Doolittle speaks!

A tour de force of understatement and euphemism, Rep. John Doolittle’s (R-CA) extensive interview with The Sacramento Bee is a remarkable beginning to his reelection campaign. Tough on reform? Yes, but not quite in the way you think. He’s tough on the idea of reform. For Doolittle, there’s no need for reform; “the laws are working” - all of his corrupt friends got caught.

Here is a man who admits he was close to Jack Abramoff (who pled guilty to, among other things, bribery)…

“Oh, it was definitely a friendship….I guess on a scale of my interaction with other lobbyists, he would have been one of the closest ones, frankly.”

to Tom DeLay (indicted for money laundering)…

Q: You were very close to Tom DeLay.

A: Absolutely.

to Duke Cunningham (pled guilty to bribery)…

“I believed Duke to be above board - what you saw is what you got.”

to Brent Wilkes (defense contractor implicated by Cunningham for bribery)…

“I must tell you Brent Wilkes and his family have always seemed like very fine upstanding people to me.”

and to Ed Buckham (head of Alexander Strategy Group, forced to shut down his firm because he’s a likely target in the Abramoff probe)…

“Ed Buckham was a good friend of mine”

Doolittle seems not to be a very good judge of character.

Q: Doesn't that call into question your choice of friends?

A: Oh, I must admit David, I have wondered about that myself…. I think I am a pretty good judge of character, or at least I thought that. I've seen these two examples [Abramoff and Wilkes]. I'll admit those are significant exceptions.<snip>

I guess maybe one of the effects is I- And I know to be, you know, wary of people's claims. You sort of have to evaluate as best you can, are these people on the level, can they be trusted, you know? I guess that period of evaluation is going to get longer for me. If anything it will make me a little less- a little more wary of people. I am not sure that's a positive thing. I must say I never would have believed- Look at how all three of these things have happened [Abramoff’s and Cunningham’s plea, the implication of Wilkes], more or less, within the last few months. Pretty amazing. I can't think of- I don't have anything like that happen in the Congress before.

How’s that for a strong stand on corruption? John Doolittle: “a little more wary of people.”

And here’s where Doolittle lays out his plan for reform (a bit of context: Doolittle failed to report use of Abramoff’s skybox for five years). Pull up a chair:

Q: I was wondering what you think about lobbying reform.

A: Oh, I was answering that by saying that I think the laws are working and that I don't really know that some of the [reforms] I'm seeing written about are that wise to do. I'll tell you one reform I'd like to see, having been sort of victimized by this myself. I think when a lobbyist is providing something like a box or something you know for a fundraiser or something, I think the burden ought to be on them to be reporting. Right now it's on us. And we kind of- we don't know what the value of the box is, unless they tell us. And we didn't find out. And that was our fault and we missed it…. I'd like to see the reporting burden to be on lobbyists. If they are taking you out to dinner or something, then I'd like to see them have to report it rather than - right now they can violate those rules and it's OK, they are without penalty. But it's not the case with the members. That would help ensure compliance on everyone's part.

Now that’s reform!

A while back over at TPM, Josh wondered whether lobbyists might not consider rebranding after all this bad PR. Doolittle has a suggestion: instead of “lobbying,” why not call it “friendship”:

Q: Your political committees accepted by our count $130,000 or more from [Abramoff], his associates, and Indian tribes, etc., that he represented. What did he ask for in return for that?

A: This is the thing that people don't understand. He never asked me anything in return for that. I don't think people understand quite what motivates political giving anyway. Believe it or not, the main thing that motivates it is friendships I think.

It's relationships. And Jack Abramoff was a very- at the time a very influential lobbyist in town, had a lot of significant clients. And if you had a friend who was a lobbyist like that and he liked you, he was able to procure quite a bit of support for you from the clients he represented. So I was in the fortunate position then of benefiting from his friendship and his willingness to help me.

Friendship reform?

John Doolittle, in fact, provides an excellent tutorial in the K Street Project, which was all about friendship. He is unabashed about his shilling for the Mississippi Choctaw, an Abramoff client, because the Chief was “a Republican” who “supports Republicans.” Unaware of any apparent tension with his touted ideals, here he lauds the Choctaw for being “very free-enterprise oriented.” Never mind that Doolittle, according to his spokesperson, has a "longheld anti-gaming position." All such high-minded principles go out the window when friendship is involved.

The same goes for Brent Wilkes, who would have been just another defense contractor if he had not showed such friendship to his representatives ($82,000 to Doolittle, which won him $37M in earmarked appropriations for a technology the military never asked for). As Doolittle charmingly puts it, “[Wilkes] was, you know, really quite the Republican in San Diego.”

No wonder Doolittle has refused interviews for several months – he’s too quotable for his own good.

There’s one more bit that should absolutely not be missed. Here, Doolittle defends his wife’s work for Abramoff’s sham charity, the Capital Athletic Foundation. Documents related to her work for Abramoff and her company's client list were subpoenaed by Justice Deparment investigators. In his telling, her work for Abramoff was all completely random:

“…she started to make this A to Z list and Abramoff was the first name under the A's. So she went to meet with him, not thinking he would be the source directly of business but thinking that he would know someone perhaps that might need her services.”

The Bee has more in their write-up of the interview. Hotline speculates that Doolittle went easy on Abramoff in order to avoid angering a man who could be very dangerous to him. As Doolittle put it:

“I just, uh, I certainly don't think what [Abramoff] has pled guilty to was part of our relationship, at least not on my end it wasn't, I can say with a certainty. But, uh, I don't know what he is saying on his end.”

The Bee also ran a story Sunday about Doolittle’s seemingly random praise (“"a great American success story") of the Mississippi Choctaw in 1998. The Stakeholder points out that the language is strikingly similar to DeLay’s praise of the Marianas (another Abramoff client), that "perfect petri dish of capitalism."

Prosecutors Want 10 Years for Duke

The prosecutors in the Duke Cunningham case have issued their Sentencing Memorandum, a minor masterpiece complete with documents and a picture of the famous yacht, the Duke Stir. They asked for the maximum sentence of ten years. Nothing less could cut it for a man bold enough to actually write up what prosecutors call a “bribe menu.”

Read TPM on the memo here and read the memo here.

Here's The Washington Post's story.

Jack and George

Kim Eisler of The Washingtonian discusses the pictures he's seen of Abramoff with Pres. Bush:

The White House has repeatedly claimed that Bush did not know Abramoff and that the pictures must have been taken at a White House holiday party, when the President shakes hands with hundreds of people he doesn’t know. None of the photographs seen by Eisler matched that description.<snip>

In the photograph taken at the same event as the one published by Time, Abramoff said he and the President were discussing working out with weights.

Other photographs included a picture of Bush and Abramoff standing together with “Cheshire cat grins”; pictures of Bush and what Abramoff characterized as the “bearded fatter me”; a picture of Bush chatting with Abramoff’s twin daughters (“Oh, you are twins; I have twins,” Abramoff quoted Bush as saying); a picture of Bush, House speaker Dennis Hastert, and Abramoff’s children; and a picture of Laura Bush with Abramoff’s wife, Pam, and the twin girls, who had led the Pledge of Allegiance at the event (said Abramoff: “Laura went ga-ga over their being twins”).

A frustrated Abramoff, who feels he has been abandoned by many of his conservative friends, added, “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.”

Michael Crowley wonders what was behind Eisler's odd retraction of this account earlier this week. 

More Muck in the Sun

Down in Florida, where Abramoff pled guilty to federal fraud charges, both prosecutors and the defense have asked the judge to delay the sentencing, saying that he needs more time to cooperate before he’s sentenced. The sentencing had been scheduled for March 16^th. This sentence is in addition to what Abramoff will get from the D.C. prosecutors, who have him on tax evasion, bribery, and fraud. Suffice it to say that cooperating is more than a full time job for Abramoff right now.

Conrad Burns' Abramoff Problem

Burns may be complaining that "The only thing [Democrats] got in their sack is mud," but the mud is sticking.

From The LA Times:

The Montana Democratic Party has been hammering him over the Abramoff ties in ads that began in August....Although most political professionals still consider Burns a slight favorite to win reelection, recent polls showed that the double-digit lead he enjoyed last year has vanished. Some surveys show him tied or trailing his two leading Democratic opponents — state Auditor John Morrison and state Senate President Jon Tester.

Don Young’s Abramoff Problem

As Josh points out, Rep. Don Young (R-AK) has denied that Abramoff organized his trip to the Marshall Islands in 1999. Abramoff’s firm Preston Gates, of course, said otherwise. We’ll have more on this soon.

Meanwhile, in a longer piece on leadership PACs (yet another fundraising tool for lawmakers that deserves much more scrutiny), The Sacramento Bee uses Don Young as their prime example:

Known as a leadership PAC, Midnight Sun is controlled by Young, and its treasurer is a registered lobbyist with a client list that includes transportation interests.

In southeast Arkansas, more than a dozen men and women connected to road paving and auto sales in and near Pine Bluff gave about $28,000 last March to Midnight Sun, on top of about $20,000 to Young's re-election committee. When the highway bill passed a few months later, it had more than $200 million for their region over the next five years, including a $72 million interstate construction project extending to Pine Bluff.

Young's office and several Arkansas donors declined to comment for this story. One donor, Clydine Davis, said of Young in a telephone interview: "We just all banded together to support him as he supports Arkansas."

FYI, Abramoff never gave political contributions to Young, but his clients gave the congressman about $20,000, mostly through his Midnight Sun political action committee.

The Rush Saunter to Reform

From The Washington Post:

A month ago, Republican leaders in Congress called legislation on the topic their first priority, and promised quick action on a measure that would alter the rules governing the interaction between lawmakers and lobbyists.

But now they do not anticipate final approval of such a measure until late March at the earliest.

Gambling Money

Jack Abramoff isn't the only Republican who figured out these are good clients and supporters to have. From The Chicago Tribune:

Federal campaign contributions from the gambling industry have jumped more than 27-fold, from $478,000 in 1990 to more than $13 million in 2004, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a non-partisan watchdog group. Washington lobbying expenses disclosed by the industry have nearly doubled in six years, from $6.1 million in 1998 to $11.4 million in 2004, according to the Center for Public Integrity, another monitoring group.<snip>

While casinos, Indian tribes and other gambling interests once heavily favored Democrats with their campaign contributions, they have gradually shifted money toward Republicans as first Congress and then the White House came under GOP control. Now gambling donations are about evenly divided between the two parties.

That has created conflict among Republicans, some of whom are social conservatives morally opposed to gambling. The Republican National Committee in 1999 rebuffed a resolution that would have barred the party from accepting gambling money, despite vigorous backing from prominent Christian radio host James Dobson, founder of the group Focus on the Family.

Ethics Committee Still in Hibernation

Well, they have at least one legitimate excuse for not doing anything. From Roll Call:

The Department of Justice has instructed the Senate Ethics Committee to steer clear of any investigations into actions involving ex-lobbyist Jack Abramoff, warning the panel it has “concerns” that any such probes could interfere with its long-running investigation.

K Street & The Hill

The Times looks at when lobbyists and lawmakers go that extra step and are really get married.

Did we miss something? Was there local coverage in your area we should know about? Email us at talk@talkingpoin tsmemo.com with the Subject line "Daily Muck" and let us know.