Jack in the Box

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, January 4, 2006 10:33 AM

It's not a happy new year for anyone who had anything to do with Jack Abramoff.

The plea agreement he struck yesterday means he's now expected to sing like a canary to minimize his jail time. And that means a number of members of Congress and some of their top aides should be sweating bullets. Their onetime ally is now, for prosecutorial purposes, their enemy.

This is hardly good news for such Republicans as Tom DeLay and Bob Ney, and Abramoff was a major Bush fundraiser. But he also did business with a few Democrats such as North Dakota's Byron Dorgan, some of whom have been rushing to return the campaign cash he gave them.

Back in 2002, before we knew Abramoff was a big-time sleazebag, the New York Times ran a piece on how he was using his ties to DeLay to become a $500-an-hour lobbyist, which included this howler:

"Unlike many lobbyists who take almost any client who is willing to pay their fee, Mr. Abramoff says he represents only those who stand for conservative principles. They include three Indian tribes with big casinos and, until recently, the Northern Mariana Islands. 'All of my political work,' he said, 'is driven by philosophical interests, not by a desire to gain wealth.' "

Uh, right. The guy loved money, as his piles of e-mails made clear. He milked his clients, particularly Indian tribes, even as he disparaged them as "morons" and "troglodytes." Oh, he said yesterday he's sorry. Prosecutors said they would recommend a 10-year sentence.

The political question is whether l'affaire Abramoff will blossom into a major "culture of corruption" argument that the Democrats are trying to pin on the Republicans for this year's campaign season, or whether people will just assume that corrupt lobbying is a permanent feature of Beltway life.

One lawmaker who could be helped: John McCain, who held hearings on the Abramoff scam and is pushing radical (by D.C. standards) restrictions on lobbyists.

"The corruption inquiry involving Mr. Abramoff, potentially one of the most explosive in Congressional history, has expanded in recent months to encompass dozens of political operatives, including former Congressional aides and lobbyists suspected of arranging bribes in exchange for legislative work, participants in the case said," the New York Times reports.

"His testimony, coupled with that of Michael Scanlon, a former Abramoff business associate who pleaded guilty in November, reaches into the executive and legislative branches and appears to be drawing an ever-tighter ring of evidence around the former House Republican majority leader, Tom DeLay, and other senior Congressional Republicans."

Says the Los Angeles Times : "Abramoff now becomes the chief witness for the prosecution in its influence-peddling probe of Congress that some say presages the biggest corruption scandal on Capitol Hill in nearly three decades. It has already ensnared at least one member of Congress and two former congressional aides, and could now lead into unknown territory."

The Wall Street Journal adds: "It remains unclear which lawmakers prosecutors are looking at, and also how persuasive Mr. Abramoff could be in helping to make potential cases against any of them stick. A onetime chairman of College Republicans -- a close ally of such party luminaries as Tom DeLay, Ralph Reed and Grover Norquist -- Mr. Abramoff says he has information that could implicate 60 lawmakers."

Salon's Michael Scherer examines the indictment:

"In his plea, Abramoff appeared to tighten the prosecutorial noose around Rep. Bob Ney, R-Ohio, a one-time friend of Abramoff who has long since disavowed the relationship. Abramoff detailed the perks he provided Ney and his staff in exchange for political favors -- the golf trip to Scotland, the Super Bowl bash in Tampa, the free meals at Abramoff's Washington restaurant and the sports stadium box seats . . .

"The plea also claims that Abramoff corruptly influenced another unnamed congressional staffer by paying his wife's nonprofit company $50,000. The allegation matches press reports of a relationship Abramoff had with Tony Rudy, another aide to former majority leader DeLay, and Rudy's wife, Lisa."

As for public opinion, a USA Today/ CNN poll says that "49 percent of respondents said most members of Congress are corrupt." Most? Wow. It's not true, in my humble opinion, unless you count the legalized bribery of the campaign finance system, but speaks volume about public opinion.

But the GOP doesn't win the corruption sweepstakes: "Asked how many congressional Republicans are corrupt, 19 percent of respondents said 'almost all' and 28 percent said 'many.' The response was similar when people were asked about corruption among Democrats: 17 percent said 'almost all' and 27 percent said 'many.'"

Raw Story has the back story on the plea of Abramoff associate Michael Scanlon:

"Scanlon was implicated in the Abramoff scandal by his former thirtysomething fiancee, Emily J. Miller, whom he met in the late 1990s while working as communications director for former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-TX), three former associates who worked with Scanlon at DeLay's office said. Colleagues say Miller went to the FBI after Scanlon broke off their engagement and announced his intention to marry another woman."

Miller is the onetime State Department flack who tried to cut off Tim Russert's interview with Colin Powell, leaving NBC shooting palm trees for awhile.

Ankle Biting Pundits has no sympathy for Abramoff:

"I think it is time for conservatives to begin piling on the Abramoff thing for a couple of reasons. First, liberals are right in this instance. The fact that this hideous wretch climbed to the heights of power under GOP leadership in Washington, shoot, with the aid and comfort of the GOP leadership, is a scandal in and of itself. I was around in 1994 when we won the House and the Senate for the first time in forty years. I recall distinctly using the phrase "K Street fat cats" in mail pieces against Democrat incumbents who, while not breaking any laws by cozying up to these sleaze ball lobbyists, certainly violated common decency by allowing them to draft their legislation and fund their political operations. The GOP of the Abramoff era behaved no differently, sad to say."

The debate over eavesdropping is becoming a broader argument over presidential power. Andrew Sullivan connects the dots:

"In my view, this could turn out to be the big question of the new year: Do we have a president who refuses, in any matter tangentially related to the war on terror, to obey the law? We know he broke the FISA law and lied about it. We know he broke U.S. law against torturing detainees, and lied about it. Now we find that he is declaring himself unbound by the McCain Amendment. Marty Lederman is on the case. Money quote from the president's signing statement of the Amendment:

"The executive branch shall construe Title X in Division A of the Act, relating to detainees, in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the President to supervise the unitary executive branch and as Commander in Chief and consistent with the constitutional limitations on the judicial power, which will assist in achieving the shared objective of the Congress and the President, evidenced in Title X, of protecting the American people from further terrorist attacks.

"Translation: I will violate this law whenever I feel like it. I hoped we had put this issue behind us. It appears we haven't."

Bill Kristol lambastes the left:

"No reasonable American, no decent human being, wants to send up a white flag in the war on terror. But leading spokesmen for American liberalism-hostile beyond reason to the Bush administration, and ready to believe the worst about American public servants-seem to have concluded that the terror threat is mostly imaginary. It is the threat to civil liberties from George W. Bush that is the real danger. These liberals recoil unthinkingly from the obvious fact that our national security requires policies that are a step (but only a careful step) removed from ACLU dogma."

After quoting deputy intelligence chief Michael Hayden as saying the administration had gotten information it could not have obtained with court-approved wiretapping, Kristol notes that the next day, "the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee blathered on about 'the Constitution in crisis' and 'impeachable conduct.' Barbara Boxer, a Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, asserted there was 'no excuse' for the president's actions. The ranking Democrat on that committee, Joseph Biden, confidently stated that the president's claims were 'bizarre' and that 'aggrandizement of power' was probably the primary reason for the president's actions, since 'there was no need to do any of this.'

"So we are really to believe that President Bush just sat around after 9/11 thinking, 'How can I aggrandize my powers?' Or that Gen. Hayden--and his hundreds of nonpolitical subordinates--cheerfully agreed to an obviously crazy, bizarre, and unnecessary project of 'domestic spying'? This is the fever swamp into which American liberalism is on the verge of descending."

Kos has infuriated the right with a posting titled "Why Are Conservatives So Afraid?", ripping "an administration that parlays the incessant fear of its supporters into increased authoritativeness to the point where he now resembles the very despot we fought in our war of independence. And his supporters bellow, as they cower under their beds . . .

"These blowhards pretend they are macho even as they piddle on themselves in abject terror from every 'boo!' that comes out of Osama Bin Laden's mouth. They like to speak about how tough they are, even though they send others to fight their battles and couldn't last a day in places like Iraq, or Sudan, or the El Salvador of my youth, or any other war-torn nation.

"The breathtaking cowardice of the 101st Fighting Keyboardists knows no bounds. They hide behind the American flag and our genuinely brave men and women in uniform."

Among those on the right punching back is Ed Morrissey of Captain's Quarters:

"Markos Moulitsas has lost it -- and the candidates who pay him for his services might have some explaining to do about their views on national security in the future . . .

"Kos loves freedom of speech when that speech agrees with him. He loves civilian control of the military when those civilians belong to MoveOn, but not when they belong to the Republican Party. In fact, Kos doesn't like American values at all -- he only uses them when convenient to his argument, but in fact would rather have a Starship Troopers (the movie) government made up of military bureaucrats making all of our decisions for us. He has no respect for those who did go to Iraq to help with security -- recalling his infamous 'Screw 'em' to the civilians who did believe in the mission enough to go over and help out, smearing them as 'mercenaries' -- and then calls those who stay home and support the mission 'cowards'."

How important is Kos? The Washington Monthly's Benjamin Wallace-Wells says he raised $500,000 for Dems in the last cycle and talks regularly with Harry Reid and Rahm Emanuel.

If you missed this column by NYT Public Editor Byron Calame , he is accusing the paper of "stonewalling":

"The New York Times's explanation of its decision to report, after what it said was a one-year delay, that the National Security Agency is eavesdropping domestically without court-approved warrants was woefully inadequate. And I have had unusual difficulty getting a better explanation for readers, despite the paper's repeated pledges of greater transparency.

"I e-mailed a list of 28 questions to Bill Keller, the executive editor, on Dec. 19, three days after the article appeared. He promptly declined to respond to them. I then sent the same questions to Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the publisher, who also declined to respond. They held out no hope for a fuller explanation in the future."

Editor & Publisher chats up Calame:

"He told E&P he could still do his job despite the stonewalling, but appeared frustrated by it. 'I believe last week's column shows the public editor can function in the absence of cooperation in some cases,' he said. 'I am going to keep doing it one day at a time.' "

Glenn Reynolds is unhappy with the paper:

"The Times' behavior on this story, and the Plame story, has undermined the unwritten "National Security Constitution" regarding leaks and classified information. Since the Pentagon Papers, at least, the rule has been that papers could publish classified information in a whistleblowing mode, but that they would be sensitive to national security concerns. In return, the federal government would tread lightly in investigating where the leaks came from. But the politicization of the coverage, and the outright partisanship of the Times, has put paid to that arrangement. It's not clear to me that the country is better served by the new arrangement, but unwritten constitutions require a lot of self-discipline on the part of the various players, and that sort of discipline is no longer to be found in America's leadership circles.

"If the Times decided that its job was to tell its readers everything it knew, when it knew it, then it would have a good argument for publishing this sort of thing. But since the Times has made clear that it's happy to keep its readers in the dark when doing so serves its institutional interests, it doesn't have that defense for publishing stuff that's bad for national security."

Rand Simberg wonders why Times editors didn't pop the story during the '04 campaign when they had the chance:

"At first glance, given their partisan behavior in general at least since the beginning of the Bush administration, one would have thought that it would be a slam-dunk decision, just as Dan Rather and Mary Mapes' tilting at the AWOL windmill occurred a few weeks before the election.

"But perhaps they had the political acumen to realize that it might backfire on them. Consider--the Democrats were trying (however pathetically), by nominating an anti-war (and anti-military) protester who picked up some medals in Vietnam for three months, to indicate that they were finally serious about national security, an issue that has dogged them since the era of said protester--1972. Did they really want, in wartime, to be seen as criticizing the president for intercepting enemy communications, warrantless or otherwise? Was there someone in charge then who was prescient as to the potential blowback of this story, who is no longer?

"If so, he (or, of course, she) has certainly been shown to be right in retrospect, and if they had pulled this stunt during the campaign, given his recent surge in approval and the Dems corresponding drop, Bush's victory margin would likely have been even larger."

Um, what exactly did Bill O'Reilly mean when, in complaining about unspecified personal attacks by the New York Times, he said the following?

"If they continue, those people continue to attack people personally, as Frank Rich does almost every week, and Keller allows it, then we'll just have to get into their lives . . . And if they want to attack people personally, Rich in print and Keller allowing it, then we're going to have to just show everybody about their lives."

Joel Stein says he just keeps on apologizing to Maureen Dowd.

Say it ain't so, Wonkette! The Wall Street Journal's new law blog , along with the New York Observer, breaks the story that she's bailing out of her Web site, to be succeeded by "David Lat, the federal prosecutor who revealed himself to the New Yorker magazine in November as the author of the popular 'Underneath Their Robes' judicial blog."

Cox tells The Post's gossips : "What can I say? My [butt] is tired from all that sitting."