The New York Times reports that Jack Abramoff, the same lobbyist whose shady dealings with Congressman Tom Delay have been all over the news recently, has been brokering shady deals for many years:
Jack Abramoff, the lobbyist at the center of a federal corruption investigation, led a Congressional delegation to Pakistan in 1997 but failed to tell the group’s sponsor or the lawmakers that he was a registered lobbyist for the Pakistani government, according to the sponsor and the two House members on the trip.
Lobbyists for foreign governments are required to register with the Justice Department. Disclosure statements filed by Mr. Abramoff and his former firm, Preston Gates & Ellis, show that the firm was retained by Pakistan in May 1995 to lobby to overturn sanctions barring delivery of American weapons to Pakistan if its government continued to pursue a nuclear weapons program. The initial six-month lobbying contract paid the firm a retainer of $165,000, plus expenses. A spokesman for Preston Gates had no comment.
Heh, I love the registration of lobbyists for foreign governments. When Walter Pincus gave the Columbia Journalism Day speech in 2004 (sort of our own private graduation ceremony), he talked about how he first wrote about the problem (I guess people didn’t know who was a foreign lobbyist and who wasn’t?) and then took a sabbatical to do work on the problem, leading to legislation (the legislation that just caught out Mr. Abramoff?) with Fulbright’s Senate Foreign Relation’s Committee. Kind of cool—not too often you hear about a journalist totally completing the cycle of muckraking to reform.
Can’t really blame Mike McNulty–it would probably have been too much work for overworked aides to cross reference every lobbyists various clients–but in this day and age that kind of thing ought to be more avoidable. The whole thing reeks of that special insider halls-of-power odor you get only in politics. No matter how jaded I get, I’m still amazed at how byzantine and opaque our Republic is. . .
Okay, this is seriously, disgustingly, old school:
From the Foreign Agents Registration Unit Website:
Public information relating to the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) can be obtained in person at the FARA Registration Unit Public Office located at:
As far as I can tell that’s it.. You can’t write to them, fax them, call them, or, heaven forbid, query them through a website. You actually have to walk in the door to get any information out of them. How’s that for transparent government? The latest available copy of the “semi-annual” report is only from 2002! According to this article from the Center for Public Integrity, dated last year, their database was in such a fragile state that even copying it threatened it. (Sound plausible, Sepia Engineers?) Pakistan and India from the second half of 2002.
Do we have a DC Mutineer who wants to go demand the more recent South Asian info?
My favorite Abramoff accusation was that he redirected money given by his casino clients for inner city youths to a defense fund for settlers int eh weest bank so that they could buy night vision goggles, and other military goodies. Like all news stories, this is just one side, but that’s a juicy claim …