Lawmaker's Abramoff Ties Investigated

Five weeks after the Boulis killing, SunCruz officials, including Kidan, threw a $1,000-a-head fundraiser for Ney at Abramoff's skybox at the MCI Center, according to Abramoff's fundraising log.

Language for Tiguas

In early 2002, Volz left his post as Ney's chief of staff to join Abramoff's lobbying team. Soon after, in March 2002, Ney agreed to sponsor legislation that would benefit the Tigua tribe of El Paso, an Abramoff and Scanlon client. They wanted Ney's help to reopen the Tiguas's casino, which the state of Texas had shut down.

"Just met with Ney!!! We're f'ing gold!!!! He's going to do Tigua," Abramoff told Scanlon in a March 20, 2002, e-mail.

Six days later, Abramoff directed tribal officials to make three contributions totaling $32,000 to Ney's campaign and political action committees. A Ney spokesman recently said that money has been donated to Ohio charities.

On June 7, 2002, Abramoff wrote in an e-mail to Tigua consultant Marc Schwartz that "our friend" had "asked if we could help (as in cover) a Scotland golf trip for him and some staff."

The e-mail does not name "our friend," but Schwartz testified in the Senate last fall that it was Ney.

Abramoff wrote that "the trip will be quite expensive (we did this for another member -- you know who) 2 years ago." He was referring to an earlier Scotland golf trip that Abramoff had arranged in 2000 for DeLay. Abramoff suggested to Schwartz that the tribe send $50,000 to a charity he directed, the Capital Athletic Foundation, which would pay for the trip "as an educational mission."

Ney later stated on disclosure forms filed with the House that the August 2002 trip cost $3,200 and was paid for by the National Center for Public Policy Research, a conservative advocacy group on whose board Abramoff served. The Washington Post reported last year that the trip was actually paid for by the Capital Athletic Foundation, which reported in tax records that it spent $150,225 on the trip.

Ney has said he was misled by Abramoff about who paid for the trip.

"In April, 2002, I was approached by Mr. Abramoff, who I believed to be a respected member of the community, and asked to go on a trip to Scotland which Mr. Abramoff said would help support a charitable organization, that he founded, through meetings he organized with Scottish Parliament officials," Ney said in a statement last November.

Ney's report to Congress listed as a purpose of the trip: "speech to Scottish Parliamentarians." However, there is no record of Ney's speech in the Scottish Parliament's register of official visits kept by the external liaison office, which is available on the Web. In addition, at the time of Ney's trip, the Scottish Parliament was out for its August recess, spokeswoman Sally Coyne said.

Ney is not the first public official who has come under scrutiny by investigators for the Scotland trip. David Safavian, then chief of staff at the General Services Administration, also went on the trip with Ney, Abramoff and former Christian Coalition leader Ralph Reed Jr. Safavian, who went on to become the chief White House procurement officer, was indicted this month on charges that he lied to investigators looking into the Scotland trip when he said that Abramoff had no business before the his agency.