The New York Times reported on some interesting developments today in the Jack Abramoff saga, not the least of which is the possibility of him joining his former business partner Michael Scanlon as a flipped witness.
With a federal corruption case intensifying, prosecutors investigating Jack Abramoff, the Republican lobbyist, are examining whether he brokered lucrative jobs for Congressional aides at powerful lobbying firms in exchange for legislative favors, people involved in the case have said.
The attention paid to how the aides obtained jobs occurs as Mr. Abramoff is under mounting pressure to cooperate with prosecutors as they consider a case against lawmakers. Participants in the case, who insisted on anonymity because the investigation is secret, said he could try to reach a deal in the next six weeks.
And while the prospect of an Abramoff deal is enticing enough, it’s that part about his role in trading favors for lobbying jobs that warrants additional attention.
The “K Street Project,” as many of you know, is a scheme launched 11 years ago after the GOP takeover of Congress. Newt Gingrich and Grover Norquist looked at DC’s infamous K Street, home to the city’s powerful lobbying industry, and noticed a problem: some of the lobbyists weren’t Republicans. It was a predicament that demanded a remedy — and the K Street Project was born. Michael Kinsley described the initiative today as legalized bribery.
Tom DeLay — the real boss in Congress — openly warned K Street that unless all the choice lobbying jobs went to Republicans, lobbyists could not expect to have any influence with the Republican Congress. This warning would be meaningless, of course, unless the opposite was also true: If you hire Republican lobbyists, you and they will have influence over Congress. And darned if DeLay didn’t turn out to be exactly right about this.
No prominent Republican upbraided DeLay for his open invitation to bribery. And bribery is what it is: not just campaign contributions but the promise of personal enrichment for politicians and political aides who play ball for a few years before cashing in.
What does Abramoff have to do with this? A great deal.
As the Times report explains in some detail, it appears that Abramoff, as part of his influence peddling network, may have helped move Republican staffers — particularly from DeLay’s and Bob Ney’s offices — from the Hill to K Street. The pattern is reportedly “very much a part of” what prosecutors are focusing on.
In this sense, the list of “favors” Abramoff did for his congressional allies included lucrative jobs for staffers, in addition to the golf trips, campaign contributions, free meals, entertainment tickets, etc.
This may seem like an odd favor for Abramoff to do for his Hill allies. Why would a lawmaker care if one of his or her staffers got some high-paying gig at a lobbying firm? As it happens, they care quite a bit. By having their associates dominate the lobbying industry, lawmakers like DeLay are expanding their network of power while helping to guarantee that lobbying firms will share his policy goals and agenda. For that matter, part of the point of the K Street Project is to have associates in the lobbying industry who could help arrange campaign contributions for the indefinite future.
Hiring patterns offer a rich and complicated field for investigators. Congressional staff members routinely leave for the private work, with the sole prohibition a one-year ban on lobbying their former supervisors. Mr. DeLay is so renowned for funneling his skilled staff members into lobbying firms across Washington that his political network is known as “DeLay Inc.”
Although Mr. DeLay was reprimanded by the House Ethics Committee in the late 90’s for pressuring a lobbying firm to hire a Republican, the practice has become so standard in an era of Republican dominance that partisans have given it a name, the K Street Project.
What investigators seek is evidence of a quid pro quo between Mr. Abramoff and the lobbyists he helped hire, lawyers and others involved in the case said.
I keep thinking about a recent comment from Thomas Mann, a congressional specialist at the Brookings Institution, who said, “I think this has the potential to be the biggest scandal in Congress in over a century.” It’s a remark that appears more and more accurate all the time.