Lobbyist (Abramoff) Sought $9 Million to Set Bush Meeting

From the NY Times. It certainly appears that the Abramoff scandal reaches all the way to the door steps of the drunken cowboy in the White House. damn, are these great days to be a Dem or what!!
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The lobbyist Jack Abramoff asked for $9 million in 2003 from the president of a West African nation to arrange a meeting with President Bush and directed his fees to a Maryland company now under federal scrutiny, according to newly disclosed documents.

The African leader, President Omar Bongo of Gabon, met with President Bush in the Oval Office on May 26, 2004, 10 months after Mr. Abramoff made the offer. There has been no evidence in the public record that Mr. Abramoff had any role in organizing the meeting or that he received any money or had a signed contract with Gabon.

White House and State Department officials described Mr. Bush's meeting with President Bongo, whose government is regularly accused by the United States of human rights abuses, as routine. The officials said they knew of no involvement by Mr. Abramoff in the arrangements. Officials at Gabon's embassy in Washington did not respond to written questions.


<snip>

In a draft agreement with Gabon dated Aug. 7, 2003, Mr. Abramoff and his associates asked that $9 million in lobbying fees be paid through wire transfers - three of them, each for $3 million - to GrassRoots instead of the Washington offices of Greenberg Traurig, the large lobbying firm where he did most of his work. The agreement promised a "public relations effort related to promoting Gabon and securing a visit for President Bongo with the president of the United States."

Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/10/politics/10lobby.html?hp&ex=1131598800&en=c143a0d022b49971&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Great way to start out the day!

Public relations work! LOL!




Cher

deeper and deeper, doesn't it? :evilgrin:

I am sure we will be told it was not as bad as having that Ch. guy in for tea.

while at Greenberg & Traurig, Jack Abramoff also "set up a subsidiary lobbying group with a Director of the Islamic Institute, a Virginia group founded by Grover Norquist, a GOP strategy and fundraising heavyweight. http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/10/17/122311/72

Abramoff and a partner, Kaled Saffuri, operated Lexington Group LLC. This was reportedly not a commercial success, according to The Hill newspaper (04/14/2005): http://www.hillnews.com/thehill/export/TheHill/News/Fro ...

Three years ago, Abramoff and a prominent Islamic activist set up a lobbying firm, the Lexington Group LLC, with the goal of developing more lobbying business for Abramoff's employer at the time, Greenberg Traurig.

The firm existed for at least four months and boasted on its now-defunct website that it represented "major U.S. corporations before the U.S. Congress and the Executive Branch every day." But it never reported any clients, nor did it direct business to Greenberg Traurig, according to public records and an interview with Abramoff's associate in the venture, Khaled Saffuri, now a government affairs adviser with Collier Shannon Scott.

"I expected business to come, and it didn't. It just folded," said Saffuri, who said he was hired by Abramoff to be the Lexington Group's president from May until August 2002, when it closed.

Reportedly, Grover "Norquist and Khaled Saffuri founded the Islamic Institute, which was instrumental in the creation of the Al Qaeda financial network in Virginia. Saffuri was the Executive director of the American Task Force for Bosnia, which lobbied for US military intervention in Bosnia. Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda organization actively was recruiting and training Arab fighters to fight alongside the Bosnian Muslims. Bosnia had become the focus of the worldwide jihad after the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989." http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1571/is_2004 ... ; http://www.libertyforum.org/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=new ...

Norquist's ties to the Saudi-funded Islamist movement in the US go back to 1998, after which Norquist became the principal Washington bridge for radical Islamists to the Republican Party. Frank J. Gaffney writes: http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID ...

The association between Grover Norquist and Islamists appears to have started about five years ago, in 1998, when he became the founding chairman of an organization called the Islamic Free Market Institute, better known as the Islamic Institute. The Institute's stated purpose was to cultivate Muslim-Americans and Arab-Americans whose attachment to conservative family values and capitalism made them potential allies for the Republican Party in advance of the 2000 presidential election. . . .

Unfortunately, some associated with the Islamic Institute evidently had another agenda. Abdurahman Alamoudi, for one, a self-described "supporter of Hamas and Hezbollah," the prime-mover behind the American Muslim Council (AMC) and a number of other U.S.-based Islamist-sympathizing/supporting organizations, saw in the Islamic Institute a golden opportunity to hedge his bets.

**

But, Jack did have some help in managing his affairs. He delegated operations to a number of trusted lieutenants, many of whom ended up with ranking staff positions in offices ranging from Karl's Rove's personal assistant (Susan Ralston - http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/11/10/1537/1310) to the head of Republican Maryland Governor Bob Ehrlich's state economic development office. TPM CAFE's Ryan White reports on Abramoff's reach into the Office of Personnel Management and the Maryland governor's office:

http://www.tpmcafe.com/story/2005/9/25/13441/0255
By Ryan White | bio
From: Auction House
Another week, another hurricane, and another Abramoff associate in hot water--though this time it's a fresh face who's making their debut on the Week in Corruption.

Sep 25, 2005 -- 01:44:00 PM EST

The Office of Management and Budget's (OMB) former procurement chief, David Safavian, was arrested on Sept. 19th for lying to officials and obstructing a Justice Department investigation in connection to his relationship with Jack Abramoff. Safavian accompanied Abramoff on an August 2002 golf junket to Scotland--a trip that also included Ralph Reed and Bob Ney--and asked for permission to accept the free airfare, claiming in an email to a GSA ethics official that "he host is a lawyer and lobbyist, but one that has no business before GSA (he does all of his work on Capitol Hill)." Safavian twice later repeated this claim, once in a late March-early April questioning by the GSA Inspector General, and again in a 2005 email to the Senate Indian Affairs Committee.

As emails have shown, Safavian worked with Abramoff both before and after the Scotland trip on affairs that did involve the GSA, the federal agency that manages federal land and property. Safavian aided Abramoff in his efforts to acquire 40-acres of GSA-managed land in Silver Spring, MD, and also in changing development regulations on the Old Post Office building in DC, which, according to FBI special agent Jeffrey Reisig, would help Abramoff give "tribal clients a competitive advantage in efforts to lease and develop the building." In an email exchange one of Abramoff's colleagues asked Abramoff about Safavian's presence on the golf trip, "Why Dave?... Business angle?" to which Abramoff replied in bold, "Total business angle. He is new chief of staff at GSA." Safavian claims he will fight the three-count criminal complaint "vigorously." He previously worked with Abramoff in the 1990s at the law firm Preston Gates Ellis & Rouvelas Meeds, and with Grover Norquist at Janus-Merritt Strategies LLC.

In other Abramoff news, Tyco's general counsel Timothy Flanigan, in a statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee, said that Abramoff boasted he could help the company fight taxes aimed at offshore corporations because "he had contact with Mr. Karl Rove," and "had good relationships with members of Congress," including Tom Delay. A Silver Spring-based company, Grassroots Interactive, was given $2 million by Tyco at Abramoff's behest, $1.5 million of which Abramoff promised to repay after a Tyco investigation found that, according to Flanigan, the $2 million was "diverted to entities controlled by Mr. Abramoff" and wrongfully spent. Flanigan's statements came during his confirmation hearing as President Bush's nominee for deputy Attorney General. Yesterday the Washington Post reported that Edward Miller, a "top aide" to Robert Ehrlich (R-MD), was subpoenaed last summer by a federal grand jury for his efforts in establishing Grassroots Interactive, and has been "cooperating" with the federal investigation ever since.

It seems that claims made by Adam Kidan's lawyer less than a month ago that Abramoff and Kidan will not testify against each other might not hold up much longer. In court documents filed in the SunCruz Casinos lawsuit, Abramoff blames Kidan for not telling Abramoff of his past business failures and disbarment, and said of the loan papers used to buy the SunCruz, "ad I known these facts about Kidan, I would never have signed." (For those of you in need of an Abramoff-Kidan refresher course, the Associated Press has a useful timeline of all the important events).

SNIP

once served as ambassador to Gabon. Interesting....

Bush is a fad whose time has passed. He won't be worth 50 cents this time next year. Bongo wus took bad.