The big, corrupt picture

January 4, 2006

The details about who Jack Abramoff will implicate in his web of corruption will be fleshed out in the coming weeks, but I thought it might be worthwhile to take a step back and look at what’s become of the Republican establishment.

* GOP uber-lobbyist Jack Abramoff has pled guilty to fraud, tax evasion, and conspiracy to bribe public officials — and may ultimately implicate as many as 60 lawmakers, in addition to several Bush administration officials.

* House Administration Committee Chairman Bob Ney (R-Ohio) has already been implicated in the Abramoff scandal and is in a world of trouble.

* Tom DeLay, who is already facing money laundering charges in Texas, has reason to worry about what Abramoff might tell prosecutors.

* The Bush White House already lost one high-ranking aide due to a criminal indictment, and is still under a criminal investigation now. (Fitzgerald’s grand jury met this morning, by the way.)

* The Bush administration is also facing an investigation into whether it circumvented the law by engaging in warrantless searches.

* Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist is under investigation by the SEC and the Justice Department.

A few months back, for the first time in American history, we had a White House, Senate leader, and House leader all under criminal investigations at the same time. And that’s without even getting into “Duke” Cunningham’s almost cartoonish corruption or the bevy of scandals among several Republican governors.

“Culture of corruption”? Sounds about right to me.

I wonder what sort of effect this will have on other K street mercenaries? Will the Justice Dept. be looking more closely at other lobbyists?

  • Where the heck has the SEC been? It didn’t take this long to bring Martha down. When will this happen?

  • Now if we can get the MSM on board that this is a REPUBLICAN culture of corruption, rather that “everybody does it…”

  • I think simple graphics, when all is said and done, will be able to put to rest the whole “bi-partisan corruption” argument. Side by side lists of names, with a simple notation of the amounts (and nature of the contributions) received by each will be all that is necessary. The left hand side of the list will have a few names, while the right hand side will have a few dozen names. The total number of names and amounts given per party can be in big numbers at the bottom of each list. I think even the American public will be able to figure that one out.

  • Let’s hope, bubba, that the American people can figure it out. The elections of 2000, 2002 and 2004 have made me lose a lot faith in my fellow Americans.

  • sknm, i think they will be able to figure it out–but I am not confident they will vote accordingly. With political affiliation becoming more and more like religious affiliation, I wonder if the truth really does matter.

  • I don’t believe the totality of corruption is limited to Republicans only. And I truly hope that Democrats don’t back down, even if it means ‘retiring’ a few corrupt Democrats as well.

    The MOST CREDIBLE campaign stance this year is to encourage any Dem actually caught up in the Abramhoff scandal to not seek re-election and to trumpet the sins of the ethically challenged loudly.

  • Time to dig up all the bullshit they spewed about how they were going to “Clean up Washington DC”.

    Beat ’em over the head with it. Hard.

  • Bound to be a couple of Dems caught in this
    scandal, and that’s all that’s needed for it to
    become a bipartisan tale of corruption to the
    MSM and American public.

    We need a miracle, folks, but I understand
    our side doesn’t get them.

    Nothing can bring Bush or the radical right down.
    Nothing.

  • It is also time to revisit all of the prior actions of Delay et al wherein they threatened business and lobbies if they hired Dems and strongarmed them into hiring only the GOP. These actions need lots and lots of attention and need to be repeated ad nauseum (sorry for using latin twice in one post) by our own pundits, writers and pols.

  • I see the RNC is donating some of the money (about $6k) the Bush re-election Campaign got from Abramhoff to the American Heart Association.

    I don’t care how much money they give the AHA, there is no way they can buy a heart.

  • Winners and Losers

    A guide to those whose careers will crash—and those who might benefit—because of Jack Abramoff’s saga of greed.

    By Howard Fineman
    Newsweek
    Updated: 4:24 p.m. ET Jan. 4, 2006

    Jan. 4, 2006 – Forget the black hat. Everybody in Washington is obsessed with Jack Abramoff’s gangsterlike attire as he came out of the federal courthouse. But the thing that jumps out at me is the figure $20,194,000. If I read the fed’s plea-agreement papers correctly, that’s the amount of cold cash that the Republican lobbyist siphoned from Indian tribes and stashed in his secret accounts.

    You may not believe this, but in this city, that is an unheard of amount of money for a lobbyist to haul in—and the number itself signifies a troubling change in the nature of life in the capital of our country.

    The denizens of D.C. deal in trillions of dollars. But they are YOUR dollars: tax receipts and federal spending. Lawyers and lobbyists here do well. Still, they haven’t generally been in the same league as money-power types in, say, New York or Los Angeles. This was a city in which official position meant more than a plush vacation home; in which a Ph.D. or J.D. meant more than a BMW. Traditionally, the locals have been more like Vegas blackjack dealers than the greedy people sitting on the other side of the table.

    Well, Abramoff jumped the table—and the result will be the biggest influence-peddling scandal to hit Washington in recent times: the Scandal of the Poisoned BlackBerrys, which sent and received e-mails that now will make a gripping saga of greed in action.

    And just who are the political losers and winners? There are more of the former than the latter.

    LOSERS
    Members of Congress: Lawmakers fingered by the Feds in Abramoff probe, or who received campaign contributions through the networking of Abramoff, and who are facing re-election this November. Voters tend to like, or at least tolerate, their local congressman and assume that they aren’t part of the corrupt world of Washington—until the member’s name surfaces in a context like this one.

    The Republican Party: The semi-conventional wisdom here is as follows—some Democrats are likely to be stained by ties to Jack Abramoff; polls show that the public has a plague-on-both-your-houses attitude toward wrongdoing in Washington; therefore, the GOP won’t be hurt in November. I don’t buy it. Republicans are the incumbent party in the Congress. They are led by a less-than-popular president in the traditionally weak sixth year of his presidency.

    The DeLay-Hastert Crowd: Rep. Tom DeLay, given his close ties to Abramoff, can forget about getting his job as House majority leader back. At least that’s what one GOP backbencher, who insisted on anonymity for now, told me Tuesday. “We just can’t afford to have him in such a visible position anymore.” DeLay, facing state charges in Texas, could have a tough re-election campaign, if he gets that far. Semi-figurehead Speaker Denny Hastert, installed in the job by DeLay, hastily returned all of his Abramovian campaign contributions, but that only served to underscore his visibility. Look for a major shake-up in the GOP House leadership, perhaps soon.

    The Bush-Rove White House: No one is alleging, and I think it is unlikely, that Boy Genius Karl Rove knew in any detail what kind of crook Abramoff really was. On the other hand, Rove was, and remains—unless he is indicted in the Plame case—the puppet master of Republican Washington. He shares operational and attitudinal roots with Abramoff and the other hustlers in the baby-boomer generation of Republican strategists. Over the years, as Rove has needed to “move” legislation—and make no mistake, he has been the guy guiding that process—he has called on the entire GOP lobbying establishment in D.C. to help. The process of building that machinery began long before Rove came to town with Bush. DeLay, Abramoff, Grover Norquist and others began assembling it after the GOP took the House in 1994, demanding that corporate types hire Republicans—and not just any Republicans, THEIR Republicans. Rove then took command of that vehicle when he moved to the White House in 2001. Rove will have a hard time claiming now that he didn’t know how the machinery worked, especially since Abramoff himself became a major contributor to Bush’s re-election campaign.

    WINNERS
    Third-party reform movement: If Sen. John McCain doesn’t win the Republican presidential nomination, I could see him leading an independent effort to “clean up” the capital as a third-party candidate. Having been seared by his own touch with this type of controversy (the Keating case in the ’80s, which was as important an experience to him as Vietnam), McCain could team up with a Democrat, say, Sen. Joe Lieberman. If they could assemble a cabinet in waiting—perhaps Wes Clark for Defense, Russ Feingold for Justice, Colin Powell for anything— they could win the 2008 election going away.

    Public Integrity Section: The Abramoff case is proof, at least so far, that it’s possible for lifers in the bureaucracy to still have a corrective influence on politics run amok in the capital. The case has been handled from the start by professionals who do this kind of work out of a sense of loyalty and idealism. We’ll see if Attorney General Alberto Gonzales leaves them alone if they start working their way toward the White House.

    © 2006 Newsweek, Inc.

    © 2006 MSNBC.com

    URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10708129/site/newsweek

  • What’s going to be reeeeaaaallllly interesting is when they become the Party of Corruption and Murder for Hire, which will happen when a Florida prosecutor makes the right pitch to the Gotti Family hitmen Abramoff told Kidan to hire to off Gus Boulis. When that happens, all the deals Jackie-boy has with the Feds aren’t going to matter squat in the face of a Murder One Conspiracy, let us give you the needle, indictment.

    It’s going to be so much fun campaigning against the Party of Corruption (Abramoof/Delay/Ney, etc.) and Treason (Bush/Cheney/Snoopgate coup against the republic).

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