Part of Tom DeLay’s defense with regards to his lobbyist-sponsored excursion to England and Scotland has been that the jaunt was important congressional work, which just happened to include some golfing. True? It certainly doesn’t look that way.
Rep. Tom DeLay’s now-controversial 2000 trip to Scotland was organized by a Washington lobbyist who hired an Arizona golf-tour company to make the arrangements and invited his clients and associates to interact with the House majority leader, newly available documents show.
House rules say such trips are acceptable only if they are principally designed for information gathering, and Mr. DeLay’s visit to Scotland and London was billed as an effort to promote an exchange of ideas with British conservatives.
Still, lobbyist Jack Abramoff’s heavy involvement and the recreational nature of much of the trip raise questions about the true purpose of the Scottish leg of the expensive outing, which Mr. Abramoff initially helped pay for, according to travel documents and billing records reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
The new information suggests instead that recreation was the primary purpose of going to Scotland, and the excursion appears more a gift and contrary to House rules defining “necessary” travel expenses as not including “entertainment or recreational activities.”
Ultimately, DeLay’s U.K. adventure was controversial enough — corrupt lobbyist Jack Abramoff, after all, put the trip on his credit card — but these new records suggest the scandal is even worse.
On top of everything else we’ve learned about the trip(s), the documents obtained by the WSJ also note that DeLay’s travel party included:
* a member of a Louisiana Indian tribe that Abramoff was fleecing;
* a prominent garment maker in the Marianas Islands, where Abramoff was trying to stop legislation aimed at cracking down on sweatshops and sex shops;
* and the general manager of a Russian energy company that had helped host DeLay in Moscow in 1997 (coincidentally, DeLay’s Houston office helped set up a meeting between the Russian energy exec and American energy companies before the trip).
I wonder how good DeLay’s ethics lawyers are? I guess we’re about to find out.