As many as 60 U.S. Congressmen may be implicated in Bribery scandal

As many as 60 U.S. Congressmen may be implicated in Bribery scandal
Friday 2nd December 2005

The Abramoff affair: Corruption scandal threatens Republican control
of US Congress
Michael Scanlon, a Republican political operative, publicist and
former press spokesman for House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, pled
guilty November 21 to conspiring with lobbyist Jack Abramoff to
bribe a Republican congressman and cheat several American Indian
tribes out of tens of millions of dollars.

Scanlon's guilty plea-and even more his agreement to cooperate fully
with federal prosecutors and testify against former colleagues-has
sent a chill through Republican ranks and raised the prospect of
numerous indictments, convictions and jail terms for congressmen and
congressional staffers as well as Bush administration officials
involved in the rampant corruption of official Washington.

By the end of last week, there were press reports that at least four
Republican legislators and 17 staffers and former staffers were the
targets of the Justice Department investigation into the Abramoff
affair. The Wall Street Journal named DeLay, Congressman Robert Ney
of Ohio, Congressman John Doolittle of California, and Senator
Conrad Burns of Montana as targets, as well as several former Bush
administration officials. The Washington Post reported that
prosecutors had informed Congressman Ney that he was the subject of
a bribery investigation and added that the wives of DeLay and
Doolittle had also been linked to Abramoff's influence-peddling
schemes.

The Abramoff affair could have much wider implications. A reporter
for BusinessWeek, on a television interview program, said that his
Justice Department sources had told him that as many as 60
congressmen could be implicated in the bribery scandal-far more than
enough to threaten control over the House of Representatives, where
the Republican majority is 231-202, with one independent.

The Associated Press named eight more congressmen and senators who
received contributions engineered by Abramoff in return for
political favors, four Republicans and four Democrats. The
Republicans were congressmen Charles Taylor of North Carolina, J. D.
Hayworth of Arizona, Todd Tiahrt of Kansas and Dave Camp of
Michigan. The Democrats included three senators, Carl Levin and
Debbie Stabenow of Michigan and Byron Dorgan of North Dakota (the
senior Democrat on the committee now investigating the Abramoff
affair), and Congressman Dale Kildee of Michigan.

Previous press accounts have noted that House Speaker Dennis Hastert
of Illinois, a Republican, and the leading Democrat in the Senate,
Minority Leader Harry Reid, received substantial campaign
contributions from groups directed by Abramoff, most of them Indian
tribes seeking congressional favors for their casino gambling
operations.

While some of these contributions went to leading Democrats,
particularly members of the Indian Affairs committees of both
houses, the bulk of the cash went to the Republicans-both because
they had the deciding role, as the majority party in both houses,
and because Abramoff built his lobbying empire on his longstanding
ties to top Republican figures like DeLay, chief Bush political aide
Karl Rove, anti-tax lobbyist Grover Norquist and Ralph Reed, former
head of the Christian Coalition.

When Abramoff was president of the National College Republicans in
the mid-1980s, his two top deputies were Norquist and Reed. All
three went on to prominent positions in far-right politics. Abramoff
turned to lobbying for the Nicaraguan contras and anti-communist
terrorist groups in southern Africa, and then, especially after the
Republican takeover of Congress in 1994, to lobbying for commercial
and business interests.

With the installation of the Bush administration, the well-connected
Republican lobbyist could virtually name his price for influence-
peddling, and he rapidly became a multi-millionaire wheeler-dealer,
representing, among other companies, Tyco International and Unisys
Corp.

The essential mechanism of Abramoff's operations, as detailed in
press accounts and Senate hearings over the past 18 months, was to
plunder the extensive lobbying funds provided by Indian tribes with
lucrative gambling operations. Abramoff directed much of these funds
to Scanlon, who left DeLay's office in 2000 to set up a publicity
firm in Washington to cash in on his high-level Republican
connections. Scanlon then kicked back half the profits secretly to
Abramoff.

From 2001 to 2004, according to documents filed in federal court in
Washington DC, Abramoff and Scanlon together raked in some $82
million in payments from the Indian tribes. Scanlon himself billed
four Indian tribes $53 million during this period, while kicking
back $19 million under the table to Abramoff.

The 35-year-old Scanlon, who was still paying off college loans from
his congressional staff salary in 1999, became a millionaire
overnight, buying several million dollars in beachfront property in
Delaware shortly after going into business for himself. Five years
later, even after agreeing to $19 million in restitution to the
tribes, according to one press account, he still retains significant
personal wealth.

Abramoff manipulated the Native American tribes, using his influence
with Christian fundamentalist groups opposed to gambling in order to
extract what amounted to political protection money. In the most
notorious case, Abramoff mobilized the Christian fundamentalists to
spike the bid of a smaller Indian tribe to establish a casino that
would have undercut the profits of his clients, the Louisiana band
of Coushatta Indians.

The Coushattas hired Abramoff and Scanlon to shut down a casino run
by the Jena band, another Louisiana tribe, at Livingston, Texas, on
the Texas-Louisiana border. At Abramoff's direction, the Coushattas
funneled money to various Republican political action committees and
conservative groups, including two campaign committees run by DeLay,
ARMPAC and TRMPAC.

Abramoff and Scanlon used Ralph Reed as their contact with Christian
right groups and also contacted John Cornyn, then the Texas attorney
general, now a US Senator, seeking legal action to block the Jena
casino. Reed organized a group of 50 pastors to meet with Cornyn. He
subsequently told Abramoff in an e-mail, "We have also choreographed
Cornyn's response. The AG will state that the law is clear... and
pledge to take swift action to enforce the law." The ministers were
reportedly unaware that their moral outrage at gambling was being
used to aid one gambling interest against another.

Even more brazen was the effort of Abramoff and Scanlon to funnel
millions of dollars through Reed for a campaign to shut down the El
Paso, Texas casino run by the Tigua tribe. After the casino was shut
down, Abramoff and Scanlon induced the Tiguas to hire them to wage a
campaign to allow the casino's reopening. Although the Tiguas paid
out millions, however, this effort failed.

Abramoff and Scanlon discussed their devious operations in language
of unvarnished cynicism, as revealed in e-mail exchanges made public
by the Senate Indian Affairs Committee. In one memo to Abramoff,
Scanlon wrote, referring to the Christian fundamentalists: "The
wackos get their information through the Christian right, Christian
radio, mail, the internet and telephone trees. Simply put, we want
to bring out the wackos to vote against something and make sure the
rest of the public lets the whole thing slip past them."

This could serve as a crude but nonetheless telling summary of the
entire political strategy of the Bush administration: mobilize
the "wackos" while keeping everyone else in the dark.

While there has been substantial media publicity over Abramoff's
gulling of the Indian tribes, the Republican lobbyist has been
indicted so far only in an unrelated case of business swindling in
south Florida, when he and an associate took control of SunCruz, a
cruise line that offered gambling tours, using allegedly fraudulent
financial information and bad checks.

With Scanlon's testimony, however, an indictment for swindling the
Indian tribes could be forthcoming shortly. The most recent Wall
Street Journal and Washington Post accounts reveal that the Justice
Department task force looking into the influence-peddling cases has
grown to 35-40 people, suggesting that multiple high-level criminal
cases could be brought.

Particularly ominous, from the standpoint of targeted congressmen,
is the prospect that criminal bribery charges could be brought over
campaign contributions, even though the cash did not go directly
into the congressmen's pockets, but to finance their reelection
efforts. The whole purpose of the elaborate Federal Election
Commission ritual has been to legalize the escalating financial
subsidies from corporate interests to legislators.

One of Abramoff's favorite tactics was to hire the wives of
congressional staffers or of the congressmen themselves, providing
what amounted to a direct payoff under the cover of employment. One
Abramoff-linked company, Alexander Strategy Group, run by former
DeLay staffers Edwin Buckham and Tony Rudy, hired Christine DeLay,
the congressman's wife, "to determine the favorite charity of every
member of Congress," according to a Washington Post account. This
not terribly complex job-presumably 435 phone calls would have
sufficed-resulted in payments to Christine DeLay of $3,200 to $3,400
a month for three years, for a total of $115,000. The DeLays' family
lawyer, Richard Cullen, told the Post, "It wasn't like she did this
9 to 5, but it was an ongoing project. This was something that she
found to be very interesting, very challenging and very worthwhile."

As the criminal information published by the Justice Department in
connection with Scanlon's guilty plea states, the contributions to
the congressional campaign funds as well as personal gifts, such as
Super Bowl tickets, vacation trips, and expensive restaurant meals,
were "in exchange for a series of official acts." These included
passing legislation, agreeing to put statements into the
Congressional Record, contacting federal officials to influence
decisions, meeting with Abramoff's clients, and awarding contracts
for improvements in congressional office buildings.

While the Republican lobbyist has so far only been indicted in the
Florida case, and has not yet been convicted of any crime, the
details flooding out into the media demonstrate the extraordinarily
corrupt alliance of Christian fundamentalists, Jewish ultra-
Zionists, anti-tax zealots and rabid neo-conservative ideologues in
the service of corporate America.

The scandal-the word is unavoidable but inadequate, since it is here
describing the rule, not the exception, in today's Washington-
reaches into the highest rungs of the Republican Party leadership
and the Bush administration. DeLay, forced to step down as House
Majority Leader after his indictment on an unrelated political
corruption case in Texas, is the first top-level casualty. He once
described Abramoff as "one of my closest and dearest friends."

A mid-level White House official, David Safavian, chief procurement
officer at the Executive Office and previously chief of staff at the
General Services Administration, was indicted last month on charges
that he lied to federal investigators about a junket he took with
Abramoff, Reed and Congressman Ney to Scotland.

There may well be further White House reverberations. According to
documents released November 9, Abramoff sought a $9 million payment
from the West African nation of Gabon to arrange a meeting with
President Bush. Abramoff asked for the money to be paid through wire
transfers to a company he controlled privately, rather than to the
lobbying firm of Greenberg Traurig, where he was then employed.
President Omar Bongo met with Bush in the Oval Office 10 months
later, but there has as yet been no confirmation that he either made
the payment to Abramoff or received the invitation in return. White
House officials denied any connection, claiming that the Bongo visit
was "part of the president's outreach to the continent of Africa."