Pay To Play Politics

A very interesting report. Here are some excerpts.

Staff Report
U.S. House of Representatives
Committee on Government Reform
109th Congress
Tom Davis, Chairman
Henry A. Waxman, Ranking Member
September 29, 2006

...

In effect, Abramoff was selling information and entrée that shouldn’t need to be bought while making his clients pay inflated fees for access and influence that shouldn’t be for sale.

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The documents on which the report is based are drawn from the records of Abramoff’s former firm, Greenberg Traurig, and thus for the most part can tell only one side of the story. In many instances, there is little or no corroboration of the events described in the documents. In other instances, the documents are vague about who was lobbied and what was said. While the documents described in this report are authentic, that does not mean that the events actually transpired or that Abramoff and his associates did not exaggerate or misrepresent their actions. [italics mine]

...

In the case of the e-mails, however, the Committee requested only e-mails relating to “contacts between Mr. Abramoff, or individuals working with Mr. Abramoff, … and officials in the White House.”131 To facilitate searches of Greenberg database of Abramoff e-mails, the Committee staff provided Greenberg with specific terms to search for, which included the names of multiple White House officials.

Most of the e-mails received by the Committee are internal e-mails sent by Abramoff or an Abramoff associate to someone else on the Abramoff team at Greenberg. The e-mails include, however, over two hundred e-mail exchanges between Abramoff and his associates and White House officials.

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According to the billing records and e-mails, Abramoff and his Greenberg associates had 485 lobbying contacts with White House officials between January 2001 and March 2004. Of these instances of lobbying, 405 are described in the billing records and were billed to Abramoff clients. An additional 80 are described in the e-mail records produced by the firm.
Of the 485 instances of lobbying, 345 (71 percent) are described in the documents as meetings or other in-person interactions; 71 (15 percent) are described as phone conversations, and 69 (14 percent) are e-mail exchanges. In counting e-mail exchanges as instances of lobbying, a series of back-and-forth e-mail exchanges addressing a single subject is counted as a single contact.133

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The documents also reflect that the Abramoff team urged White House officials, including Karl Rove and Ken Mehlman, to intervene to remove from office a State Department employee, Allen Stayman, who opposed their efforts in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands. Todd Boulanger wrote, “It will be a great day when stayman is whacked.”291 Stayman was let go from his State Department post.

131 Letter from Chairman Tom Davis and Ranking Minority Member Henry A. Waxman to Kevin M. Downey, Williams and Connolly L.L.P. (Mar. 2, 2006).

133 In counting instances of lobbying over e-mail with White House officials, a number of contacts identified in the Greenberg documents were excluded. Excluded were (1) e-mails that appear to involve purely social events such as happy hours or birthday parties, (2) phone calls described in the e-mails as being placed to White House officials that may not have been returned, (3) e-mails to White House officials that did not appear to garner a response, and (4) e-mails on subjects unrelated to client issues, such as White House tours for family and friends. The e-mails contain over 200 contacts that were excluded for these reasons.

291 E-mail from Todd Boulanger to Kevin Ring, Jack Abramoff, et al. (June 14, 2001) (GTG-R006369).

The report goes on like this seemingly forever. Actually it is only 93 (PDF) pages.

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