time."

Hughes and two other Republicans filed their own ethics complaint against Riesen Wednesday, saying Riesen violated House rules by leaking the ethics complaint against Hughes to some members of the media before it was officially filed.

The incident report says Riesen showed up at the Capitol about the same time Hughes left the building. The report says an officer told Riesen to wait in the hallway until Hughes left, and Riesen complied.