Yahoo! has posted new links between Bush and Abramoff which puts them in bed together for a very very long time, even while he was governor of Texas.
WASHINGTON - In President Bush's first year in the White House, the administration had roughly 200 contacts with Republican fundraiser Jack Abramoff and his lobbying team as they sought to influence Bush's hires and pressed him to keep the Northern Mariana Islands free from the minimum wage law, documents show.
There's lots of goodies in here:
"Our standing with the new administration promises to be solid as several friends of the CNMI (islands) will soon be taking high-ranking positions in the Administration, including within the Interior Department," Abramoff wrote in a January 2001 letter in which he persuaded the island government to follow him as a client to his new lobbying firm, Greenberg Traurig.
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His firm boasted that its lobbying team helped revised a section of the Republican Party's 2000 platform to make it favorable to its island client.
In addition, two of Abramoff's lobbying colleagues on the Marianas won political appointments to federal agencies: Patrick Pizzella, named an assistant secretary of labor by Bush, and David Safavian, chosen by Bush to oversee federal procurement policy in the Office of Management and Budget.
"We have worked with WH Office of Presidential Personnel to ensure that CNMI-relevant positions at various agencies are not awarded to enemies of CNMI," Abramoff's team wrote the Marianas in an October 2001 report on its work for the year.
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Abramoff's team didn't neglect party politics either: There were at least two meetings with
Republican National Committee officials, including then-finance chief Jack Oliver, as well as attendance at GOP fundraisers.
The records obtained by AP provide a detailed accounting of daily dealings between Abramoff and his team and government officials, and talk in raw terms about the lobbyist's campaign to convince Congress the U.S. territory was not home to sweatshops.
Let the hearings begin!