Hammered

DeLay ultimately won the whip race and Republicans captured the House for the first time in 40 years. It was a heady time to be a House Republican, but a scary one, too. In 1994, not one House Republican had ever served in the majority. Hastert, then chief deputy whip, asked me to help in the whip office, so I returned and got ready to pass the bills included in the Contract With America.

In the meantime, Buckham had become DeLay's chief of staff. He eventually hired me as Tom's communications director and Tony Rudy as press secretary. But he was brutal in firing some of DeLay's previous staffers. His win-at-all-costs attitude played out in strange ways around the office. He ran a fantasy baseball league that he always seemed to win, even if it meant browbeating young staffers into trading their best players to him. He was also forceful in promoting the evangelical beliefs he shared with DeLay. There were times when he would gather the staff for prayer. And I must admit, at times we needed those prayers just to get through the grueling pace of the Contract With America.

In those early days, Jack Abramoff was not a significant presence in our office; we knew him mainly as a friend of Buckham's. One of my few encounters with Abramoff took place far from Washington -- in the U.S. commonwealth of the Northern Marianas Islands.

I was accompanying Tom on a trip in early 1997 to meet with government officials of Saipan, who were fighting hard to keep Congress and the Clinton administration from imposing minimum-wage and other labor laws. As a former small-business owner, DeLay hated minimum-wage laws and other government mandates, so it was a pretty easy sell.

When we arrived we were greeted by a throng of well-wishers, musicians, elected officials -- and Abramoff. Jack had the Northern Marianas as a client, and acted as a semi-official tour guide throughout our trip. Local leaders seemed to love Abramoff and treated him with great affection.

Later that night, we attended a luau, complete with dancers and a roasted pig. During the festivities, a police officer approached me and pointed to a clump of bushes, where, to my surprise, I would find two "20/20" reporters hiding. They were there to report on our fact-finding trip. We ended up playing cat-and-mouse for most of the five-day visit, until we finally invited them into the factories we were there to inspect and to our New Year's Eve party, where DeLay told the assembled revelers to resist evil, referring to a minimum-wage hike. Needless to say, the story on "20/20" wasn't a positive one.

Later that year, a reporter asked me about another trip -- a $5,000 Concorde flight that Ed Buckham had taken from Paris to Washington after meeting with Russian oil and gas executives in Moscow. (Buckham would later introduce his Russian contacts to DeLay.) Ed asked me to spin it for him, suggesting that I say he had been sick and needed to return home quickly. "Spin it yourself," I told him. "You know the details. I don't."

On the morning of Thursday, July 10, 1997, Tom called a special meeting of his senior staff. He looked shaken and tired. The prior evening, he had spoken with a group of House members who were growing restless under Newt Gingrich's leadership.

"Last night, I think I said some things I shouldn't have said," he admitted.

Not good. "What exactly did you say?" I asked.

"I think they got the impression that I would vote with them to replace Newt," Tom replied.

The failed Gingrich coup had come and gone.