{"id":7772,"date":"2006-06-26T09:40:45","date_gmt":"2006-06-26T13:40:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/?p=7772"},"modified":"2006-06-26T09:40:45","modified_gmt":"2006-06-26T13:40:45","slug":"norquist-rove-cooperate-on-selling-white-house-access","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/norquist-rove-cooperate-on-selling-white-house-access\/","title":{"rendered":"Norquist, Rove cooperate on selling White House access"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s probably a little too late to go back and review all the interesting tidbits from last week’s Jack [tag]Abramoff[\/tag] report from John McCain’s Senate Indian Affairs Committee — suffice it to say, there was plenty of bad news for Bob Ney<\/a> and Ralph Reed<\/a> — but there’s one revelation<\/a> about [tag]Grover Norquist[\/tag] and [tag]Karl Rove[\/tag] that deserves special attention.<\/p>\n

Wanted: Face time with President Bush or top adviser Karl Rove. Suggested donation: $100,000. The middleman: lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Blunt e-mails that connect money and access in Washington show that prominent Republican activist Grover Norquist facilitated some administration contacts for Abramoff’s clients while the lobbyist simultaneously solicited those clients for large donations to Norquist’s tax-exempt group.<\/p>\n

Those who were solicited or landed administration introductions included foreign figures and American Indian tribes, according to e-mails gathered by Senate investigators and federal prosecutors or obtained independently by The Associated Press.<\/p>\n

“Can the tribes contribute $100,000 for the effort to bring state legislatures and those tribal leaders who have passed Bush resolutions to Washington?” Norquist wrote Abramoff in one such e-mail in July 2002.<\/p>\n

“When I have funding, I will ask Karl Rove for a date with the president. Karl has already said ‘yes’ in principle and knows you organized this last time and hope to this year,” Norquist wrote in the e-mail.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Given this, it certainly sounds<\/i> as if Norquist and Rove cooperated on a scheme to arrange White House meetings for Abramoff clients in exchange for contributions to Norquist’s group, Americans for Tax Reform. The details are a little murky — what did Rove have to gain from such an arrangement? — but the 2002 emails suggest White House access may have been for sale.<\/p>\n

At a minimum, it seems like the kind of arrangement that deserves an explanation. I know congressional hearings are out of the question, but maybe some enterprising [tag]White House[\/tag] reporter could ask Tony Snow for a “clarification”?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s probably a little too late to go back and review all the interesting tidbits from last week’s Jack [tag]Abramoff[\/tag] report from John McCain’s Senate Indian Affairs Committee — suffice it to say, there was plenty of bad news for Bob Ney and Ralph Reed — but there’s one revelation about [tag]Grover Norquist[\/tag] and [tag]Karl […]<\/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-7772","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7772","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=7772"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7772\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7772"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7772"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7772"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}