Abramoff's Firm Fined for Illegal Foreign Campaign Contributions

There's a very significant piece of background information in today's Raw Story report, which notes that Greenberg Traurig (GT) law firm, which hosted Abramoff's lobbying shop, was previously convicted of knowingly accepting illegal foreign campaign contributions. A German paid the largest fine to date for that offense after a foreign contribution went through a GT lobbyist in 1998. Under Federal Election Commission laws, foreign individuals and companies are barred from contributing to American political campaigns and parties. http://rawstory.com/news/2005/Firm_knew_of_Abramoffs_relationship_with_0102.html

This raises an obvious question: when are we ever going to hear more about how Jack Abramoff and Grover Norquist funneled money to the GOP from Islamic banks and fees from groups tied to terrorist finance? According to reports published in The Hill, a respected Washington political newsletter, after 9/11, Abramoff and Norquist continued to do business on behalf of Islamic banks that had been accused of financing terrorist groups. We must now ask, is this part of the Republican influence-peddling scheme ever going to be revealed in court documents, or is this going to get buried as part of Jack's plea agreement with the Justice Department? See, www.dailykos.com/story/2005/10/17/122311/72 ; www.dailykos.com/story/2005/12/13/91057/126

Rawstory is running an article today reporting that the law firm was aware of his unlawful practices months before The Washington Post first reported on them in 2004. Greenberg Traurig claims it had no knowledge of Abramoff's wrongdoing until it was revealed in The Post. According to today's RawStory:

Before he was a pariah, Abramoff was Greenberg Traurig’s poster boy.

SNIP

With Abramoff, Greenberg Traurig did even better than they had hoped. The firm’s lobbying receipts leapt fourfold, from $3 million in 2000, to $16 million in 2001. At the peak in 2003, the firm grossed $26 million on lobbying alone.

The scandal hounding Abramoff isn’t the first the firm has faced. In 1998, the Federal Election Commission levied a $77,000 fine against Greenberg for knowing soliciting illegal contributions from foreign national. The fine given the German developer in the case, $323,000, was the largest of its kind ever assessed by the FEC.

Reporting in national media, including The Washington Post which has been covering the Abramoff story closely, have virtually ignored foreign sources of fees and funding collected by Abramoff and his various shell companies, money which if it were commingled with Jack's political contributions to the Republican Party would be a violation of federal law.

State's Secrets to gag Sibel Edmunds?

-Hoot

The answer won't confirmed to a legal certainty while the Republicans still control America as a one-party state.

The facts are pretty clear, though, that the Speaker of the House and a number of other GOP leaders, particularly the Bush family, have accepted huge amounts of foreign source money, and that has influenced their policies. This has been going on for decades.