The Abramoff affair: Corruption scandal threatens Republican control of US Congress

Scanlon’s guilty plea—and even more his agreement to cooperate fully with federal prosecutors and testify against former colleagues—has sent a chill through Republican ranks and raised the prospect of numerous indictments, convictions and jail terms for congressmen and congressional staffers as well as Bush administration officials involved in the rampant corruption of official Washington.

By the end of last week, there were press reports that at least four Republican legislators and 17 staffers and former staffers were the targets of the Justice Department investigation into the Abramoff affair. The Wall Street Journal named DeLay, Congressman Robert Ney of Ohio, Congressman John Doolittle of California, and Senator Conrad Burns of Montana as targets, as well as several former Bush administration officials. The Washington Post reported that prosecutors had informed Congressman Ney that he was the subject of a bribery investigation and added that the wives of DeLay and Doolittle had also been linked to Abramoff’s influence-peddling schemes.

The Abramoff affair could have much wider implications. A reporter for BusinessWeek, on a television interview program, said that his Justice Department sources had told him that as many as 60 congressmen could be implicated in the bribery scandal—far more than enough to threaten control over the House of Representatives, where the Republican majority is 231-202, with one independent.

The Associated Press named eight more congressmen and senators who received contributions engineered by Abramoff in return for political favors, four Republicans and four Democrats. The Republicans were congressmen Charles Taylor of North Carolina, J. D. Hayworth of Arizona, Todd Tiahrt of Kansas and Dave Camp of Michigan. The Democrats included three senators, Carl Levin and Debbie Stabenow of Michigan and Byron Dorgan of North Dakota (the senior Democrat on the committee now investigating the Abramoff affair), and Congressman Dale Kildee of Michigan.

Previous press accounts have noted that House Speaker Dennis Hastert of Illinois, a Republican, and the leading Democrat in the Senate, Minority Leader Harry Reid, received substantial campaign contributions from groups directed by Abramoff, most of them Indian tribes seeking congressional favors for their casino gambling operations.

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The Abramoff affair: Snapshots from an empire of corruption

Many episodes in Abramoff’s relations with various congressmen have already been given considerable exposure in newspaper accounts and court filings. What follows is a summary of the most revealing:

Christian fundamentalists and Internet gambling

In what seems to have been a dress rehearsal for the Coushatta Indian shakedown, Abramoff and Tony Rudy, a senior aide to then-House Majority Whip Tom DeLay, induced a prominent Christian fundamentalist to intervene against a bill restricting Internet gambling, without telling him that Abramoff was working on behalf of eLottery, a Connecticut-based e-gambling company.

In the spring and summer of 2000, after the Internet Gambling Prohibition Act had passed the Senate and was moving through the House of Representatives, Abramoff was hired by eLottery to spike it. He arranged for a $25,000 payment from eLottery to a foundation which hired Rudy’s wife as a consultant, then himself hired Rudy as a lobbyist after the gambling bill was defeated.

As reported by the Washington Post October 16, Abramoff hit on the idea of inducing Christian fundamentalists to oppose the ban on e-gambling on the grounds that it did not go far enough, since the bill had loopholes to protect established horse-racing and jai alai interests. To disguise the source of funds, he had $150,000 funneled from eLottery through Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform, then to a fundamentalist lobby called the Faith and Family Alliance, then to Ralph Reed’s Century Strategies company, before it reached the Rev. Louis P. Sheldon of the Traditional Values Coalition. Sheldon, apparently unwitting, came out publicly against the Internet gambling bill, breaking with other fundamentalist groups like the Moral Majority and Focus on the Family.

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