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Jack Abramoff
Last Updated: May 16, 2009

In his pursuit of tens of millions of dollars in lobbying fees, Jack Abramoff bribed politicians, laundered money, defrauded his clients, and befriended terrorists. At least one of his frauds led to murder. Yet the most chilling details of his corruption spree are the least often repeated: Abramoff learned of the Bush Administration’s intention to invade Iraq from a White House insider who was a guest in his luxury skybox, the alert coming a full seven months before Congress would vote to authorize the war; in that same skybox, a high-ranking member of the Justice Department tipped him to a classified investigation that uncovered grave security lapses in the Northern Marianas Islands. And they agreed that the man who ignited the investigation needed to be fired.

These two events provide a glimpse at the influence wielded over the Administration of President George W. Bush by Abramoff, possibly the most corrupt lobbyist in U.S. history.

Abramoff in 2006 began serving a nearly 6-year prison term for fraud and tax evasion, crimes not connected with his government corruption but to fraud he committed when he bought a stake in a fleet of Florida gambling boats. (He defrauded banks of $23 million in that case.)

He pleaded guilty to charges of fraud, tax evasion and bribing public officials in 2006 as well; after a two-year delay, while he helped federal prosecutors investigate the public officials and members of Congress who accepted his bribes, Abramoff was sentenced to another 4 years. (His sentences run concurrently, so he could stay in prison until 2012.)  By mid-2008, two years after his guilty plea, 12 public officials were charged or convicted of crimes related to Abramoff, but only one was a member of Congress – former Rep. Robert Ney, R-Ohio, who pleaded guilty to corruption charges in 2006 and served a year in federal prison. He was released in 2008.

Abramoff was so corrupt that he lobbied against his own clients, to keep the fees flowing, and so greedy he arranged to skim $25 million from the fees they paid.

His affairs were so enmeshed with those of the White House that his former assistant Susan Ralston went to work for the President’s top advisor, Karl Rove.

Rove and others in the White House routinely consulted Abramoff on federal policy. The House Oversight Committee counted the number of times Abramoff and his lobbyists had contact with Rove and other White House staffers, putting the number at 485. That figure does not include the secret meetings Rove and Abramoff held on sidewalks and street corners.

A FEW GOOD CONNECTIONS AND A LOT OF MONEY


Abramoff was a 1980s leader of the College Republicans, where he befriended Grover Norquist and Ralph Reed, both of whom would eventually lead their own GOP activist groups and work with Abramoff to defraud his clients.

Norquist used his nonprofit group Americans for Tax Reform to route money for Abramoff, when he wanted to hide where the cash was coming from. Norquist is a close adviser to President Bush; he also brought the president in contact with people who have links to terrorism. In 2000, Norquist began cultivating relationships with American Muslims, recruiting as a client Jamal al-Barzinji, an officer of several companies under investigation for terror financing. Norquist also represented Abdurrahman Alamoudi, serving 23 years in prison for conspiring with Libya to assassinate Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah. Alamoudi was photographed with President Bush in 2000.

Abramoff paid Reed’s lobbying firm Century Strategies more than $4 million between 1999 and 2002, which has landed him under federal investigation. In 2006, Reed ran for Lieutenant Governor of Georgia and lost, largely because of his relationship with Abramoff.

Of course, connections weren’t all that Abramoff had. The other key to his success was money.

Between 1998 and 2004, Abramoff and his wife donated $225,000 of their own money to Republican politicians, according to a special report by the Center for Responsive Politics. But he did not control only his own purse. He directed donations from his underlings and associates at the two firms that employed him (Preston Gates Ellis from 1994 to 2001; Greenberg Traurig from 2001 to 2004). He also controlled the purse strings of his clients, who, after paying him millions in lobbying fees, handed out another $5 million to 308 U.S. Senators and Congressmen. Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay received $44,000. Ney received $35,750. President Bush received $48,950.

Those are the legal campaign donations. Abramoff also wooed Congressmen,  their staffers and high-ranking federal employees with vacations, skybox seats at athletic events, concert tickets, dinners at one of the two restaurants he owned, gambling excursions on one of his casino boats and other similarly luxurious gifts. A select few, including Ney, accepted outright bribes.

To cover the millions that these bribes cost, he inflated the bills for his services, especially to the eight Native American Indian tribes that he represented, and encouraged clients to make donations to charities and political organizations that were really fronts for him and his associates.
In return, Abramoff’s powerful friends helped him and his clients grab land, win business disputes, circumvent inconvenient federal regulations and at least once for Abramoff himself, escape prosecution.

SWEATSHOPS AND NATIONAL SECURITY


Shortly after September 11th, the U.S. Attorney for Guam became worried about the immigration policies of the island. U.S. territories in the South Pacific, Guam and the Northern Marianas Islands at the time did not have to abide by the same immigration laws as the continental states. The islands are home to many garment manufacturing factories, the owners of which were Abramoff’s clients, paying him fees of about $7.7 million.

The sweatshops needed so much cheap labor that by 2001 guest workers outnumbered native island workers by 5 to 1. Acting U.S. Attorney Frederick Black became concerned that lax immigration rules could be exploited by terrorist groups, and he asked the FBI to check it out.

Within weeks of Black’s request, David Ayres, the chief of staff to Attorney General John Ashcroft, tipped Abramoff to the probe. Abramoff immediately shot off an email to his clients in the Marianas, assuring them he’d meet with Ashcroft to kill the report. He asked a Congressional aide he’d been bribing to get a copy of the report for him while it was still classified. (The aide, Mark Zachares, pleaded guilty to fraud in April 2007.) And White House Director of Political Affairs Ken Mehlman ordered White House staffers to keep Abramoff in the loop on all things related to Guam, the Marianas and Black.

Abramoff began pressing the White House to fire Black, and soon he would have even more incentive to succeed. In 2002, Black initiated an investigation into Abramoff himself. Judges on the islands’ Supreme Court had hired Abramoff to fight legislation they disliked, and they spent government money to pay him. Black heard of the arrangement and launched an investigation. He subpoenaed Abramoff in November 2002. A day later, President Bush fired Black.

The immigration report that Black requested ultimately confirmed his suspicions, finding immigration in the Marianas created a “critical vulnerability to the federal government.” But the Justice Department buried the report and demoted the analyst who wrote it.

After Abramoff went to prison, Congress in 2008 passed a law requiring the Northern Marianas and Guam to abide by U.S. immigration laws.

SLAVE LABOR AND THE HOUSE MAJORITY LEADER


Garment manufacturers in the Marianas were among Abramoff’s earliest and most lucrative clients. He was first hired by Henry Tan, whose family’s companies have been fined for forcing their immigrant Chinese workers into slavery-like conditions. The employees worked up to 90 hours a week at substandard wages and were coerced into signing contracts that forbade them from dating, marrying or having children. Women who did get pregnant were forced to have abortions in order to keep their jobs. The Northern Mariana Islands are a U.S. territory, and Congress in 1998 was considering legislation to bring the labor practices there in line with those in the United States. Tan, through the government of the Islands and through a garment manufacturers’ group there, hired Abramoff to kill that legislation.

He and his family and their companies spent about $200,000 of their own money on lobbying fees, but the Island’s government and the local garment manufacturers’ groups also spent more than $11 million on lobbying fees, most of it for Abramoff and his companies.

Abramoff’s key to his first victory for Tan was his cultivation of DeLay in the early years after he became House Majority Leader. Abramoff befriended DeLay’s top aide, Ed Buckham, and steered business to Buckham when he founded a lobbying firm of his own, the Alexander Strategy Group. In his first year as a solo lobbyist, Buckham took in as much as $500,000 from Abramoff-referred clients.

Once Buckham opened the door for him, Abramoff was soon showering DeLay with not only campaign contributions – at least $57,000 from Abramoff, his wife and his clients in four years – but with cash. With Buckham’s help, Abramoff used phony charities, phantom public interest groups, retirement funds and other ruses to collect money from his clients and route it into the bank accounts of DeLay and his wife Christine. The Washington Post estimated in 2006 that Abramoff managed to give the DeLays at least $490,000.

Abramoff also hosted DeLay on luxurious vacations, three of which are under investigation. One of those trips was a cold-season visit to the South Pacific Marianas in 1998, co-sponsored by Abramoff and Tan. After dining out and staying in beachfront resorts on the tab of the sweatshop owners, DeLay returned to the states, said the islands “represented what is best about America” and killed the labor legislation.

DeLay was indicted in 2005 on elections fraud and money laundering charges unrelated to his dealings with Abramoff. The FBI investigations of Buckham and DeLay continue, now with Abramoff’s help.

After Abramoff’s success in beating back labor reform, Tan turned to him again when he wanted to ensure the victory of his hand-picked candidate for Governor. Ben Fitial, a former vice president in Tan’s family company, lost his first race for governor in 2001, but with Abramoff’s help, succeeded in 2005. He was sworn in 2006.

DeLay helped promote Fitial’s candidacy, this time with an assist from Rep. John Doolittle, R-California. Abramoff threw campaign fundraisers for Doolittle in a skybox he rented with his clients’ money in 2000, just before Doolittle was appointed to the powerful House Appropriations Committee. After his re-election and appointment , Doolittle met twice with Fitial, then earmarked transportation projects for the Islands, at a cost of about $400,000. The grant helped Fitial campaign on a platform of bringing pork to the Pacific, and if that weren’t enough, Doolittle then wrote a letter praising Fitial.

Abramoff rewarded Doolittle in much the same way that he did DeLay – by routing money from his clients into the politician’s pockets. Doolittle’s wife, Julie, set up her own consulting firm, Sierra Dominion Financial Services, in 2001, and began collecting consulting fees almost immediately, most of them from Abramoff’s clients or cronies. Sierra Dominion received at least $66,000 in consulting fees from Abramoff-related clients. The FBI subpoenaed the firm’s financial records in 2005.

CASINOS, KICKBACKS AND THE CABINET


Despite the deep pockets of the Marianas sweatshop owners, they were not Abramoff’s most lucrative client. Over about five years, Abramoff collected about $85 million from several Native American tribes who sought to expand or protect their casinos.

The Department of the Interior oversees Native American tribes and reservations, and in 2002, Abramoff cultivated a contact high in the department to make sure his clients got what they needed.

Deputy Interior Secretary J. Steven Griles slipped Abramoff confidential information about internal discussions at the agency. On one occasion, he gave Abramoff a copy of a letter the department was drafting; on another, he advised Abramoff to get Congress to override an Interior Department decision.

Griles sent many of his communications to Abramoff through a third party, his then-girlfriend, Italia Federici. Federici was the president of the Council of Republicans for Environmental Advocacy, a nonprofit started by Norquist and then-Interior Secretary Gale Norton. As Abramoff’s clients donated nearly $500,000 to the nonprofit, Federici kept passing information between him and Griles.

Federici is also a former aide to Norton, who as Interior Secretary ignored ethics complaints about Griles’ relationship with lobbyists. The Interior Department Inspector General found in 2004 that Griles used his post at Interior to help clients of his former employer, an oil and gas lobbyist. That firm paid Griles $1 million while he was at Interior. Norton declined to fire, or even rebuke, him.

Griles and Federici both lied to protect Abramoff in federal investigations of his activities with the Interior Department. Griles pleaded guilty to lying to the Senate and was sentenced to 10 months in prison. Federici pleaded guilty to tax evasion and lying to Senate investigators. She was sentenced to 60 days in a halfway house and to pay $77,234 in restitution.

For all this work, Abramoff routinely betrayed the Native American tribes that employed him. He strong-armed them into hiring a public relations firm owned by his friend Michael Scanlon, and they agreed, paying Scanlon’s firm more than $30 million. But Scanlon kicked nearly $25 million of that back to Abramoff.

Abramoff also paid Ralph Reed’s lobbying firm $4 million to get Texas to close down a casino there; then he signed the tribe that owned the casino as a client, promising to lobby to re-open the casino. At Abramoff’s behest, the tribe paid $6 million to two Scanlon firms; the casino remained closed.

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