Moo Goo Saipan

The DeLay scandal gets bigger and bigger, and now we learn that crooked lobbyist Jack Abramoff's tentacles spread all the way to the White House.

The LA Times has this today:

SAIPAN, Northern Mariana Islands — Two former top aides of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay's brokered a political deal here five years ago that helped land island government contracts worth $1.6 million for a Washington lobbyist now the target of a federal corruption probe.

Using promises of U.S. tax dollars as bartering chips, Edwin A. Buckham and Michael Scanlon traveled to these remote Pacific islands in late 1999 to convince two local legislators to switch their votes for speaker of the territory's 18-member House of Representatives. They succeeded.

Once in office, the new speaker pressed the governor of the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands to reinstate an expired lobbying pact with Jack Abramoff, now under grand jury and congressional investigation.

Within months of the visit, Abramoff's law firm had a contract paying $100,000 a month from the Marianas government. Also, the island districts of the legislators who switched sides soon won federal budget benefits from Congress, apparently supported by DeLay.

This is pork-barrel politics, trading appropriations for votes, pushed to the extreme - outside the United States. The effect for citizens of Saipan (a US territory) was to deny them an increase in their minimum wage (pegged at a little over $3 an hour), keeping them in sweatshops making clothes for US companies that were allowed to have the "Made in the USA" label sown on them.

The New York Times adds to the Abramoff-Saipan story, showing that he was able to use his vast experience in ripping off brown people:

Many people say hiring Mr. Abramoff was a waste of money. Some accuse him of double-dealing the Marianas, one of his first big lobbying projects, in much the same way he is now accused of defrauding Indian tribes.

An adviser to Gov. Juan N. Babauta, Robert J. Schwalbach, said Mr. Abramoff's policy was "to play both sides against the middle and take the Marianas for millions of dollars in fees."

The documents released here this week - 22 pounds of billing statements, e-mail messages and sales pitches - help explain how Mr. Abramoff wooed this island chain with his connections to powerful Republicans who had recently taken over the United States Congress. He turned the Marianas into a destination for dozens of conservative thinkers and Congressional delegations, for some Democrats, but mostly Republicans.

Over six years, he and his law firm collected nearly $9 million from the Marianas. He also obtained work for friends. A $67,000 contract for one friend, Rabbi David Lapin, chief executive of Strategic Business Ethics Inc. of Los Angeles, to perform eight days of ethics training ballooned to $1.2 million a year later.

Finally, the AP brings this full circle, showing how Abramoff, a big-time fundraiser for President Bush in 2000, was using his influence in the White House to get government contracts for Saipan:

In President Bush's first 10 months, GOP fundraiser Jack Abramoff and his lobbying team logged nearly 200 contacts with the new administration as they pressed for friendly hires at federal agencies and sought to keep the Northern Mariana Islands exempt from the minimum wage and other laws, records show.

The meetings between Abramoff's lobbying team and the administration ranged from Attorney General John Ashcroft to policy advisers in Vice President Dick Cheney's office, according to his lobbying firm billing records.

That's a whole lot of political capital just to make sure islanders can't make more than $25 a day. But then the President pulls the "Who's Jack Abramoff?" excuse later in the article:

White House spokeswoman Erin Healy said Thursday that Bush didn't consider Abramoff a friend. "They may have met on occasion, but the president does not know him," she said.

As for the number of Abramoff lobbying team contacts with Bush officials documented in the billing records, Healy said: "We do not know how he defines 'contacts.'"

Abramoff has been cut loose by the Republican Party, but he is simply too tangled with them, all of them, to go quietly. And his scent of lying and stealing and corruption will continue to stink up the right side of the aisle for years to come. That's why Reform Democrats have their best chance in years of taking back the House in '06.