{"id":6768,"date":"2006-03-04T10:38:09","date_gmt":"2006-03-04T15:38:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/?p=6768"},"modified":"2006-03-04T10:38:09","modified_gmt":"2006-03-04T15:38:09","slug":"ralph-reeds-troubles-get-considerably-worse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/ralph-reeds-troubles-get-considerably-worse\/","title":{"rendered":"Ralph Reed’s troubles get considerably worse"},"content":{"rendered":"

If Ralph Reed was planning to start measuring the drapes in Georgia’s Lieutenant Governor’s office, he may want to rethink his plans. His role in the Abramoff affair just got considerably worse<\/a> (thanks to J.C. for the tip).<\/p>\n

Ralph Reed has said he didn’t know it until last year, but emails suggest he was informed that eLot — a firm then in the online lottery business — was behind his effort to fend off a ban against internet gambling in 2000.<\/p>\n

The e-mails passed between Reed and Jack Abramoff, the now disgraced Washington lobbyist. Abramoff was lobbying for eLot Inc. of Connecticut, parent company of eLottery Inc., against a bill in Congress that would have banned most online betting. ELottery opposed the bill because it wanted to help states sell tickets online.<\/p>\n

Reed, a lifelong opponent of gambling, said last year that he did not know in 2000 he was actually working on behalf of eLottery.<\/p>\n

But e-mails obtained by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution show Reed was offered the name of the company at the beginning of his involvement in the campaign, in May 2000. The e-mails emerged as dozens of federal investigators have increased their focus on events surrounding the defeat of the Internet gaming ban.<\/p>\n

Abramoff included the company’s name — referring to “the elot project” — in an e-mail he forwarded to Reed, as the two worked out details of Reed’s contract for the campaign.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Reed campaign manager Jared Thomas declined to discuss the apparent inconsistency of Reed’s earlier statements and the date of the “elot” e-mail. Given the circumstances, I’m not sure what he’d say anyway.<\/p>\n

Of course, for me, it was that sentence in the fourth paragraph that stands out: “The e-mails emerged as dozens of federal investigators have increased their focus on events surrounding the defeat of the Internet gaming ban.”<\/p>\n

At this point, I’m afraid we may not have Ralph Reed to kick around much longer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If Ralph Reed was planning to start measuring the drapes in Georgia’s Lieutenant Governor’s office, he may want to rethink his plans. His role in the Abramoff affair just got considerably worse (thanks to J.C. for the tip). Ralph Reed has said he didn’t know it until last year, but emails suggest he was informed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6768","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6768","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6768"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6768\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6768"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6768"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6768"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}