Perhaps Jack Abramoff said it best:
"Any important Republican who comes out and says they didn't know me is almost certainly lying," he says. Such lies are not just, well, lies, but dumb to boot, he adds, for, as his own humiliations suggest, old e-mails never die; they just sit on hard drives, waiting to be subpoenaed and then to be leaked to the press. "This is not an age when you can run away from facts," he declares. "I had to deal with my records, and others will have to deal with theirs."
I've been swimming through Republican corruption. Over the last couple of months I've been trying to compile a list of Republican candidates in this cycle who have multiple links to Jack Abramoff and the slush fund he was managing for the GOP.
Earlier this year, a reporter told Newshour:
EAMON JAVERS: I have one source who says it could be as many as 60 members of Congress that they are looking at.
I think he might be right.
Join me on the jump to meet The Abramoff 64 (34 in competitive races)...
Javers may have had a good source, but the DOJ investigation will not conclude before November (it will take years). And the source wasn't even factoring in the Duke Cunningham scandal in the tally. Plus, there are dozens of other scandals waiting in the wings if oversight ever returns to Capital Hill.
This is a very complicated conspiracy. You will not be able to convict DeLay, Ney, Doolittle, and the gang, until you understand the mechanics of the pay-for-play system of corruption. The professionals at the DOJ seem to be focused on building the case and not the politics. That is a good sign.
We are not constrained by the rules of evidence required to support a criminal charge. We can make the political case. There are enough connections to Jack Abramoff to hold these candidates and their Party accountable this November.
My list of Abramoff connected races in 2006 has grown.
At the beginning of August it was 21. Last week it was 53.
Now it is 64 Races: 5 for Governor, 4 for Senate and 53 for the House. Of these races, 34 have been identified as competitive by various outlets.
They are presented in a table below (if the formatting works), but more on that in a moment.
There are 64 names on the list,, but if I kept digging it could have easily grown. Virtually every elected Republican official in Washington is connected to Abramoff by one degree of separation. And if I used the standard that the AP and others use to tie Democrats to Abramoff, then every Republican Candidate in this cycle would make the cut.
But, as I've mentioned before, I'm just posting a Diary as part of the Daily Kos community, so I'll have to set the bar a little higher than the AP's John Solomon.
After all, you will let me know if I get things wrong and I respect your insights. It helps me sharpen the research and improve the usefulness of this work for this election cycle. So please, let me know if I've missed anything.
To make this list, a Republican candidate had to have multiple points of contact with Jack Abramoff, his team and/or his clients. I paid special attention to contacts involving Jack's work to protect the system of sweatshops, human trafficking, force prostitution and forced abortion on the Commonwealth of North Mariana Islands (CNMI) for fun, power and profit.
I looked across six main areas of contact between Abramoff and the GOP. Here they are:
1: Money
Candidates with contributions directly from Jack and the other lobbyists from his team (Scanlon, Rudy, Volz, Buckham, Ring and Safavian) and their spouses/family made the list. And so did the folks who pocketed contributions from the Tan Family and the sweatshop lobby on Saipan. Over the last 10 years this small part of the GOP slush fund Abramoff managed moved $825,192 in recorded donations to Republican candidates.
It is a very small fraction of the money Abramoff's GOP slush fund moved to the GOP, but it does point to Jack's Team of elected officials.
And I looked at even more donations from the Slush Funds main lobbying firms (Preston Gates, Alexander Strategy, Greenburg Traurig and more). Then there were all the contributions from Abramoff's other clients and the clients of Abramoff trained lobbyists.
Another source of funds I looked for was GOP Leadership PAC donations, especially the ones funded by Abramoff, his team and his clients. And candidates who got money from Leadership PACs controlled by Jack's inner circle of Congressmen and Senators stood a good chance of making the list. Under the GOP the Leadership PACs work as a series of connected washing machines to launder money to hide pay-offs for earmarks and other favors. Abramoff and Duke Cunningham are just the tip of the iceberg ripping through Capital Hill.
Another source of funds was the $13.5 million that Jack and the slush fund ran through the stealth GOP PAC, United Seniors Association in 2002. The backdoor donations were used to support 25 GOP candidates in that mid-term election. There were (and are) quite a few of these GOP controlled Stealth PACs.
In addition to the FEC reported donations there are also solid reports of some off-the-books donations, trips, freebies, meals and jobs for family and friends of elected officials and their staffs. Candidate tied to Jack through creative financial reimbursements always made the list.
2: Staff Connections
Abramoff was the point of the spear for the K Street Project. He trained a generation of GOP lobbyists and staffers in his way of doing "business". He was also a legendary head of the College Republicans in the early 1980s. In his lobbying days, Jack always made time to mentor the youngsters at the CRNC.
Candidates who had a staffer who went to work for Jack, or one of Jack's Team members who went to work the candidate made the list. So did those with ties to Jack through their College Republican days. And the candidates whose staff took trips on Jack's dime to the Marianas Islands (and other destinations) made the list.
If you want to see if a particular GOP candidate has an Abramoff connection, a good place to start is a list of their staff members over the years. Almost everybody on Team Abramoff (except Jack) spent time on Capital Hill. Feel free to send me a list of staff members for any of the 53 or any other candidates who should be added to the list.
3: Travels with Jack
Abramoff used travel. It started back in the 1980s and it never stopped. By some accounts over 100 Congressmen and their staffers traveled to CNMI between 1996 and 1999. The actual number is much higher, especially when you look for travel between 1995 and 2004.
Almost every scam in Jack's portfolio involved trips and how to hide the payment, purpose and travelers from required disclosure. If a candidate or their staff was cited in published reports or other records as traveling on Jack's dime or to support Jack's clients they made the list, especially if they took the junket to the Marianas Islands.
Let me know if I missed somebody.
4: The Public Record
There is a rich public record of Abramoff's connections to GOP Candidates in this cycle. Some are reports after Abramoff's fall from grace in 2004. Others are reports from 1980 through January 2004 when Jack was at the height of his power. Candidates with long time ties to Abramoff through these reports made the list. So did the candidates who traveled to the Marianas Islands to support the GOP's Hong Kong based sweatshop owning patrons who run the US Territory as a feudal fiefdom. The local press on Saipan and Guam reported many connections to Abramoff, especially the Tan Family's newspaper, the Saipan Tribune.
The reports and records of human rights workers trying to end the abuse on CNMI was another source. Candidates who made these reports as sweatshop protectors made the list.
And then there is the Congressional record and transcripts of many hearings, as well as some legal documents.
If you know something in the public record that connect a candidate to Abramoff let me know, especially if I've left them off the list.
5: Billing Records/Emails
There are thousands of pages of emails, memos and other records related to Abramoff's lobbying work. Some have been released. Some have not. The Indian Affairs Committee reviewed over 80,000 pages of documents and released around 2,000 pages of documents and testimony. While these were scrubbed to protect Republican Members of Congress, the Senate and George Bush, there are still quite a few documents that connected some members to Abramoff, especially when compared with other bits of information.
A better set of documents is the billing records and emails for Jack's lobbying work for the CNMI Government. These records were collected as part of a 2001 audit of all the lobbying expenses that the CNMI government paid for between 1994 and the end of 2001. The audit was done by the CNMI Office of Public Auditor (OPA) and the records were released to various news outlets in the last couple of years. I have a set.
The billing records are day by day details of Team Abramoff's efforts to protect sweatshops and shower their Chinese Patrons with favorable earmarks, appropriations and laws. If a candidate repeatedly made the Abramoff's CNMI invoices, they made the list.
The CNMI invoices are incomplete. They represent only a fraction of Abramoff's work. It is a core sample of how Lobbying in the Gingrich/DeLay/Bush era of incompetence and corruption is conducted. These are roadmaps of graft.
6: Congressional Favors
In a few cases the CNMI invoices or press reports have tied a candidate to an official action taken for Jack Abramoff. More often than not, the official action is only implied. In these cases I looked to see if a candidate was in a position to help Jack and his clients. If they were a member of DeLay's House Leadership, on the Resources Committee, and/or on the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee (or the Senate equivalent) they stood a good chance of making the list, especially if the had Abramoff connections in other categories. The same is true of the Appropriations Committee and a few others on specific issues.
And then there is the hunt for the quid pro quo, the search for the payback. In 2001 alone it looks like Congress found an extra $28 million for various projects just on CNMI. There are a lot of earmarks to search through. And the CNMI was just one of Jack's clients.
Abramoff could deliver massive amounts of dollars to an election cycle whenever and where ever the Party was in trouble. That gave him power and access. Candidates who were in a position to do Jack favors made the list. Especially when they were rewarded with donations and/or choice Committee assignments around the time of an action that helped Abramoff and his clients.
The table below has four columns:
The Race:
This is the alpha sort of the list. I've added links to Daily Kos Dairies about the races that have been identified as competitive by the Cook Report and MyDD. There are quite a few other assessment of competitive races in this cycle, but I thought these two were helpful. Another source to check out is C-Span's and CQ's new Campaign Network site (the interactive map is fun).
The Corrupt Republican:
This provides the name and a link to Daily Kos Dairies or other sources to help you meet the scoundrel.
The JA Connection:
I looked at the six areas of connection between a candidate and Abramoff that are mentioned above. All 6 Areas means a candidate had multiple connections with Jack across the board. For the rest, each number corresponds to the area where they are connected with Abramoff. For example: a "1" means they took money; a "2" means there are staff connections; a "3" means travels with Jack; a "4" means connections cited in public records; a "5" means a mention in billing records or emails; and a "6" means they were in a position to do Jack favors on Capital Hill. If you notice something I missed, please let me know.
Democratic Opponent
Meet our team. In most cases they are challenging Republican incumbents (I've added an "i" after Democratic incumbents). There are links to their Web sites or their DCCC page for each candidate. Please use them to offer your time, energy and money to help these folks win in November.
One more note. The formatting of the table is leaving a lot of space before it begins in the preview mode, so just keep scrolling down until it starts.
I hope this helps to make the list clear.
So, let's meet The Abramoff 64:
In addition to the 34 competitive races, I think it is important to give some support to the other 30 races on the list.
Some have the opportunity to be upsets if the wave is big enough. All have the potential to at least weaken a GOP punk in advance of another run at them in 2008.
CA-41, IL-14, MO-07, MT-AL, UT-03, VA-07, VA-11, and WV-02 are all races that I think we should watch and support.
And in a perfect world, Don Young, Dana Rohrbacher and Ralph Hall would be defeated because they are Sweatshop protecting, human trafficking enabling, immoral pricks (IMHO). Perhaps that will be the case by 2008.
And then there is George W. Bush and Ben Fitial, the Governor of CNMI. It really is hard to tell who is the most corrupt, but I'm going to have to give this one to the shifty fella from Texas.
And there is a host of other players as well, like former Congressmen Matt Salmon and Bob Schaffer. If they were still in Congress, they would both be in Bob Ney territory. As it is they are heading the Republican Party in their States. Salmon is bringing his brand of corruption to Arizona and Schaffer now heads the Colorado GOP into the Heart of Darkness.
Then there is Ralph Reed, Grover Norquist, Ken Mehlman, Karl Rove and the rest of the Abramoff's partners in crime in GOP circles of power.
They all need to be brought to justice.
A Democratic victory is they best course of action and the fastest route to justice for these scoundrels who used a system of sweatshops, human trafficking, force prostitution and forced abortion to fund their rise to power. (And their work on CNMI is just one of their many crimes).
Please support a Democratic victory with your time, energy and money. The list above includes links to the Democrats who will defeat these scoundrels on November 7th.
2006 is now.
Let's take our Country back.