Oh, it is a good day for muck.

Let's start with the $1.2M Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir paid to meet with President Bush, shall we?

Malaysia was a client of Jack Abramoff's at the time, though the relationship wasn't exactly on the up-and-up. The money went through a sham company set up by Abramoff partner Michael Scanlon called the American International Center - it was supposed to be a think tank, but it was really nothing more than a beach house.

That the Malaysians had paid Abramoff $1.2M was known. The fees were paid out over 2001 and 2002. What's new here is that PM Mahathir admits that the money was in exchange for that single meeting. As the AP puts it:

Former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad said Monday that disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff was paid $1.2 million to organize his 2002 meeting with President Bush...

The meeting, if you believe two anonymous former associates of Abramoff (who were right, incidentally, about the fee being $1.2M), was set up through Karl Rove.

Mahathir also says in the piece that his government sought the meeting at the prompting of the Heritage Foundation. As Laura Rozen asks, "What's the Heritage Foundation doing serving as a lobbyist for the Malaysian government? And who's investigating?"

It would take quite a while to untangle the relationship between Heritage, Alexander Strategy Group, and Abramoff, but suffice it to say for now that Alexander Strategy and the Heritage Foundation shared offices in Hong Kong. And they worked with Abramoff. This meeting was just one part of a long, entangled, and very sketchy relationship between the three and the Malaysians. No doubt the money worked its way through some back channels.

So it's no wonder that Mahathir can't remember who actually footed the bill. 

In the AP piece, Mahathir denies that the money came from the Malaysian government - in his version, "somebody" or "some people" paid the bill. Well, at least those people were mighty close to his government - Abramoff's invoices were sent to the Malaysian embassy, according to The National Journal. 

Brent Wilkes, Earmark Superstar

The Post today gets in on some of the fun, detailing some of Brent Wilkes' shenanigans. The man knew what a congressman cost.

But for real Wilkes afficianados, there's no beating the San Diego Union-Tribune piece on Wilkes from a couple weeks ago - the Post is just playing catch up. You can read my write-up of it here.

DeLay Flip-Flops

Tom DeLay has come out in support of a bill that he helped kill 6 years ago. What's different about the Internet Gambling Prohibition Act, this time around? Nothing, so far as I can tell, except that Jack Abramoff hasn't been hired to work against it.

Roll Call provides a little flashback to 2000:

DeLay went on a trip to Scotland with Abramoff in May 2000, shortly before the Internet gambling ban came to the House floor. According to The Washington Post, DeLay’s trip, nominally paid for by the National Center for Public Policy Research, was in fact funded at least in part by eLottery, an Abramoff client. eLottery paid Abramoff’s former firm, Preston Gates Ellis & Rouvelas Meeds, more than $700,000 during 2000 to help defeat the Goodlatte bill, according to federal lobbying reports.

DeLay pushed to have the Goodlatte bill [the Internet gambling ban] considered by the House under suspension, which meant it needed 270 votes instead of the usual 218 in order to pass. Goodlatte and his supporters were able to garner only 245 votes when the House debated the issue on July 17, 2000.

Florida's Tom Feeney and Abramoff

We have our first "I didn't inhale" defense of the Abramoff scandal. Rep. Tom Feeney went on a golfing trip with Jack Abramoff, yes, but he's not a golfer, OK?

Three members of Congress went on a golfing junket to Scotland with lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Two of them are under investigation.

The third is Rep. Tom Feeney of Florida....

But Feeney's chief of staff, Jason Roe, wrote in an e-mail to the St. Petersburg Times that Feeney did not know golf was included in the trip and went because he was already going on vacation to Ireland with his wife about the same time.

"While Tom played golf, and paid for it, he is not even a golfer and golf was never presented to us as an activity in advance of him accepting," Roe wrote.

Via the Stakeholder.

Santorum's Sketchy Finances

Will Buch of the The Philadelphia Daily News did some digging and found:

Sen. Rick Santorum and his wife received a $500,000, five-year mortgage for their Leesburg, Va., home from a small, private Philadelphia bank run by a major campaign donor - even though its stated policy is to make loans only to its "affluent" investors, which the senator is not.

Good-government experts said the mortgage from The Philadelphia Trust Co. raises serious questions about Santorum's conduct at a time when he is the Senate GOP's point man on ethics reform. They said it would be a violation of the Senate's ethics rules if Santorum received something a regular citizen could not get.<snip>

 A political-action committee chaired by Santorum, America's Foundation, spends less money on direct aid to GOP candidates - its stated purpose - and more on expenditures than similar PACs. And its expenditure reports are littered with scores of unorthodox expenses for a political committee, with charges at coffee and ice cream shops and fast-food joints as well as supermarkets and a home-hardware store.

For example, America's Foundation made 66 charges at Starbucks Coffee, almost all in the senator's hometown of Leesburg, Va., and 94 charges at another D.C.-area vendor, HMSHost Corp. Virginia Davis, the campaign spokeswoman, defended all the charges as campaign-related, saying the senator prefers to meet political aides in coffee shops rather than on Senate property.<snip>

A little-publicized charity founded by Santorum in 2001, the Operation Good Neighbor Foundation, is not registered in Pennsylvania, even though the majority of its fundraising and spending takes place here.

What's more, three years of public tax returns show the charity spent just 35.9 percent of the nearly $1 million it raised during that time on charity grants, well below the 75 percent threshold recommended by experts. The group's Web site says it has distributed a total of $474,000 to groups, many faith-based, that fight social ills and urban poverty.

More here.

The Medicare Drug Bill's Shady Support

At Fired Up!, Roy Temple starts pulling a thread that seems like it might take awhile to unravel:

In 2000, Hanwha Group, a Korean company with extremely close ties to Speaker Dennis Hastert, Rep. Tom DeLay, Rep. Roy Blunt and other GOP leaders donated $300,000 to a "grassroots" seniors organization, Sixty Plus, that has assisted the GOP with their legislative agenda, including their Medicare prescription drug proposal.

In Search of Presidential P-rk

From the Wall Street Journal:

The president's earmarks are harder -- if not impossible -- to tally. Many appear only in closely held supplements separate from the public budget books. Also, as head of the executive branch, the president often doesn't need earmarks: Once federal agencies get funding from Congress, his appointees are fairly free to steer sums to places, programs and vendors as the administration decides....

More Abramoff Fun to Come

From Roll Call:

The Senate Indian Affairs Committee has sent nearly 100 pages of documents regarding ex-lobbyist Jack Abramoff’s use of nonprofit groups to the Senate Finance Committee, opening a second avenue into Congressional probes surrounding the admitted felon.

Indian Affairs agreed Feb. 10 to send a limited batch of files to the Finance Committee, covering how Abramoff and his network of nonprofits helped conceal a multimillion-dollar bribery conspiracy. These documents will allow Finance to engage in the probe it announced almost a year ago into Abramoff and his nonprofits.

On Friendship

Yesterday, Rep. John Doolittle (R-CA) waxed poetic on friendship. Republicans or the Mafia? looks closely at what that might mean:

That inevitably reminded us of the classic gangster introduction: “He’s a friend of ours.”

Marianas out of Money

Their governor can't afford a trip to Washington. Abramoff must have sucked them dry.

Reform

According to Roll Call, 527 organizations from the right and left are banding together to minimize changes to their status as part of any lobbying reform proposal.

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.