Abramoff's Media Pal

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, February 27, 2006 7:03 AM

Most Washington journalists view Jack Abramoff as a black-hatted symbol of corruption who disparaged his own clients even as they made him incredibly rich.

Kim Eisler says he's a decent man who has been unfairly demonized.

For six years, Washingtonian's national editor has been chatting, dining and exchanging e-mails with the disgraced lobbyist, undeterred by last month's guilty plea to fraud, tax evasion and conspiracy to bribe public officials.

"There's been this explosion of hatred toward the guy, far in excess of what any other lobbyist has ever been confronted with," Eisler says. "I think the level of villainy is a little excessive. . . . He has a lot of good qualities that people don't know about."

Their friendship provides a glimpse of how even a spectacular scandal can look different when someone is acquainted with the person under fire, although why Eisler remains loyal to a man who stole millions is not entirely clear.

The relationship drew public notice when Eisler told a researcher for the liberal group Center for American Progress about e-mails in which Abramoff said President Bush had met him nearly a dozen times, joked with him and discussed his family -- thus disputing the president's stance that, despite a number of picture-taking sessions, he could not remember Abramoff. The researcher, Amanda Terkel, says she clearly identified herself when she called Eisler to ask about Abramoff, later e-mailing him for permission to post the information on the center's Think Progress blog.

Eisler says he confused the organization with the American Prospect magazine and that he regrets making Abramoff's life more difficult: "I guess I considered it a private correspondence. I feel like I slipped a little bit."

Washingtonian Editor Jack Limpert was "disappointed" about being scooped, says Eisler, who then wrote an item for the magazine's Web site. The magazine took it down after Abramoff called and, says Eisler, "was just hysterical" about the possible impact on his plea agreement to cooperate with federal prosecutors. Washingtonian restored the item days later when Eisler concluded that Abramoff had overreacted.

In the piece, Eisler quoted Abramoff as saying of Bush and the White House: "They will come up with excuse after excuse as to how and why he did not know me. I could have spent four months alone with him in Bolivia and he would not know me."

Eisler, who is married to a Washington Post editor, Judy Sarasohn, got to know Abramoff while researching a 2001 book on Indian casinos, some of which were represented by the lobbyist. "He was funny, engaging, candid," Eisler says.

Abramoff has admitted defrauding four tribal clients out of millions of dollars. In private e-mails, he referred to such clients as "stupid," "moronic," "idiots," "troglodytes" and "monkeys." Abramoff faces a prison sentence of 9 1/2 to 11 years and is required to repay the government and his clients more than $26 million.

Abramoff made the remarks about having frequently met Bush after Eisler, preparing for a planned appearance on MSNBC's "Hardball," wrote him that "a lot of this is going to deal with GWB's denying he knew you." Abramoff also told Eisler that he declined a presidential invitation to visit the Crawford, Tex., ranch in 2003 because, as an Orthodox Jew, he could not travel on the Sabbath.

Eisler, who lunched with Abramoff a few weeks ago, had advised him to be more accessible to journalists. When Abramoff was planning to invoke the Fifth Amendment at a Senate hearing in 2004, Eisler wrote him, according to the e-mail he provided to The Washington Post: "You claim to be a religious man (I put it that way out of my long argued conviction that Reform Jews are just as religious as people who keep Kosher); and it's Yom Kippur. The past is past, what happened last year is sealed. This is the New Year and it's your chance to tell the whole story totally and completely and let the chips fall where they may. That will take courage. But in the long run it will save you, in more ways than one. If you refuse to answer questions, you are done."

Abramoff, telling Eisler his attorneys did not agree, took the Fifth anyway.

Eisler stresses that he has only published the e-mails in which he was questioning Abramoff as a reporter. But he sounds more like an advocate than a journalist when he describes how Abramoff is reading religious literature and expressing remorse over his crimes.

At one dinner, Eisler says in one of several interviews, Abramoff told him that " 'Bad Jack is dead.' He was acknowledging the fact that there were two Jacks. He had one Jack who ruthlessly pursued this lobbying thing. . . . His attitude toward his adversaries was squash them, destroy them."

Despite Abramoff's guilty plea, Eisler insists: "I don't fully accept the notion that he cheated his clients. He worked 24/6 for his clients. The story line of 'rich white guy steals from poor downtrodden Indians' is a little misguided in my view. . . . Let's not burn him at the stake because of a media frenzy that would rather stick to caricatures."

Jack Cafferty, CNN's resident curmudgeon, is drawing some flak for his rhetorical bombshells.

In a typical rant, Cafferty, a New York local anchor for two decades who now delivers his short bursts on "The Situation Room," said of the Bush administration: "Who cares if the Patriot Act gets renewed? Want to abuse our civil liberties -- just do it! Who cares about the Geneva conventions? Want to torture prisoners -- just do it! Who cares about rules concerning the identity of CIA agents? Want to reveal the name of a covert operative -- just do it!"

Before any legal charges were brought against Tom DeLay, Cafferty said of the Texas congressman: "Has he been indicted yet?" He told Wolf Blitzer that if presidential adviser Karl Rove is indicted, "he might want to get measured for one of those extra large orange jumpsuits, Wolf, 'cause looking at old Karl, I'm not sure that they'd be able to zip him into the regular size one."

And when Dick Cheney, after his hunting accident, granted an interview to Fox's Brit Hume, Cafferty said it "didn't exactly represent a profile in courage for the vice president to wander over there to the F-word network." ("Get your mind out of the gutter," he says now. "The F-word is Fox.")

Responds Fox spokeswoman Irena Briganti: "Jack is about as unstable as CNN's programming lineup -- nobody pays much attention to his incoherent ramblings."

Cafferty's cutting remarks have made him a hero to some on the left. Liberal radio host Cenk Uygur called for Cafferty to get his own prime-time show, saying on http://huffingtonpost.com/ that "he is a rare truth-teller on cable news." But Tim Graham of the conservative Media Research Center writes that Cafferty "has created a little career as a gruff anti-Bush commentator" in "an attempt to be the anti-Bill O'Reilly."

Cafferty disagrees, saying he was often accused of being "a Nazi and a right-winger" when he initially supported the administration's war effort. "I certainly don't picture myself as an apologist for one side of the political spectrum or another," he says. "When I see something that aggravates me or doesn't make sense or seems strange in some way, I express that."

He also picks on liberals: When Ramsey Clark, a former U.S. attorney general, turned up as Saddam Hussein's lawyer, Cafferty said: "What is wrong with this moron? . . . Why doesn't he just go live in Baghdad?"

Cafferty, 62, who invites viewer e-mail that he reads on the air, seems adept at pushing buttons. When he accused the administration of "arrogance" last week for approving a Dubai company to operate six U.S. ports, he got more than 5,000 letters in three hours.

"It doesn't matter what you say," he insists, "you're going to [tick] someone off."

(Howard Kurtz hosts CNN's weekly media program, "Reliable Sources.")

In other news, Ron Brownstein sees a certain poetic justice in the port debate:

"President Bush may not like the arguments that critics are raising against the Dubai company attempting to take over cargo and cruise operations at ports in six U.S. cities. But he should recognize them. The arguments marshaled against Bush closely echoed the ones he deployed to defend the Iraq war. "The president, in other words, is stewing in a pot he brought to boil."

Citing Iraq, Quailgate and Portgate, Time's Joe Klein says, "The response of President Bush to all this has been surreal. Public support for his policies is dwindling; his own party is abandoning him; he seems naked, defenseless in the public square. Yet he has spent most of the past few weeks traveling the country, selling the vaporous "policies" he proposed in his State of the Union address.

As conservatives warm to the Dubai port deal, they seem particularly annoyed at former impeachment manager Lindsey Graham, as we see in this Rich Lowry piece in National Review:

"Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina, styles himself an independent voice unafraid to speak truth to power. Judging by his performance in the controversy over a company that is owned by the United Arab Emirates potentially managing terminals at six U.S. ports, Graham is also unafraid to speak falsehood to power. He doubts whether we should 'outsource major port security to a foreign-based company.'. . . .

"Graham, unfortunately, isn't alone. He is part of a bipartisan herd hoping to win the War on Terror through ill-informed hysteria.

"Did some of the 9/11 hijackers come from the UAE, and did the hijackers launder money through that country? Yes, but Britain also has produced terrorists, and the UAE has worked to tighten its financial system. It is arguably our most useful Arab ally, providing an air base and ports crucial to military operations in the Middle East.

"The UAE is a kind of Arab model. It is pursuing commercial openness, attempting to orient itself more toward the West. Blackballing the Dubai firm would turn our backs on the UAE's progress."

Wall Street Journal columnist Dan Henninger also sees a town gone mad:

"What we have here is the dawn of the new Yosemite Sam school of national politics. Put any news event in front of our politicians now--Hurricane Katrina, Terri Schiavo, Dick Cheney's quail or this week the ports--and like Bugs Bunny's hair-triggered nemesis they'll start spraying the landscape with wild remarks and opinions decoupled from what is knowable about these events. Wait to learn the facts--as almost alone, Sen. John McCain, suggested? Why bother?

"Yes, there are matters of substance in the ports decision about which serious people could disagree, but there's not much chance of that now, not after the politicos have poisoned the well."

But to Salon's Joe Conason , this is an oily deal influenced by the personal fortunes of the Bush family:

"Bush's passionate defense of the United Arab Emirates and the ports deal inevitably raises questions -- not only about the due diligence of his administration in this instance but about his and his family's long-standing ties to the Persian Gulf sheikdoms, and specifically to the UAE's rulers. His insinuation that skepticism is equivalent to bigotry cannot deflect such concerns, which first arose in the months after the 9/11 attacks...

"Consider the Carlyle Group, the huge, politically wired private equity firm that has employed both the president and his father -- and from which the members of the Bush family and their closest associates, such as former Secretary of State James Baker III, have profited handsomely in recent years. With its sole Middle East office headquartered in Dubai, Carlyle has managed to attract substantial funding from the UAE government, which controls most of the tiny nation's oil wealth and channels that money into foreign investments. . . .

"The ports controversy could cause similar problems for Neil Mallon Bush, the president's most troublesome brother, who has become a familiar face in Dubai and Abu Dhabi."

This debate is getting really heated, as we see in this post from Rick Moran at Right Wing Nut House:

"The backlash against the incompetent and cavalier manner in which the Bush Administration has handled the DPW port sale imbroglio has spawned its very own hysterical opposition -- much of it from those who should know better. And I can assure these holier than thou hysterics that the way to make friends and influence people is not by calling them bigots or questioning their patriotism.

"I don't like waking up in the morning and discovering that I'm an 'Islamaphobe' or 'Un-American' for calling the Administration a bunch of rabbit heads for the way they've managed the unveiling of this idiocy. To tell you the truth, I resent it. It bespeaks a certain kind of intellectual laziness when the best one can do to counter an argument is to indulge in an orgy of name calling and finger pointing."

At New Donkey, Ed Kilgore sees an opening for the Dems:

"It's important right now that we move as quickly as possible from that hook to the underlying vulnerability of our ports to the most critical threat post by terrorists: a nuclear 9/11. Even, and perhaps especially, from a political point of view, showing that the president who proclaims himself the living embodiment of the War on Terror can't be bothered to budget the money necessary to secure our ports is a lot more powerful an argument than highlighting his soft spot for big corporate contracts."

Democrats are looking good in the governors' races--both the New York Times and Washington Post agree, so it must be true.

NYT : "At a time when considerable political attention is focused on the Democrats' uphill struggle to recapture Congress, leaders of both parties say Democrats appear to be in a much stronger position on another pivotal battlefield this November, the contests for governors."

WP : "Republicans face a potential upheaval in the states this November, with Democrats positioned to capture a majority of the governorships for the first time since 1990 and seize an early advantage in the 2008 presidential contest."

The New Republic's Lawrence Kaplan journeyed to Baghdad to write "The Case for Staying in Iraq":

"With U.S. reconstruction aid running out, Iraq's infrastructure, never fully restored to begin with, decays by the hour. Iraq's political arena, from which the Americans had no choice but to withdraw, has dissolved into something unrecognizable, carved up for sectarian advantage and without a center to keep its parts from spinning away. In both cases, the United States may have given all it reasonably could be expected to give.

"But, when it comes to America's withdrawal from Iraq's security arena, a process that accelerates with each passing week, the only explanation can be that the White House, for all of its high-minded rhetoric about standing with Iraq, has decided not to. The insurgency continues to rage. Iraq's security forces still cannot operate on their own. And, as what was once a largely one-sided Sunni campaign of terrorism rapidly approaches something like parity (with the Shia taking up arms in their own defense), the likelihood of a civil war has surged. So, too, contrary to the delusions of war supporters and critics alike, has the importance of the Americans...

"Whether you measure Iraq's well-being through its infrastructure, politics, security, or even geography, one thing is clear: Where the Americans do not operate, very little else does. The level of corruption that pervades Iraq's ministerial orbit, for instance, would have made South Vietnam's kleptocrats blush."

Kevin Drum is appalled by the latest Gitmo revelations:

" Knight Ridder reports on the latest disclosures about interrogation practices at Guantanamo Bay during the 2002-2004 period when Major General Geoffrey Miller was in charge of the prison there:

" Military interrogators posing as FBI agents at the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, wrapped terrorism suspects in an Israeli flag and forced them to watch homosexual pornography under strobe lights during interrogation sessions that lasted as long as 18 hours, according to one of a batch of FBI memos released Thursday .

"Honestly, when I read this stuff I don't know whether to be more disgusted by the moral obtuseness it displays or by its sheer stupidity."

It does sound like a sad parody of interrogation.