The Return Of Malachi

It's one thing for disgraced Jack Abramoff buddy Ralph Reed to resurface at all in a Presidential election. It's another thing for him to headline a fundraiser for the Republican nominee. It's quite another for that nominee to be John McCain, who as chair of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee investigated Reed and Abramoff's bilking of tribes out of millions of dollars through fake Indian gaming ballot initiatives.

McCain's campaign said Tuesday that Reed has no official role in the presidential campaign. But that didn't stop Democrats from castigating Reed's participation in Monday's fund-raiser at the Marriott Marquis.

"John McCain's decision to cozy up to one of the central figures in the Republican culture of corruption shows how far he is willing to go to win," said Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean. "Despite all of his rhetoric about reform, McCain's willingness to accept money raised by tainted Abramoff cronies like Ralph Reed shows that McCain simply cannot be trusted to bring change to Washington politics."

The Georgia Democratic Party was even more blunt. "John McCain says he takes the high road, and then he comes to Atlanta and chows down on shrimp cocktail with an unindicted co-conspirator," party spokesman Martin Matheny said.

Reed is tied into all the disgraceful scandals of the Abramoff years, from the Indian gaming deals to forced slavery and sexual assault on the Marianas Islands:

In August 1999, political organizer Ralph Reed's firm sent out a mailer to Alabama conservative Christians asking them to call then-Rep. Bob Riley (R-Ala.) and tell him to vote against legislation that would have made the U.S. commonwealth of Northern Mariana Islands subject to federal wage and worker safety laws....

"The radical left, the Big Labor Union Bosses, and Bill Clinton want to pass a law preventing Chinese from coming to work on the Marianas Islands," the mailer from Reed's firm said. The Chinese workers, it added, "are exposed to the teachings of Jesus Christ" while on the islands, and many "are converted to the Christian faith and return to China with Bibles in hand."

A year earlier, the Department of the Interior -- which oversees federal policy toward the U.S. territory -- presented a very different picture of life for Chinese workers on the islands. An Interior report found that Chinese women were subject to forced abortions and that women and children were subject to forced prostitution in the local sex-tourism industry.

This is sad, but typical of a campaign fueled by lobbyist money and weighed down with multiple ties to Abramoff.

When Senator John McCain led a Senate investigation three years ago of Jack Abramoff, the disgraced lobbyist who later pleaded guilty to fraud charges, Mr. Abramoff’s old firm turned to a former McCain campaign adviser for help.

The firm, Greenberg Traurig, which had quickly cut its ties to Mr. Abramoff, hired Randy Scheunemann, who had been the McCain campaign’s foreign policy adviser in 2000 — and is again this year — for advice on handling the Senate investigation.

“After Greenberg Traurig severed ties to Mr. Abramoff, Mr. Scheunemann advised the law firm on how best to cooperate with the Senate investigation,” said Brian Rogers, a spokesman for the McCain campaign. “The record reflects that the law firm cooperated.”

(by the way, McCain basically let Abramoff off with a warning in his part of the investigation. He also never called his good buddy Reed to testify.)

My Congressman Henry Waxman today called on McCain to return any money Reed aided in raising for him. Waxman also noted this:

One reporter asked Waxman about the tens of thousands of documents McCain assembled in the course of his investigation but refuses to release to the public.

Waxman told us that John McCain has documents that even the House Oversight Committee couldn't get.

The House Abramoff probe also has a tie-in to the missing email scandal. Waxman's committee found that Abramoff was exchanging a lot of email with White House staffers, and not just through government accounts (as required by law).

In fact, the subpoenaed emails were the first indication that White House officials were doing public business over private email accounts, Waxman explained.

This is a complete racket. I'm glad that the Obama campaign is hammering McCain over his lobbyist ties, but the Abramoff-Reed nexus is the big kahuna. They should go deeper.