Following up on Kagro X's post
below, I'd like to riff off of Josh's excellent work at
Talking Points Memo and continue to tease out this conversation. What is most interesting -- and possibly explosive -- about the Abramoff "bag man" investigation is that Abramoff seems tied to literally every major Republican player and power broker. Through his money connections, he represents the governing force behind the current Republican movement: if you want to play in Washington, you grease Abramoff's wheels, or DeLay's wheels, or those of one of the close "friends" they share between them.
As Josh points out, among those seeking to take advantage of Abramoff's much-used skybox in late 2000: John Ashcroft and staff. Josh has memos linking these conversations to Susan Ralston, who at the time was Abramoff's executive assistant but who later went to work for Karl Rove in the same capacity.
Now, you also might remember Ralston as a special assistant of Rove and Grover Norquist:
Norquist had a deal with Susan Ralston, who until recently was the assistant to Karl Rove. An unnamed Republican lobbyist recently told Salon.com: "Susan took a message for Rove, and then called Grover to ask if she should put the caller through to Rove. If Grover didn't approve, your call didn't go through."
Talk about pay-to-play. Any guesses on what wheels you needed to grease to get an appointment in the White House, under this arrangement? Something tells me we're going to find out.
The Ralston connections, and this shall-we-say curious Rove-Norquist arrangement to police White House access through the auspices of an outside Republican lobbyist, need to be far more fully explored. This is a White House that has been continually accused of being utterly beholden to lobbyists: as we're finding out, that's even more true than we realized. Republican-connected lobbyists literally determined, in advance, who got to talk to the White House at all.
And now those lobbyists are accused, as Kagro pointed out below, of a shakedown scheme -- manufacturing artificial legislative roadblocks in order to maneuver their clients around them. In exchange for large fees, of course.
Now add in today's arrests for the "gangland-style" murder of SunCruz figure 'Gus' Boulis in 2001. Boulis sold SunCruz Casinos to Abramoff and partner Adam Kidan in 2000, the transaction which currently has Abramoff under indictment. If you wanted a newsroom degrees-of-separation game between Republican lobbyist Abramoff, Tom DeLay, Ohio Representative Bob Ney, and the Gambino crime family, you've now got it.
OK, freeze that, for the moment. Josh also points us at another Abramoff connection, and one that raises more interesting questions as to the scope of the Abramoff corruption and how it ties to the rest of the Republican Party.
Back in 2002, the US Attorney in Guam started a criminal investigation into Abramoff's dealings on Guam. Curiously, the acting U.S. Attorney was demoted days after informing the Justice Department of his investigation into Abramoff, and blocked from pursuing further public corruption cases. This remarkable removal is, for obvious reasons, currently being investigated by the F.B.I.
Josh notes that the apparently urgent recommendation for his replacement, Leonardo Rapadas, was blessed through the auspices of Karl Rove. That's perhaps eyebrow raising enough, given the already known Rove-Abramoff connections, but it actually gets worse, according to the LA Times (reprinted in the Boston Globe):
His replacement, Leonardo Rapadas, was confirmed in May 2003 without any debate. Rapadas had been recommended for the job by the Guam Republican Party. Fred Radewagen, a lobbyist who had been under contract to the Gutierrez administration, said he carried that recommendation to top Bush aide Karl Rove in early 2003.
Rapadas and Radewagen are significant because the administration of Governor Carl Gutierrez was currently under investigation for public corruption... by Frederic A. Black, the U.S. Attorney that found himself abruptly demoted. Nominee Rapadas, on the other hand, was a cousin of "one of the main targets" in the Gutierrez case. (One of Rapadas' first actions was in fact to ostensibly recuse himself from the case.)
That's a little beyond odd. A 12-year acting U.S. attorney investigating corrupt lobbying under the Gutierrez administration is suddenly replaced, days after informing the U.S. Justice Department of his investigation into lobbyist Abramoff, on the recommendation of the Guam Republican Party and a lobbyist working for the Gutierrez administration, who then "carried" the apparently urgent recommendation to Karl Rove? And the person they recommend for the job just happens to be the cousin of one of the "main targets" in the Gutierrez corruption investigation?
What, are we kidding?
As with so many Abramoff, DeLay, and Rove investigations, the questions surrounding the probes seem to revolve less around who was acting illegally, and more around trying to determine how far in the investigation you have to travel before you find anyone who wasn't involved in the crime.