Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA), ranking Dem on the House intel committee, reports in from on the ground in Iraq. Check it out.
--Josh Marshall
Just to refresh everyone's memory about what happened last week, three reputed mob soldiers were arrested in Florida for the February 2001 gangland-style murder of Gus Boulis, founder and one-time owner of Sun Cruz, the Florida casino boat line. Jack Abramoff and Adam Kidan muscled Boulis into selling them Sun Cruz. And it is for fraud in that acquisition that both were indicted last month.
That's all known.
It's also been a matter of public record for more than four years that around the time of Boulis's murder, for no clear reason, Kidan paid roughly a quarter million dollars to one of those three men now under indictment for the crime. For that and other reasons, those of us who live in the world where gravity always pulls down and never up, can probably conclude that the cops believe Kidan's are somehow dirty in this matter.
In any case, here's the point I haven't seen discussed at any length. That money did not come out of Kidan's pocket. He may have authorized the payments. But those checks came from Sun Cruz itself, the company Kidan and Abramoff then co-owned.
Articles on this subject almost always throw in a line to the effect that no one suspects Abramoff himself of knowledge or involvement in Boulis's death. And I know of little tangible to contradict that. But he was the co-owner, with Kidan, of the company which made the tainted payments. And Abramoff and Kidan were in pretty close and regular contact in how they used Sun Cruz's money for the DC lobbying operations. At a minimum Abramoff might be able to shed some light on whether there is some innocent explanation for the money that went to the guy who's been indicted for Boulis's murder.
In any case, the a priori blanket exoneration does seem a bit more total than journalists would normally grant in such cases.
As far as I know, too, the local police investigating the crime have still failed in their efforts to get an interview with Abramoff to find out what he might know about Boulis's death.
--Josh Marshall
Attention DeLay-downfall junkies: Succession battle silver-medalist David Dreier to appear on Charlie Rose tonight. (Also a guest: Philip Seymour Hoffman. Oh, for the dada comedy of those two interviewing each other.)
--Michael Crowley
There are a lot of Roy Blunt crib sheets out there right now. But for my money, this Washington Post profile is the best one-stop reading on the man.
It's far from clear what Tom DeLay's departure means for House Republicans. One academic in today's papers offered the excellent metaphor of Marshall Tito's fall from power in Yugoslavia and the resulting civil war there. (Which raises the pressing question: who shall be the House GOP's Slobodan Milosevic?) Others expect Republicans to circle their wagons and for Blunt to continue the same ruthless discipline as his predecessor.
My first hunch is the latter. As this Post piece indicates, Blunt seems to have modelled himself after DeLay in every way -- with perhaps less of the Texan's mean-spirited partisan vitriol. But that was never what made DeLay effective anyway.
No, I think the fundamental basis for DeLay's unprecedented reign of terror has been his phenomenal K Street power base, cultivated over many years through unchecked access-peddling and sheer intimidation. This network serves as part fund-raising juggernaut, part patronage machine, and part political-advocacy operation. And so DeLay commanded the loyalty of House Republicans not just because he's a real Texas sh*tkicker, but because his K Street empire is one of the most fearsome tools in Washington history -- a kind of awe-inspiring political Death Star whose reactor shaft Democrats have never been able to locate.
And to read the Post article, it seems Blunt learned that lesson well. As Thomas Edsall puts it:
Blunt's organization in scope has begun to rival "DeLay Inc." -- the political fundraising committees, extensive favor-giving and alliances with Republican lobbyists that the majority leader has used to become one of the most influential leaders in memory.
In other words, Blunt, Inc. is the new DeLay, Inc. Or put another way: "The king is dead. Long live the king!"
--Michael Crowley
DeLay court date set: Oct. 21 Can't imagine there'll be much press coverage...
--Michael Crowley
Josh linked to a useful Roy Blunt backgrounder yesterday. But there's one specific episode worth considering as a case study in how Blunt operates (which, truth be told, is not all that different from how Tom DeLay operates). Flash back to November 2002, with Blunt newly installed as House Republican Whip. At the time, the House was gearing up to vote on the mammoth bill creating the new Department of Homeland Security. To some, it was a crucial public-policy moment. To Blunt, evidently, it was an opportunity. According to some fine reporting by The Washington Post, Blunt "surprised his fellow top Republicans by trying to quietly insert a provision benefiting Philip Morris USA into the 475-page bill." Here's some more detail from the Post:
The new majority whip, who has close personal and political ties to the company, instructed congressional aides to add the tobacco provision to the bill -- then within hours of a final House vote -- even though no one else in leadership supported it or knew he was trying to squeeze it in.Once alerted to the provision, Speaker J. Dennis Hastert's chief of staff, Scott Palmer, quickly had it pulled out, said a senior GOP leader who requested anonymity. Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) also opposed what Blunt (Mo.) was trying to do, the member said, and "worked against it" when he learned of it.
The provision would have made it harder to sell tobacco products over the Internet and would have cracked down on the sale of contraband cigarettes, two practices that cut into Philip Morris's profits. Blunt has received large campaign donations from Philip Morris, his son works for the company in Missouri and the House member has a close personal relationship with a Washington lobbyist for the firm.
It is highly unusual for a House Republican to insert a last-minute contentious provision that has never gone through a committee, never faced a House vote and never been approved by the speaker or majority leader. Blunt's attempt became known only to a small circle of House and White House officials. They kept it quiet, preferring no publicity on a matter involving favors for the nation's biggest tobacco company and possible claims of conflicts of interest.
Several in that circle say they were struck by Blunt's willingness to go out on a limb for a company to which he has ties. What's more, he did it within hours of climbing to the House leadership's third-highest rung, a notable achievement for a man who came to Washington less than six years ago.
A senior Republican lawmaker who requested anonymity said some GOP members worried at the time that it would be "embarrassing" to the party and its new whip if details of the effort were made public. Another Republican said Blunt's effort angered some leaders because there was "so little support for" a pro-tobacco provision likely to generate controversy.
Notice the reference to Blunt's <$Ad$>"close personal relationship" to a Phillip Morris lobbyist. That would be one Abigail Perlman, to whom Blunt is now married. (Say what you will about Tom DeLay and his seamless relationship with K Street lobbyists, he never actually shared a bed with one!) And let's not forget that Blunt's son, Andrew, is also a lobbyist for the tobacco maker back in Missouri.
This episode doesn't just illustrate the nexis between leading House Republicans and corporate lobbyists. It's also an example of the increasingly undemocratic way the House operates under the current GOP leadership. The average American might be shocked at the notion that Blunt could slip a small provision that had never been debated or voted upon into a 475-page bill hours before its passage and almost get away with it. But folks would be thoroughly aghast to know how often even more egregious provisions actually sneak through. (Blunt has defended his provision on the grounds that cigarette smuggling is a source of revenue for suspected terrorists, which is true. But if this bit of lawmaking was so truly noble, why not publicly debate it for all to see?)
At the time, I recall, some folks speculated that Blunt had been ratted out by a certain House GOP rival -- hint: he's in a little hot water down in Travis County at the moment -- wary of Blunt's rising profile. Given the way Blunt muscled himself into the Majority Leader slot yesterday, maybe his rival was right to be worried.
--Michael Crowley
Hi all, and many thanks to Josh for having me back. Lots of delightful DeLay fallout to chew over this afternoon, but let's kick off with a breathtaking quickie that simply can't wait. <$NoAd$>
It comes via an email from Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid, who is demanding an apology from conservative morals guru (and Vegas high-roller) William Bennett, for what Reid's office says was the following remark made by Bennett on his talk radio show yesterday:
… you could abort every black baby in this country and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down.
I haven't seen the original context. But even with Bennett's caveat, could there possibly be an exculpatory context? And did someone cast a voodoo curse on prominent conservatives recently ensuring they would all destroy themselves by the end of 2005?
Update: Media Matters has the transcript and audio. It seems Bennett was led down this road by a remarkably kooky caller. But I'm not sure it means he's exonerated.
--Michael Crowley
I have to step away for the afternoon to work on a talk I'm giving. But filling in will be TNR's Michael Crowley who knows more than a thing or two about the DeLay Machine.
--Josh Marshall
Coming soon: more funny-money developments bubbling up out of the 2002 New Hampshire phone-jamming litigation.
--Josh Marshall
A special thanks to everyone who came to the Serenity screening last night in Union Square. We had a full house. And the movie was a lot of fun -- even for this guy who'd only seen a few episodes of Buffy and never even heard of Firefly. Everybody I talked to after the screening loved it. Not high concept exactly, or maybe more of the concept would have been discernible if I'd seen the series, but fast-paced, electric and exhilerating. Sort of a mix of the Matrix, with Total Recall, various Harrison Ford movies, dystopic science fiction and the language and moral outlines of old-fashioned westerns. It ran about two hours but felt like about twenty minutes.
--Josh Marshall
Kevin Drum has a post this morning which poses the question, who ratted out DeLay and Co. in Texas. And he suggests it may have been the corporations whose money was in play rather than any of the operatives.
I have no knowledge of the particulars. But to me that sounds like a very good surmise. Most of the soldiers will stay loyal until their own lawyers explain to them the multi-year prison terms. The point of weakness is the coerced money -- half non-ideological business investment, half protection racket.
And it suggests another point, something we're sure to see coming down the pike. The whole DeLay political machine has been built on the compliance, cooperation and cooptation of big corporations and trade groups who have little ideological truck with DeLayism. It's a business decision -- partly a protection racket. It's not only paying in big sums of money but also hiring DeLay soldiers on instruction.
With DeLay swirling down the tubes, who's going to start calling out those companies, the ones who've followed orders to hire and pay big salaries to DeLay operatives? Is it still good for business to be funding DeLay's operation? Especially when the spotlight falls on particular companies?
--Josh Marshall
Rep. Jeb Bradley (R-NH) returns DeLay money. They've almost all taken it. Who else will be pressed to give it back?
--Josh Marshall
Who will bag tomorrow's big story: what happened inside that House GOP caucus meeting this afternoon? Just what issue torpedoed David Dreier after Speaker Hastert had given him the nod? What about the folks outside the meeting? Rove weighed in. What did he say? Time for DeLay to go? How about Spongebob nemesis James Dobson? Would he not abide David Dreier?
--Josh Marshall
So what's the deal exactly?
Clearly, Blunt has pushed David Dreier aside for the Majority Leader's job, allowing Dreier, in turn, to edge out Robert Livingston for shortest ever tenure as Republican congressional leader. But the latest reports I can find have Dreier and Blunt, how else to say it, cohabiting in the Majority Leader's office.
Says Reuters: "After a closed-door meeting of House Republicans, lawmakers said Blunt's position was an interim arrangement for the rest of the year and that he would share leadership responsibilities with Rep. David Dreier of California. It was not immediately clear how Blunt, who had had been the third ranking Republican member of the House, would share duties with Dreier, the chairman of the House Rules Committee."
How does that work exactly?
--Josh Marshall
Fresh from our secret stack of never-before-published Team Abramoff emails, we bring you a special Tom DeLay indictment day edition!
We've noted before our interest in DeLay-Abramoff contacts which belie DeLay's claim that he cut Jack off soon after the murder of Gus Boulis in February 2001.
Here, just added to the TPM Document Collection, we find national GOP fundraiser and fellow DeLay indictee Warren RoBold of ARMPAC setting up a December 14th, 2001 fundraiser for ARMPAC/DeLay at the Jack Abramoff skybox at the MCI Center in Washington, DC.
To date, we've found no evidence this one was ever reported.
For those of you deeply addicted to Abramoff Skybox love trivia: it was Wizards-Knicks.
Just how many of these emails do you have?
A lot.
--Josh Marshall
Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) has just posted her second update to TPMCafe from her trip to the Middle East, this afternoon from Kuwait City.
--Josh Marshall
Shades of Speaker Livingston. Will Dreier ascend? Cold hand of James Dobson grips the House.
--Josh Marshall
Fruit of the poison tree?
See the list of seven Texas congressmen who are sitting in Congress today because of what the Travis County grand jury calls a criminal conspiracy.
--Josh Marshall
DeLay is out as Majority Leader -- at least temporarily. And Hastert plans to recommend Rep. David Dreier (R-CA) as his replacement. Why Dreier? Because DeLay plans on coming back. If DeLay lets someone into the job who actually has the juice to hold it, he might never get it back. That's why the logical person on the totem pole, Majority Whip Roy Blunt, is staying right where he is.
--Josh Marshall
DeLay steps down as Majority Leader. 'DeLay Rule' would have come in handy.
--Josh Marshall
So let's see.
House Majority Leader Indicted for Criminal Conspiracy.
Senate Majority Leader the target of an increasingly serious probe of potential insider trading.
Rumors of October Rove indictment in the Plame case.
Is this a problem yet?
--Josh Marshall
Correction: Timothy Flanigan is not General Counsel of Tyco. He is General Counsel for Corporate and International Law. The General Counsel is William B. Lytton. Also, Flanigan came to Tyco after the criminal activity which led to indictments of company executives.
--Josh Marshall
Never rains but it pours ... DeLay indicted on one count of criminal conspiracy.
--Josh Marshall
Timothy Flanigan is set to become Deputy Attorney General of the United States. He is the General Counsel of Tyco, one of the most scandal-plagued corporations in the country. He is directly connected to the Abramoff scandal. As GC at Tyco he hired Abramoff to protect Tyco's ability to avoid paying taxes through its relocation to Bermuda. He was also central to the legal White House decisions permitting quasi-torture to be used by the US military.
Attorney General Al Gonzales will almost certainly have to recuse himself from various aspects of the Abramoff case as it centers more and more on the White House. That leaves Flanigan, who is even more directly implicated in the case. He'll have to recuse himself too, whether he realizes it yet or not.
So, major corporate corruption, implicated in the Abramoff scandal, legal enabler of torture.
Is Al Gonzales really such a politically disinterested figure that he needs a pure party-liner as his number two?
Why is this guy's nomination not dead in the water?
--Josh Marshall
Boulis/Kidan/Abramoff timeline from the Sun-Sentinel. Or, how many degrees of separation between your Majority Leader and a Gotti family contract killing.
--Josh Marshall
For better or worse, Michael Brown can probably avail himself of the doofus exception to the laws on the books against perjurious testimony. But here's just another example of the guy's fibs on the hill yesterday.
--Josh Marshall
And all out in the open <$NoAd$> (from the Post) ...
As fiscal hawks surrendered, would-be government contractors were meeting in the Hart Senate Office Building to figure out how to get a share of the money. A "Katrina Reconstruction Summit," hosted by Sen. Mel Martinez (R-Fla.) and sponsored by Halliburton, among others, brought some 200 lobbyists, corporate representatives and government staffers to a room overlooking the Capitol for a five-hour conference that included time for a "networking break" and advice on "opportunities for private sector involvement."Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) sent his budget director, Bill Hoagland, who cautioned that federal Katrina spending might not exceed $100 billion. But John Clerici, from a law firm that helped sponsor the event, told the group that spending would "probably be larger" than $200 billion. "It's going to be spent in a fast and furious way," Clerici said.
Straight up looting.
--Josh Marshall
AP: "A Texas grand jury's recent interest in conspiracy charges could lead to last-minute criminal indictments _ possibly against House Majority Leader Tom DeLay _ as it wraps up its investigation Wednesday into DeLay's state political organization, according to lawyers with knowledge of the case. Conspiracy counts against two DeLay associates this month raised concerns with DeLay's lawyers, who fear the chances are greater that the majority leader could be charged with being part of the conspiracy. Before these counts, the investigation was more narrowly focused on the state election code."
--Josh Marshall
The Post now has a nice piece up about the unfortunate coincidence that Abramoff's business partner, Adam Kidan, happened to pay a huge amount of money to the guys who the cops say whacked Abramoff's erstwhile business partner, Gus Boulis.
Late Update: This looks interesting too.
--Josh Marshall
Michael Brown: "It's my belief that FEMA did a good job in the Gulf states."
Who's going to get a hold of the transcript of this guy's testimony and give it the fact check it deserves?
If anybody finds articles or <$NoAd$> blog posts with good fact-checks of this bozo's malarkey, send it in and I'll link.
I only got a few grafs into the Times run-down before I found this ...
He [Brown] said much of the criticism of FEMA has sprung from misunderstandings about its capabilities and true mission - "FEMA doesn't own fire trucks, we don't own ambulances, we don't own search-and-rescue equipment" - and that he had advised New Orleans residents on Sunday news shows, as the hurricane was closing in, to get out of town, even though the governor and mayor had not yet decided on evacuating the city.
Interesting. If you look at our Katrina Timeline, you'll see that that Mayor Nagin issued a voluntary evacuation order at 5 PM local time on Saturday. I think that means he'd decided to evacuate the city. He followed that up with a mandatory evacuation order at 10 AM local time on Sunday morning.
In other words, Nagin had issued a voluntary evacuation order more than a dozen hours before Brown hit the airwaves. And the mandatory order was pretty much simultaneous with Brown's alleged TV-fest.
In and of itself this fib may not be the be all and end all. But I think it's pretty clear Brown's Sunday show voice crying in the wildnerness line is bogus. And certainly it's just the tip of the iceberg with this militant oaf.
Found more lies? Let us know about them here.
--Josh Marshall
Disgraced disaster goof and horse judge Brown: "I know what I'm doing, and I think I do a pretty darn good job of it." Says his biggest mistake was not making Nagin and Blanco get organized: "I very strongly personally regret that I was unable to persuade Gov. Blanco and Mayor Nagin to sit down, get over their differences, and work together," he told a congressional panel. 'I just couldn't pull that off.'"
Boy, would it be nice if someone asked this sorry fool a real question. See our Katrina Timeline for some possibilities.
Of course, it now seems the White House has realized he deserves the fate of proven incompetents: a new job. Medal of Honor next.
--Josh Marshall
Breaking news out of Florida.
Two men, Anthony Ferrari and Anthony Moscatiello, arrested in the gangland killing of erstwhile Abramoff business partner Gus Boulis.
Unmentioned in today's AP story are the quarter million dollars in unexplained payments Abramoff business partner Adam Kidan made to Moscatiello, Ferrari and their family members around the time of Boulis' death.
Kidan earlier explained that the payments were for "catering" and "surveillance".
Small world.
--Josh Marshall
There is a rather cryptic article in tomorrow's New York Times about Jack Abramoff's first brush with the law back in 2002 and how he got unbrushed.
This is the case in late 2002, when the Acting US Attorney in Guam opened a criminal probe into Jack Abramoff's lobbying activities in the US Pacific island protectorate. Yet days after federal prosecutor Frederick A. Black notified the Justice Department's Public Integrity section of his inquiry into Abramoff, he was demoted. And his new bosses barred him from pursuing any other public corruption cases. That brought the entire Abramoff investigation to halt.
Administration officials argue there was nothing out of the ordinary with an acting US Attorney being replaced by a permanent apppointee. But Black had been the 'Acting' US Attorney in Guam for twelve years. So that explanation seems rather weak.
The news in the article is that FBI and DOJ IG personnel have been investigating just what or who might have been behind Black's timely demotion.
Former Attorney General Ashcroft comes in for some discussion, in part because Abramoff had apparently boasted of his close ties to the former AG and his staff at the Justice Department. Yet "a spokesman for Mr. Ashcroft," reports the Times, "said the former attorney general and his aides at the Justice Department had done nothing to assist Mr. Abramoff and his clients and had had no significant contact with him."
Now, it seems to me that Abramoff and Ashcroft must have been buddies on at least some level, because there's this heretofore unpublished email exchange (just added to the TPM Document Collection) sitting on my desk, in which their staffers are hashing out which date Ashcroft, his wife and his staff could enjoy the pleasures of the Abramoff skybox at DC's MCI Center in late 2000.
In the exchange, Abramoff's Kevin Ring hashes out possible dates with Ashcroft's Andy Beach. Ring later forwards the exchange on to Susan Ralston, Abramoff's skybox gatekeeper, for approval. And I can't help but notice the February 2nd, 2001 piece in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which notes that Ashcroft brought Beach with him to the Justice Department. Presumably, two years later, Beach was still there as Ashcroft's scheduler at Justice Department.
So who knows? Maybe there was just some line of communication after all.
Perhaps even more interesting, though, is a possibility that goes unmentioned in Tuesday's Times piece: Karl Rove.
The Los Angeles Times article on the Guam story from August 7th, 2005 (discussed here and reproduced here in the Globe) notes that Black's replacement, Leonardo Rapadas, apparently came at the behest of none other than Karl Rove.
Wrote the Times ...
His replacement, Leonardo Rapadas, was confirmed in May 2003 without any debate. Rapadas had been recommended for the job by the Guam Republican Party. Fred Radewagen, a lobbyist who had been under contract to the Gutierrez administration, said he carried that recommendation to top Bush aide Karl Rove in early 2003.
It's probably worth mentioning that at the point Black got the ax in November 2002 and was replaced by the party-backed Rapadas, the aforementioned Ralston was working as Rove's executive assistant.
Small world.
--Josh Marshall
More and more from the administration and former administration bunglers we're hearing the line that the problem was insufficient power to use the military in a domestic natural disaster.
Certainly, the military has a role to play in a major natural disaster. State National Guard troops are almost always deployed. And in catastrophic cases, only the regular military has the ability to organize major transports of resources, execute certain rescue missions, perhaps even handle a sort of para-law enforcement in extreme cases.
But a simple look at the <$Ad$> facts of what actually happened almost a month ago in Louisiana shows no evidence that anything that went wrong went wrong because the federal government lacked sufficient authority or because the US military was given too small a role.
It's simply not true.
In almost every case, the culprits were fully-empowered civilian officials who proved incompetent at executing their given tasks.
Response to a major natural disaster is basically a civilian mission. It went poorly in this case because because the federal government let the civilian disaster relief infrastructure decay dramatically over the last four years; because there was little thought given in advance to how the federal and state and local authorities should interact in a crisis; because the president and his chief advisors ignored the issue for a critical few days; and because the plans in place at a local level were themselves inadequate to the scale of catastrophe that could have been and was predicted.
Blame it on the locals or blame it on the Feds -- neither storyline requires you or even allows you to claim that things went wrong because the military lacked power to intervene.
As I wrote a couple weeks ago, you don't repair disorganized or incompetent government by granting it more power. You fix it by making it more organized and more competent. Just so here -- the move to militarize government's domestic responsibilities rather than improve them is a dangerous trend. And it suggests that, functionally, there's little left of conservatism today other than a warped big-government authoritarianism.
Governmental incompetence solved -- or rather papered over -- by militarization has a long history. And authoritarianism's hand is usually as clumsy as it is heavy.
I'm curious to see whether Andrew Bacevich has had anything to say about this.
--Josh Marshall
CBS says FEMA has rehired Brownie as a consultant "to evaluate it's response following Hurricane Katrina." The Times-Picayune says merely that he "is continuing to work at the Federal Emergency Management Agency at full pay, with his Sept. 12 resignation not taking effect for two more weeks."
While there, says, DHS spokesman Russ Knocke, said Brownie will advise the department "some of his views on his experience with Katrina."
Long goodbye or not, aren't pearls of wisdom such as Brown appears to have on offer usually extracted not with paychecks but with subpoenas?
--Josh Marshall
Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) is the ranking Democrat on the House Intel Committee. This week she's touring the Middle East and reporting back with a post each day at TPMCafe. She did this post just before leaving this afternoon.
--Josh Marshall
Let's return to the matter of Timothy E. Flanigan, currently awaiting confirmation as Deputy Attorney General of the United States, and Jack Abramoff.
To review the highlights of our story, Timothy Flanigan was appointed Deputy White House Counsel at the beginning of the Bush administration. He later left that job to become General Counsel of Tyco Corporation, which had relocated to Bermuda to avoid paying taxes to the US Treasury. At Tyco, Flanigan hired Abramoff to fend off legislation which would have forced Tyco to pay its taxes. And, in the course of that hiring and work, Abramoff first boasted of his access to DeLay, Rove and others and then later claimed that he had spoken to Rove and enlisted his assistance on Tyco's behalf.
When we discussed this Friday, I noted that any suggestion that Abramoff had just fooled Flanigan into believing that he had more access than he had was highly implausible since Flanigan, as Al Gonzales' deputy at the White House, would have gotten a good sense of who Abramoff was and the level of juice he had with Rove and other Republican power-brokers.
Now, after I made this point on the site, a conservative acquaintance of mine emailed and asked a sensible question. If Flanigan was so plugged in at the White House -- enough to know how tight Abramoff was with the president's key advisors -- why exactly did he need to hire Jack Abramoff?
Didn't he already have enough access to handle the issue on his own?
Good question. But there's a pretty straightforward answer once you get a clear view of what sort of operation Abramoff was running.
So this a good opportunity to restate the point.
On paper, Jack Abramoff was a lobbyist. And he made a great deal of money for himself. But if you think of Jack Abramoff as just a crooked lobbyist most of the facts coming out about what he did don't make a great deal of sense. He was a key player in a very big political machine and he was managing a slush fund.
Look at the pattern.
Notice how all Abramoff's clients seemed to get 'bilked' out of large sums of money that ended up going to other conservative foundations, consulting firms, Ralph Reed, lobby shops, Grover Norquist, astroturf organizers, politicians, etc.? All of them part of Washington's Republican infrastructure?
In the case of Abramoff's work for Flanigan and Tyco, Abramoff ended up sending the greater part of their $2 million lobbying fee to an astroturf outfit called Grassroots Interactive -- an outfit allegedly controlled by Abramoff and run by a guy who now works as the Deputy Chief of Staff to the Governor of Maryland.
The money ended up diverted to other purposes beside the honorable task of whipping up populist enthusiasm on behalf of corporations that relocate to PO boxes in Bermuda to avoid paying taxes. Tyco lawyer George Terwilliger claims the firm "was a victim of a rip-off."
So is that it? Another rip-off? Another corporation which hires a lawyer out of the White House only to get taken in by Jack Abramoff's wiles? Please. How many times can one operator pull off the same stunt? How many times do big chunks of these pay days get passed on to other operators and organizations without the operators and organizations getting wise to the game?
These odd diversions aren't the exception but the rule.
The Republican machine built by DeLay, Norquist, Abramoff, et al. and pulled into high gear after 2001, is a pay-for-play political machine. This is just another part of the operation, like the diktat for trade associations to hire only Republicans. Big political machines need their soldiers taken care of -- jobs on K Street which also discipline the trade associations under Hill leadership. Just so, they need big sums of money to move around off the books. How does Rove keep the millions moving to Norquist? To Reed? To all the other operatives whose names you don't know about?
Indian tribes bursting with millions who need very focused sorts of legislative intervention -- that's one good source of money. Corrupt Pacific Island governments who need similar help -- another good source.
If Tyco wanted help, they had to pay in. That's what the $2 million was. Of course it got passed on to some other GOP outfit with Abramoff connections. That was the point!
--Josh Marshall
You know how on pretty much every government website, when you click a link that takes you to another site, there's that somewhat tedious announcement that you're leaving the government website and that they're not responsible for the content?
Check out this page at socialsecurity.gov, go to the bottom of the page and click the button entitled "retirement income calculator."
--Josh Marshall
You know that the House Republican leadership has created a House Select Committee on Hurricane Katrina, and that the Democrats, wisely, declined to participate since it's controlled by the Republican leadership and thus highly unlikely to be anything but an exercise in White House damage control.
Now it turns out that on Tuesday at 10:00 AM they are going to have Brownie himself under oath at the Rayburn Building.
We're obviously way past the point where any Republicans are defending Brown. Indeed, he's now the designated fall-guy for the whole sorry mess. So, figure the questions will either be off-point or, when critical, critical in such a way as to focus blame for mishaps uniquely on him rather than on an administration which cared so little about disaster preparedness as to appoint him.
But I thought it would be an interesting exercise to come up a list of questions that might be asked if the House committee weren't in fact a sham. Call it a counter-factual, questions produced for an alternative reality in which there was actually congressional oversight.
I know it will be tempting to ask questions of the 'Mr. Brown, why hasn't God struck you down with a thunderbolt yet?'. But I'm thinking more of questions which might elicit significant new facts. We've set up a thread over at TPMCafe to discuss this. So think detail and specifics. What questions would you ask Brownie under oath if you had the chance?
--Josh Marshall
