With so many scandals it's hard to keep focused. Everyday another GOP Culture of Corruption bombshell bursts. It's mind blowing. The GOP defense seems to be to flood the zone with so many scandals that citizens will get bored and attribute scandal to ALL politicians.
I know that Democrats have their problems, but their scandals are not in the same league as the GOP. It's like equating Major League Baseball and whiffleball. They are very different.
At the hub of the GOP scandal is Jack Abramoff. As he said in the current Vanity Fair:
"Any important Republican who comes out and says they didn't know me is almost certainly lying," he says. Such lies are not just, well, lies, but dumb to boot, he adds, for, as his own humiliations suggest, old e-mails never die; they just sit on hard drives, waiting to be subpoenaed and then to be leaked to the press. "This is not an age when you can run away from facts," he declares. "I had to deal with my records, and others will have to deal with theirs."
While it has receded somewhat from the front page, the Abramoff scandal is getting ready to "kick it up a notch"...
Quietly, the Abramoff scandal is brewing towards the next eruption.
While his DC sentence has been pushed back to June, his sentenced in Florida for crimes connected to his purchase of the SunCruz fleet of offshore gambling ships is scheduled for March 29. I expect more Abramoff stories and leaks to come out in the lead-up to the 29th. As Jack's lawyers have made clear:
Abramoff attorney Abbe Lowell warned that the defense would disclose information about the ongoing corruption investigation to demonstrate the level of Abramoff's cooperation, something that could affect Abramoff's sentence in the fraud case. [snip] "We will name names," Lowell said...
Back in January, some were predicting that as many as 60 Congressmen/women and their staff could be indicted. To me that sounds about right. There are dozens of shockers waiting in the wings.
The case is developing on many fronts:
There are many more developments I could add to the list, but perhaps it would be best to point you to
TPMmuckkraker.com. This new site can not be celebrated enough.
Some months ago Josh Marshall over at Talking Points Memo raised funds to hire two investigated reporters/bloggers to dig deep into the growing GOP Culture of Corruption. Paul Kiel and Justin Rood have been hired and they are busy. TPMmuckkraker.com is a must read for me. I find myself checking in every few hours.
Today they merged the Abramoff scandal and the Duke Cunningham scandal into the one growing GOP slimeball.
They took the reporting of the San Diego Union-Tribune on the money Julie Doolittle was paid as a commission on fundraising for her husband from Duke sugar daddy Brent Wilkes. It seems that Julie and John got to pocket 15% or $15,000 of the Wilkes campaign contribution as Julie's "commission". The team at TPMmuckkraker took it from there to look at Julie's other clients:
Julie Doolittle has a consulting firm called Sierra Dominion Financial Solutions. Two of her clients are her husband's leadership PAC and campaign, for which she does fundraising. She gets a 15% commission on contributions. Doolittle's hilarious justification for paying her on commission is that she has to work for her money, "because if you don't raise any money you don't get paid." [snip]
So this was in effect free money. Doolittle was in a very strong position to raise funds. By his own admission, his wife even got a cut of contributions resulting from his fundraising calls - all she had to do was bring him the list.
And let's not forget here that Abramoff, his associates and clients gave Doolittle some $140,000 in contributions since 1999. How much did Julie Doolittle get of that?
But it gets fishier.
Doolittle has said that he is not his wife's major client. But the SDUT reports that she's gotten $180,000 in commissions since late 2001 - so she brings in around $60,000 a year from just his business, even though he's supposedly a minor client. Neither Doolittle nor his wife will say who those other clients are, and as Josh points out, of the only other three that we know about, two are Jack Abramoff's restaurant and charity, and the other is connected to Ed Buckham, another player in the Abramoff scandal.
So all of Julie Doolittle's other business we know about just points to a more direct means of paying the Doolittles.
Buckham, in addition to working closely with Abramoff, was Wilkes' lobbyist. And according to the SDUT, Julie Doolittle was working in Buckham's office when Doolittle met Wilkes. She was doing "bookkeeping" for one of Buckham's non-profits there. It's never been reported how much she was paid for this. Buckham's firm Alexander Strategy Group paid Tom DeLay's wife Christine $3,200/month for her work for them. How much was Julie Doolittle getting?
It's pretty amazing to think of what a jack of all trades this Julie Doolittle is. She did fundraising for Doolittle, bookkeeping for Buckham, and "public relations and other event planning services" for Abramoff. It almost seems like the job description was an afterthought, wouldn't you say?
And this is what the TPM Muckraking team came up with on a Sunday afternoon. No wonder why I love this new site!
And this is digging into the funds paid to just one Congressional wife. There are dozens more. Every dollar leads to more corruption.
Doolittle is now part of the walking dead (like Ney, Burns and DeLay). There are more GOP zombies and the Abramoff scandal is flushing them out.
From Congress to the Bush Administration there are dozens who are connected to the Abramoff scandal. Right now hundreds of bloggers, reporters, investigators, prosecutors, researchers and citizens are digging into the various scandal threads: campaign donations, money to spouses, "charities" and GOP think tanks, Jack's lobbying clients, trips, meals and more. As they untangle each thread though the rat's nest of GOP corruption they are all looking for one thing: the pay-for-play moment. The Bribe. The payoff. The connection between money and legislative action.
The stories about those connections are just around the corner.
I've posted about Abramoff for some time now and have been researching him since 1999.
I expect some big stories to break soon. I expect that the Washington Post has a major story in the works and that several other publications are close behind. And the net roots are breaking new details everyday.
This is where it gets interesting.
And remember, this is a GOP scandal. A donation from an Abramoff client alone means nothing. It is the pay-for-play that is important. The Democrats will have scandals of their own, but Abramoff will not be involved. Jack is a twenty-five year GOP bagman. He has spent his life in the pursuit of one-party rule. He never helped a Democrat. He hates them. To Jack we are all evil communist scum.
We need to push back whenever the waters get muddied.
Democrats are immaterial to this scandal. It is GOP owned and operated. And the Abramoff story remains the key to defeating the GOP.
And it is time to make the connections.
In every race and every discussion about the GOP and their Culture of Corruption.
Abramoff is theirs.
2006 is now. It is way past time to take our country back.
Let's do it.
And please take a moment to demand a Special Prosecutor for all things Abramoff. We can not trust the Bush Team to investigate this scandal.