Jack Abramoff

One of the Republican crime family finishes his sentence:

Former congressman Bob Ney of Ohio has been released from a halfway house in Cincinnati after serving a sentence in connection with a public corruption scandal.
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Ney has served nearly a year-and-a-half of his original two-and-a-half-year prison sentence. The sentence was reduced after he completed treatment for alcohol problems.

Just one of the many touched by the Abramoff corruption. Ask McCain how Ralph Reed is doing.

Ralph Reed, former business partner of Jack Abramoff, will be holding a fundraiser for John McCain. Democrats should have fun with this one.

It is really looking that way:

In a December 2002 email obtained by the Huffington Post -- which McCain and his staff had access to prior to the issuance of his report -- Abramoff explains to an aide what he would like to see Riley do in return for the "help" he received from Abramoff's tribal clients.

An official with the Mississippi Choctaws "definitely wants Riley to shut down the Poarch Creek operation," Abramoff wrote, "including his announcing that anyone caught gambling there can't qualify for a state contract or something like that."

The note showed not only the reach of Abramoff, but raised questions about Riley's victory in what was the closest gubernatorial election in Alabama history.

And yet, despite the implications of the information, McCain and the Senate Indian Affairs Committee sat on the controversial portion of the email. According to an official familiar with the investigation, McCain also subsequently refused to make the email public after the report was released.

Read the entire report here.

Mr. Righteous the maverick has accepted some money from none other than Jack Abramoff.

We find out that the person in charge of the division investigating the Abramoff scandal had to resign because of his ties to Abramoff:

A senior Justice Department official has resigned after coming under scrutiny in the Department’s expanding investigation of convicted super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff, according to a Justice Department official with knowledge of the case.

Making the situation more awkward for the embattled Department, the official, Robert E. Coughlin II, was deputy chief of staff for the criminal division, which is overseeing the Department’s probe of Abramoff.

He stepped down effective April 6 as investigators in Coughlin’s own division ratcheted up their investigation of lobbyist Kevin Ring, Coughlin’s long-time friend and a key associate of Abramoff.

Yup - Gonzales is a great leader. Hell let's bring back Hoffa and he can run the organized crime division.  

Raw Story has the details.

The FBI has raided the home of Republican Congressman John Doolitle according to Roll Call (via the Muckraker):

The FBI has raided the Northern Virginia home of Rep. John Doolittle (R-Calif.), according to Congressional sources. No details are publicly available yet about the circumstances of the raid, but Doolittle and his wife, Julie, have been under federal investigation for their ties to the scandal surrounding imprisoned former lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

Time to bring ethics back into focus. Time to remind the people why they voted for Democrats.

Perhaps this from the WSJ Blogs gives a good reason:

If there’s any doubt about the importance of getting a record of Senate investigative interviews, consider the case of J. Steven Griles.

Griles, the former deputy Interior secretary, pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in Washington today to lying to Senate investigators when he was asked about the nature of his relationship with disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who was trying to help clients on matters before the Interior Department. Abramoff, in prison after pleading guilty to felony charges, has been aiding a wider investigation that has netted eight convictions or plea deals for the Justice Department.

A transcript of the Senate interview is what helped get Griles in trouble. (See the plea agreement.) Former White House aide David Safavian found himself in similar hot water, and was convicted earlier this year on charges that included lying to Senate investigators.

So we have a conviction based upon administration officials lying to Senate and with that we should just "trust them"? Sure and I bet Bush has a war he wants to sell us also!

(h/t TPM)

Thanks to Nichole we have this flashback where Bush had the prosecutor in Guam removed. The prosecutor had a grand jury and was investigating none other than Jack Abramoff:

A US grand jury in Guam opened an investigation of controversial lobbyist Jack Abramoff more than two years ago, but President Bush removed the supervising federal prosecutor, and the probe ended soon after.

The previously undisclosed Guam inquiry is separate from a federal grand jury in the District of Columbia that is investigating allegations that Abramoff bilked Indian tribes out of millions of dollars.

In Guam, a US territory in the Pacific, investigators were looking into Abramoff's secret arrangement with Superior Court officials to lobby against a court reform bill then pending in Congress. The legislation, since approved, gave the Guam Supreme Court authority over the Superior Court.

This was not some "Clinton left over" attorney. The prosecutor fired as actually appointed by the first President Bush:

The transactions were the target of a grand jury subpoena issued Nov. 18, 2002, according to the subpoena. It demanded that Anthony Sanchez, administrative director of the Guam Superior Court, turn over all records involving the lobbying contract, including bills and payments.

A day later, the chief prosecutor, US Attorney Frederick A. Black, who had launched the investigation, was demoted. A White House news release announced that Bush was replacing Black.

The timing caught some by surprise. Despite his officially temporary status as the acting US attorney, Black had held the assignment for more than a decade.

The acting US attorney was a controversial official in Guam. At the time he was replaced, Black was directing a long-term investigation into allegations of public corruption in the administration of then-Governor Carl Gutierrez. The probe produced numerous indictments, including some of the governor's political associates and top aides.

Black, 56, had served as acting US attorney for Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands since 1991, when he was named to the post by the president's father, President George H. W. Bush.

So why did Bush fire one of his father's appointees? All evidence points to the fact he was investigating Abramoff. This is the same Abramoff that the White House denied time and time again having any involvement with until visitor logs showed he had met there numerous times.

Do we have enough for impeachment yet or is a blow job still much more serious than destroying our system of justice? If the Republicans are so tired of Bush and Cheney and think Pelosi is so evil then why don't they start supporting impeachment calls? They could use a "President Pelosi" as their campaign issue in 2008? Of course they are probably scared that Pelosi would take over and do things right and America become a happy nation again.

Jack shit that is, because Jack Abramoff, well CREW has found out a different story.

Check out CREW's blog for more!

The final nail in the GOP coffin this election season would be if the DOJ announced a bunch more indictments in the Abramoff scandal. We know this is not about to happen, but this little bit of information gives us insight into the possibility that they will becoming after elections:

Jack Abramoff, the lobbying scandal figure, has become such a chatty rat that probe insiders say he's been given a desk to work at in the FBI. We're told he spends up to four hours a day detailing his shady business to agents eager to nail more congressmen in the scandal. And when cooperative witnesses spend that much time inside, they get a desk. As a result of his help in the ever expanding investigation, we hear that the Feds hope to keep him in a nearby prison after he's sentenced on his conspiracy admission.

It is amazing to think that Abramoff was so crooked as to require such treatment and time commitments to bring down more in Abramoff. Of course it has been the job of reporters and watchdog groups to bring this sort of corruption to the attention of officials. The Republicans have failed to do any investigating and instead chose to lead with the attitude that they are above the law.

Voters (especially GOP leaning voters) need to seriously ask themselves if they want to vote for someone who may ultimately end up being removed from office due to their improprieties with Jack. 

Since Bob Ney pleaded guilty Friday, we now have a felon sitting on the United States House of Representatives. Now he has said he will resign in the future and the Republicans have vowed to vote him out, but that will not happen until after their recess, which means Ney will continue to draw a salary from U.S. taxpayers.

This needs to become another key Democratic issue. Republicans really pissed America off last year when they all flew back into D.C., from around the country, late on a Sunday night in order to vote if they should step in on the Terri Schiavo fiasco. That was the first time in our nation's history that Congress has tried to intervene on an issue that affects only one person. The fact that a felon is now getting paid by U.S. taxpayers because the Republicans are to worried about themselves and won't take a vigilant stance is effecting the entire country.

Should our Congress be in the practice of harboring felons? That is exactly what they are doing right now. Ney's decision to plead guilty was no surprise either. We have known about it for a couple of months. Why didn't Congress take action before leaving? They knew damn well it was coming, and even what day it was coming on for well over a month.

What is really disturbing is the fact that Felons are not allowed to vote, yet we allow one to stay on the U.S. payroll and remain an active member of Congress? Oh I get it. To Republicans if you are poor, black, Hispanic or just not one of them, then if you commit a crime you loose your right to vote, even after paying your debt to society. If you are some white-Christian Republican, then you can remain in power even after you have confessed to your crimes, but yet start to repay your debt to society.

Let's sum that up. This man has not been convicted of a crime yet, however Republicans are demanding he be removed from office (and the Democrats have already removed him from all his committees, taking the vigilant stand).

This guy is now a convicted felon, convicted of crimes against the U.S. taxpayers. The Republicans not only left him on his committees after he was deep into the Abramoff scandal (Ney finally resigned from them - the Republicans remained complacent), but are now letting him continue to receive a paycheck footed by taxpayers of the United States.

I guess these are the "true Conservative values" we hear about all the time. This is another layer, and a new low, to the Republican culture of corruption.

(ps. Remember Gerry Studds. The man was never convicted of a crime because the 17 year old page he had sex with was at the age of consent. To this day the Republicans are crying that the Democrats never voted to remove him, even after his own constituents voted to keep him in office. This is a big new talking point, and a counter point to all the Studds arguments that the Republicans try to use.)

The hero. The idol. The man they set up on a pedestal for the entire conservative movement is now implicated in the Jack Abramoff scandal:

Five conservative nonprofit organizations, including one run by prominent Republican Grover Norquist, "perpetrated a fraud" on taxpayers by selling their clout to lobbyist Jack Abramoff, Senate investigators said in a report issued today.

The report includes previously unreleased e-mails between the now-disgraced lobbyist and officers of the nonprofit groups, showing that Abramoff routed money from his clients to the groups. In exchange the groups, among other things, produced ostensibly independent newspaper op-ed columns or press releases that favored the clients' positions.

Officers of the groups "were generally available to carry out Mr. Abramoff's requests for help with his clients in exchange for cash payments," said the report, issued by the Democratic members of the Senate Finance Committee after a one-year investigation.

So if you don't like taxes then that means you should be able to take them from people? If that is the new way of thinking in our country then I hate marijuana and will now take it from people (for proper disposal of course ;) )

This weekend amazed me. During all the talk shows hardly a word was mention about the resignation of Susan Ralston. Instead all focus was on the Foley scandal yet again. Ralston's resignation is equally, if not more, important than Foleygate.

Ralston was Karl Rove's top aide. You could say she was to Karl Rove what Karl Rove is to Bush (she was Rove's Rove). The reasoning for her resignation is very troubling and shows an extreme lapse in our national security:

A top aide to White House strategist Karl Rove resigned Friday after disclosures that she accepted gifts from and passed information to now-convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff, becoming the first official in the West Wing to lose a job in the influence-peddling scandal.

(emphasis mine).

Something that must be asked is what information Ralston passed to Abramoff. It is bad enough that a now convicted felon had 485 visits to the White House, but just as troubling is Abramoff's super Zionistic life. Abramoff was using much of his money to help fund militias in Israel. Now we must ask the question, "If Ralston was passing secrets to Abramoff, was Abramoff in turn passing secrets to these Israeli militias?".

It is troubling that the intelligence committees in both the House and Senate are not looking more into a possible breach of our national security. Of course with the Republican leadership, nothing Bush does is wrong. This is why we need the media to spend a little less time on Foley and a lot more time on Ralston and Abramoff. Their ignoring of this story could be detrimental to our nation's security.

A large number of these contacts were with Karl Rove and Ken Mehlman.

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Roll Call has much more on this bomb shell.