It looks to me that because the Abramoff prosecution is not part of a larger RICO investigation, and because Abramoff is alive and not surrounded by heavy security, the intent is to make a DOJ window dressing and a republican "rackets" protection "Op", look like an exhaustive and aggressive probe against political corruption.

Remember that what I'm going to outline here is just one facet of the much larger picture of Abramoff financed, republican organized crime. Consider my earlier blog about the MSM failure to even report on Abramoff's family background; his uncle was coincidentally doing business with a Toronto mobster in the late 1970's and Abramoff's father, Frank was closely involved with his brother Bernard's business dealings in New Jersey. The coincidence is that Abramoff may have been induced to plead guilty because of his connection to the murder of another mysterious Toronto native with reported mob ties, Gus Boulis.

A legitimate prosecution of what has happened here should not be blunted by concerns of "upsetting" the political status quo. It is obvious that the current balance of power owes it's existance to a successful series of organized conspiracies and the resulting crimes that financed it into supremacy through the selling out of the peoples' trust and government to the highest and best connected bidders, or the threat of the use of the republican legislative apparatus against those who did not pay amountst Abramoff, Scanlon, or Markham suggested.[2]

We can only expect a limited, sham prosecution. The republican controlled executive branch controls the DOJ.

We must make use of what we have. Repeated emphasis on Susan Ralston's connections to Abramoff and her subsequent close proximity to Rove and Bush is an example of a tactic that make it harder for the white house to distance itself from Abramoff. [12] 

It may be helpful to maintain a steady message that the briber of Randy Cunningham, Brent Wilkes, paid large fees to Ed Markham's ASG, [7] and the common thread of ASG.... Alexander Strategy Group,[2] with Brian Darling,[1] the author of the Schiavo memo that was intially blamed on democrats, that ASG paid $115,000 to Delay's wife Christine[5], the reports that Abramoff's connection to Delay was via Edwin Markham, that Markham is Delay's pastor,[4] and that Markham's ASG was connected with Enron's strategy to corner the energy market,[3] and shared office quarters with a "dummy" money laundering, Delay controlled non-profit.[5] Of course, Delay's ties to his former staffer, and Abramoff lobbying partner, prosecution witness Michael Scanlon, is icing on the cake.

 .......[1]
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A32554-2005Apr6.htm

l
Counsel to GOP Senator Wrote Memo On Schiavo
Martinez Aide Who Cited Upside For Party Resigns

By Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, April 7, 2005; Page A01

The legal counsel to Sen. Mel Martinez (R-Fla.) admitted yesterday that he was the author of a memo citing the political advantage to Republicans of intervening in the case of Terri Schiavo, the senator said in an interview last night.

Brian H. Darling, 39, a former lobbyist for the Alexander Strategy Group on gun rights and other issues, offered his resignation and it was immediately accepted, Martinez said.

.......[2]
http://www.hillnews.com/news/10052004/agenda.aspx
October 5, 2004

Quietly, the right shapes its agenda

.....The Conservative Working Group (CWG), as the group calls itself, is one of several invitation-only conservative gatherings making its influence felt in the Senate, a body known more for compromise and moderation than for advancing conservative ideals.

As the conservative movement has gained strength in recent years, its champions in the Senate have sought to organize and hold regular strategy meetings, taking cues from more established gatherings on the House side and on K Street. Older groups such as the CWG, which was set up in 1974, have been rejuvenated, while a bevy of new groups has sprung up. These include the Values Action Team (VAT), which emphasizes social issues; the Fiscal Action Team (FAT), which focuses on economic and tax issues; and a gun-rights group.

Attendees claim that the behind-the-scenes strategy sessions have already swayed the Senate agenda, even though few people realize it, because, as one Senate aide put it, “We derive our power from being underground.”.....

.... The CWG is led by Ed Corrigan, executive director of the conservative Senate Republican Steering Committee. It serves as a staff-led counterpart to the weekly meeting held by senators on the Steering Committee. Corrigan also runs the Fiscal Action Team.

Sen. Sam Brownback (Kan.) and his chief of staff, Rob Wasinger, lead the VAT meetings, which like the other groups, attracts staff, lobbyists and activists.

For lobbyists, the sessions are a chance to bring their message to dozens of staffers at once, while collecting valuable information to bring back to their clients.

“People make sure they get there because [the CWG] is an important group,” said Chris Myers, a lobbyist at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and a regular attendee.
“It’s active. They get things done. Folks want to get there and get some face time.”

He added, “We can learn about issues that are out there that Senate staff are working on. … They can find out what the business community is thinking on some of these issues.”

A lobbyist who attends the meetings agreed. “It a good place to organize conservatives. It’s an opportunity for a staffer to bend other senators’ ears,” the lobbyist said. “For lobbyists, we get an update on what’s going on. That’s good for clients.”......

 “Every group would love to sit down with these staff — outside groups, K Street, trade associations. It is definitely staff willing to listen and understand, but it also has a conservative viewpoint already,” he said. When not speaking to the group, he added, “I get to be a fly on the wall. … People come and vent about things that are going on.
If a member [of the Senate] were there, people would not be as open as they are.”

Baird credits the CWG with helping force the resignation two weeks ago of a spokeswoman for the commission conducting an inquiry into the United Nations’ oil-for-food program. The Heritage Foundation had complained that she wrote an op-ed two years ago that was critical of President Bush.

For leadership aides, the meetings can be an early-warning system, indicating what the conservative base is thinking and planning. Bill Wichterman, policy adviser to Majority Leader Bill Frist (Tenn.), regularly attends.

Yet, in many cases, Senate leaders and conservatives find themselves on the same page. Frist is one of the most conservative members of the Senate, as are Majority Whip Mitch McConnell (Ky.) and GOP Conference Chairman Rick Santorum (Pa.).

Some observers argue that as the Senate leadership moves farther to the right, organized meetings such as the CWG have had more say in leadership decisions.

“When we first started [in 1974], we didn’t really have anyone in leadership favorable to our point of view,” said Paul Weyrich, who led the CWG in its early years and now heads the Free Congress Foundation. “We had to figure out ways to get around them. … Today, it’s entirely different. Today, we have the most conservative leadership group in the modern history of Senate. … The Steering Committee under these circumstances is taken very seriously.”

Myers agreed. “They aren’t outsiders anymore. It used to be that to get attention, they had to throw bombs. Now they are in the room. They are leadership,” he said.

The CWG often coordinates with House-side groups and gatherings off the Hill. The House Republican Steering Committee organizes a large group of staffers who meet on Mondays.

Weyrich runs a weekly conservative meeting, the Coalitions Lunch, at the Free Congress Foundation. It routinely attracts House Majority Whip Roy Blunt (Mo.), Sen. James Inhofe (Okla.) and Rep. Mike Pence (Ind.).

Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform also hosts a well-known conservative strategy session. Corrigan and Weyrich run the Stanton Group, which focuses on foreign policy, while Brian Darling, a lobbyist at the Alexander Strategy Group, organizes a meeting on gun rights.

Aside from the Heritage Foundation and the Chamber, the “off-campus” contingent at CWG meetings includes White House staffers Matthew Kirk and Virginia Loper, Bob Thompson from the Free Congress Foundation, Ben Dupuy from the National Rifle Association and Stacie Rumenap from the American Conservative Union.

Various contract lobbyists also attend.

.....[3]
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Alexander_Strategy_Gro

up
Enron was ASG's biggest client; they received at least $411,000 from Enron between 1999 and 2001. [7] (http://www.dfw.com/mld/startelegram/2835510.htm?1c)

"Ed Buckham and ASG were involved with a "secret 'grassroots' campaign -- spearheaded by Enron -- to deregulate energy markets... An outline for the plan was faxed to Tom DeLay's Washington office. It was printed on Alexander Strategy letterhead complete with Ed Buckham's name in print. The only problem was that Alexander Strategy's CEO was still in the employ of the federal government at the time... Alexander Strategy Group was, as Enron promised, awarded the $750,000 contract to drum up support for electric power deregulation -- a goal that Enron believed would open the $300 billion a year electric markets to Enron. The stealth campaign would operate out of an energy consortium dubbed, 'Americans for Affordable Electricity' -- a name that Californians would find bitterly ironic just three years later."

.....[4]
http://www.time.com/time/press_releases/article/0,8599,1037633,00

.html
Posted Sunday, Mar. 13, 2005
.....Buckham, DeLay’s former chief of staff, has become one of the most powerful people in Washington, report TIME’s national political correspondent Karen Tumulty,

Buckham helped DeLay build a political machine known as DeLay Inc., for the seamless coordination between his office and the lobbying corridor of K Street. Now that machinery threatens to derail DeLay, according to Tumulty. ......

.....“What even fewer people outside that office knew was that the two shared a bond that transcended power and politics: Buckham, a licensed nondenominational minister, was also DeLay’s pastor,” reports Tumulty. “For a while, in DeLay’s early days as whip, they organized daily voluntary prayer sessions for the staff—until it began making some aides uncomfortable. After that, according to two sources who worked in the office at the time, the two of them frequently prayed together privately, joining hands in DeLay’s office.”.......

....TIME reports that Buckham’s lobbying business shares the same Georgetown waterfront office suite as the registered foreign agent that gave DeLay and others paid trips to South Korea in violation of House rules. Edward Stewart, who not only manages international business for Buckham’s Alexander Strategy Group but is also Washington representative for the agent, The Korea–U.S. Exchange Council, declined to comment on the controversy. Buckham, 46, did not return telephone calls and e-mails seeking an interview......

....Buckham’s client list, according to his firm’s website, includes the American Bankers Association, Bell South, Eli Lilly, Fannie Mae, R.J. Reynolds and Time Warner (parent of this magazine).

Buckham also appears to have played a key role in the spreading scandal around lobbyist Jack Abramoff, a former producer of low-budget movies whose most marketable asset was access to DeLay, writes Tumulty. “How did Jack Abramoff get into Tom DeLay’s office?” asks a source close to the majority leader. “Ed Buckham.”........

.....[5]
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/30/A

R2005123001480_pf.html
The DeLay-Abramoff Money Trail
Nonprofit Group Linked to Lawmaker Was Funded Mostly by Clients of Lobbyist

By R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, December 31, 2005; A01

The U.S. Family Network, a public advocacy group that operated in the 1990s with close ties to Rep. Tom DeLay and claimed to be a nationwide grass-roots organization, was funded almost entirely by corporations linked to embattled lobbyist Jack Abramoff, according to tax records and former associates of the group.

During its five-year existence, the U.S. Family Network raised $2.5 million but kept its donor list secret. The list, obtained by The Washington Post, shows that $1 million of its revenue came in a single 1998 check from a now-defunct London law firm whose former partners would not identify the money's origins.

Two former associates of Edwin A. Buckham, the congressman's former chief of staff and the organizer of the U.S. Family Network, said Buckham told them the funds came from Russian oil and gas executives. Abramoff had been working closely with two such Russian energy executives on their Washington agenda, and the lobbyist and Buckham had helped organize a 1997 Moscow visit by DeLay (R-Tex.).

The former president of the U.S. Family Network said Buckham told him that Russians contributed $1 million to the group in 1998 specifically to influence DeLay's vote on legislation the International Monetary Fund needed to finance a bailout of the collapsing Russian economy.

A spokesman for DeLay, who is fighting in a Texas state court unrelated charges of illegal fundraising, denied that the contributions influenced the former House majority leader's political activities. The Russian energy executives who worked with Abramoff denied yesterday knowing anything about the million-dollar London transaction described in tax documents........

In addition to the million-dollar payment involving the London law firm, for example, half a million dollars was donated to the U.S. Family Network by the owners of textile companies in the Mariana Islands in the Pacific, according to the tax records. The textile owners -- with Abramoff's help -- solicited and received DeLay's public commitment to block legislation that would boost their labor costs, according to Abramoff associates, one of the owners and a DeLay speech in 1997......

But the records show that the tiny U.S. Family Network, which never had more than one full-time staff member, spent comparatively little money on public advocacy or education projects. Although established as a nonprofit organization, it paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees to Buckham and his lobbying firm, Alexander Strategy Group.

There is no evidence DeLay received a direct financial benefit, but Buckham's firm employed DeLay's wife, Christine, and paid her a salary of at least $3,200 each month for three of the years the group existed. Richard Cullen, DeLay's attorney, has said that the pay was compensation for lists Christine DeLay supplied to Buckham of lawmakers' favorite charities, and that it was appropriate under House rules and election law.

Some of the U.S. Family Network's revenue was used to pay for radio ads attacking vulnerable Democratic lawmakers in 1999; other funds were used to finance the cash purchase of a townhouse three blocks from DeLay's congressional office. DeLay's associates at the time called it "the Safe House."

DeLay made his own fundraising telephone pitches from the townhouse's second-floor master suite every few weeks, according to two former associates. Other rooms in the townhouse were used by Alexander Strategy Group, Buckham's newly formed lobbying firm, and Americans for a Republican Majority (ARMPAC), DeLay's leadership committee.

They paid modest rent to the U.S. Family Network, which occupied a single small room in the back.

.....[6]
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/politics/20051214-9999-1n14del

ay.html
......Even before PerfectWave's patent disputes were resolved, it was donating money to key politicians in Washington.

On Sept. 20, 2002, three months after the company was founded, it donated $15,000 to Delay's Texas PAC. By the end of 2003, Max and Ellen Gelwix made more than $50,000 in political contributions, mostly to key Republican officials in the House leadership or the House Appropriations Committee.

Among other contributions, the Gelwixes donated $10,000 to DeLay's Americans for a Republican Majority PAC; $11,000 to Future Leaders PAC, headed by Rep. Jerry Lewis, R-Redlands, who chairs the House Appropriations Committee; $10,000 to Rely on Your Beliefs PAC, headed by acting House Majority Leader Roy Blunt of Missouri; and $10,000 to Superior California Federal Leadership Fund, headed by Rep. John Doolittle, R-Granite Bay, who is on the Appropriations Committee.

The same month that Wilkes launched PerfectWave, he hired Alexander Strategy Group – composed of DeLay insiders – as his lobbying group on Capitol Hill.

The group, which is headed by DeLay's former chief of staff Ed Buckham, staffed with former DeLay employees and included DeLay's wife as a consultant, has a reputation in Washington as a conduit to DeLay's office.

Over the next three years, Wilkes paid about $630,000 in lobbying fees to the group. Although Wilkes' own two-man lobbying group – Group W Advisors – officially represented PerfectWave in Washington, Group W Advisors was represented by the Alexander Strategy Group.

During 2003 and 2004, as Wilkes pushed for contracts for PerfectWave and his other companies, DeLay was a frequent flier on a corporate jet partly owned by Wilkes and was often seen in his company at Southern California golf courses.

.....[7]
http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20051204/news_1n4adcs.htm

l
THE CUNNINGHAM SCANDAL
Contractor 'knew how to grease the wheels'

ADCS founder spent years cultivating political contacts

By Dean Calbreath
and Jerry Kammer
STAFF WRITER / COPLEY NEWS SERVICE

December 4, 2005

Born in San Diego County in 1954, Wilkes graduated from Hilltop High School in 1972, along with his football teammate and best friend Kyle Dustin "Dusty" Foggo, currently third-in-command at the Central Intelligence Agency. Wilkes and Foggo were roommates at San Diego State University, were best men at each other's weddings and named their sons after each other.

Wilkes' career in political relations dates to the early 1980s, shortly after Foggo joined the CIA. Foggo was sent to Honduras to work with the Contra rebels who were trying to topple the Sandinista government of Nicaragua, according to sources within the CIA.

.....[12]

Bush won't want you to know this:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2005/09/20/BL20

05092000753_pf.html
.......Abramoff's White House Connections

In addition to Safavian, Abramoff is known to have close ties to at least one other key White House official: Susan B.

Ralston, Karl Rove's omnipresent assistant and gatekeeper.

Here's Peter H. Stone writing in the National Journal last year: "As presidential adviser Karl Rove set up shop in the West

Wing in 2001, he was looking for an assistant to serve as the trusted gatekeeper of his new fiefdom. Superlobbyist and

Republican fundraiser Jack Abramoff was happy to lend a hand. <b>Abramoff knew just the right person for the job: his own

assistant, Susan Ralston. She interviewed with Rove and got the position."</b>

Ralston told Filipinas magazine last year: "Working for Karl Rove is like being at the center of the Bush universe -- I am

fortunate to be where I am, and be involved in much of what goes on at the White House.".....

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Susan_B._Ralston
Susan Bonzon Ralston, Special Assistant to the President & Assistant to the Senior Advisor Karl Rove, was Jack Abramoff's

executive assistant at Preston Gates and Ellis and later at the Greenberg Traurig law and lobbying firm, where "she served as

the assistant director of governmental affairs.....

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/27/politics/27aide.html
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/102705A.shtml
Ms. Ralston's portfolio expanded at the White House this year, accompanied by an elevated job title and a significant raise.

In 2003, she held the position of executive assistant to the senior adviser and <b>earned $64,700, which was bumped to

$67,600 in 2004. This year, as Mr. Rove took on new duties as the deputy chief of staff, Ms. Ralston was promoted to special

assistant to the president and assistant to the senior adviser, earning $92,100.</b>

Now, people familiar with Ms. Ralston's work said, she functions as Mr. Rove's own chief of staff, coordinating the five

groups within the West Wing that he oversees.

or this:
http://www.philippinenews.com/news/view_article.html?article_id=5

45c047910d8be922c67368a1a27ee84
Ralston still 'at her desk working:' White House
Cristina DC Pastor, Dec 07, 2005
SUSAN RALSTON, according to the White House, remains a deputy assistant to President George W. Bush and a deputy of top presidential adviser Karl Rove..........