Abramoff fed Washington’s outstretched hands

By Margaret Carlson
Bloomsberg Columnist

The 25th anniversary of Abscam passed recently, and without a lot of fanfare. For its time, it was quite a scandal, an elaborate sting pulled off in a house on a dead-end road, in a neighborhood of mansions, with a lot of late-night meetings and a lawman dressed as a sheik. It netted six congressmen and one senator, all but one a Democrat.

These days Abscam is dwarfed by the scandal that threatens to eat Washington. The Jack Abramoff mess is so much bigger than Abscam it has no name other than his. The investigation spans at least four law enforcement agencies and 12 FBI field offices, and may easily exceed Abscam's convictions.

The Abramoff affair takes powerful officials from Capitol Hill to the South Sea Islands, where they learn about the previously unknown virtues of sweatshops. A clip from one of those excursions of U.S. Representative Tom DeLay, with flowers in his hair and embracing a fully bearded Abramoff, may become as iconic as that picture of Monica in her beret hugging Clinton on the rope line.

On the House

For every sport, Abramoff had a skybox; for every occasion, his very own swank watering hole, where the drinks were on the house. The saga loops from the elegant golf course of St. Andrew's in Scotland to Florida's Gold Coast, where a casino owner who fell out with Abramoff was murdered.

With Abramoff having cut his deal with prosecutors, the scandal shifts from the givers to the receivers.

For every dollar offered by Abramoff, there was an outstretched hand; for every trip, a grateful frequent flyer. While the Abscam crowd met in secret and moved money in the dark of night, Abramoff blithely passed out his American Express card and wrote checks in broad daylight. Officials didn't wear dark glasses and big hats pulled low to cover their association with Abramoff. They sat for all the world to see in his Super Bowl seats.

For a long time, no one batted an eye. In the age of the Whopper, Abramoff was a super-sized lobbyist, admired for breaking the $500-an-hour ceiling on fees. Even the New York Times noticed, with a profile of how this religious man and committed ideologue had penetrated the heart of the Republican power establishment.

Abramoff's Access

How Abramoff really differs from Abscam is not in superficial prestige, dollar amounts, or body count but in scope. Abramoff didn't aim his largesse at the rank and file of the party in charge, but at the highest circles of its leadership.

Republican doors were opened to those who led with their wallets, encouraged to give ever greater amounts on which DeLay kept a running tally. An earmark of the e-mails uncovered by Senator John McCain's subcommittee hearings is the ease with which Abramoff moved on the Hill. It's hard to imagine anyone, perhaps save Mrs. DeLay, having an easier time getting through to DeLay than Abramoff.

For all its breadth, Abramoff isn't the only scandal in town. There are continuing investigations of the Senate majority leader, Bill Frist; of DeLay, the former House majority leader, who's already been indicted for money laundering; and of the president's top aide, Karl Rove, in an inquiry that's already seen the arraignment of the vice president's chief of staff, Scooter Libby.

White House Too

Nor is Abramoff only a congressional scandal. There is at least one White House official implicated, David Safavian, a former Abramoff lobbyist with a particularly odious list of clients ranging from the murderous former leader of the Congo to the head of a controversial Muslim group, Abdurahman Alamoudi. Alamoudi is now serving 23 years in federal prison for conspiring with Libya to assassinate then-Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, according to the conservative Weekly Standard magazine.

Safavian said he didn't actually represent Alamoudi, who extolled the virtues of Hamas and Hezbollah: Inclusion of him in the firm's lobbying disclosures was all a clerical error. He couldn't explain the $40,000 his firm received from Alamoudi.

With such credentials, why shouldn't the president pick Safavian to be his top procurement official? That's a heck of a job for a guy who had learned his trade at Abramoff's knee, and who traveled on Abramoff's dime despite telling the ethics office Abramoff had no business before him.

Graceless Minuet

In fact, at the very moment Safavian was swinging his five- iron on the greens of Scotland, Abramoff was leaning hard on Safavian to sell him two valuable pieces of government real estate. As the feds were closing in, Safavian left his office at the White House just in time to be arrested on criminal charges in the privacy of his home two days later.

But let us be grateful for small blessings. Until the Abramoff indictment and plea, we pretended that nothing is offered in return for all that's given everyday to lawmakers. No influence is being peddled; the pols just want to have fun.

What is bracing about the Abramoff indictment aside from the nailing of a bad guy is that it makes explicit that which is denied. After Abramoff, who can say with a straight face that money doesn't buy influence?

Lobbying isn't a game of solitaire; it's a graceless minuet with every step choreographed. Abramoff led the dance, and so many who promised to uphold the Constitution followed. Shame, and maybe jail time, awaits them, and all the little Abramoffs still at large.