[Mb-civic] With Friends Like These... By Michael Isikoff Newsweek

[Michael Butler]

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    With Friends Like These...
    By Michael Isikoff
    Newsweek

    Monday 18 April 2005 Issue

    A lunchtime chat with a lobbyist close to Tom DeLay suggests he may be
headed for hotter water.

    April 18 issue - Jack Abramoff was somber, bitter and feeling betrayed.
Once a Washington superlobbyist, Abramoff is now the target of a Justice
Department criminal probe of allegations that he defrauded American Indian
tribes of tens of millions of dollars in fees. As stories of his alleged
excess dribble out - including the emergence of e-mails showing he
derisively referred to his Native American clients as "monkeys" and "idiots"
- some of Abramoff's old friends have abandoned him and treated him like a
pariah. They claim they knew nothing of his questionable lobbying tactics.
So last week, glumly sitting at his corner table at Signatures, the tony
downtown restaurant he owns that remains his last redoubt, Abramoff lashed
out in frustration.

    "Everybody is lying," Abramoff told a former colleague. There are
e-mails and records that will implicate others, he said. He was noticeably
caustic about House Majority Leader Tom DeLay. For years, nobody on
Washington's K Street corridor was closer to DeLay than Abramoff. They were
an unlikely duo. DeLay, a conservative Christian, and Abramoff, an Orthodox
Jew, traveled the world together and golfed the finest courses. Abramoff
raised hundreds of thousands for DeLay's political causes and hired DeLay's
aides, or kicked them business, when they left his employ. But now DeLay,
too, has problems - in part because of overseas trips allegedly paid for by
Abramoff's clients. In response, DeLay and his aides have said repeatedly
they were unaware of Abramoff's behind-the-scenes financing role. "Those
S.O.B.s," Abramoff said last week about DeLay and his staffers, according to
his luncheon companion. "DeLay knew everything. He knew all the details."

    It is a Washington melodrama that has played out many times before. When
political figures get into trouble and their worlds collapse, they look to
save themselves by fingering others higher in the food chain. Will Abramoff
attempt to bargain with federal prosecutors by offering up DeLay - and does
he really have the goods to do so? Abramoff has at times hinted he wanted to
bargain - possibly by naming members who sought campaign cash for
legislative favors, says a source familiar with the probe. But Abramoff's
lawyer, Abbe Lowell, says, "There have been no negotiations with the Justice
Department." Lowell cryptically acknowledges that Abramoff has been
"disappointed" and "hurt" by the public statements of some former friends,
but insists his client is currently "not upset or angry with Tom DeLay."
Still, if Abramoff's lunch-table claims are true, he could hand DeLay his
worst troubles yet.

    DeLay has plenty to explain already. Last week, still more questions
about the congressman's ethics emerged when The New York Times reported that
his wife and daughter have collected $500,000 in fees from DeLay's
political-action and campaign committees since 2001. DeLay and his aides
mounted a fierce counterattack, pointing to numerous examples of family
members of Democrats who did the same thing. Potentially more troublesome
was a Washington Post story that chronicled a six-day "fact-finding" trip to
Moscow in August 1997 that was circuitously financed by Naftasib, a Russian
oil company. Among those on the trip - besides DeLay, his wife and four of
his staff members - was Abramoff, who joined the party in Moscow and dined
and golfed with DeLay.

    House rules require members to accurately report who pays for their
travel. In this case, DeLay reported the $64,000 trip as being sponsored by
the National Center for Public Policy Research, a conservative think tank
whose board members included Abramoff. The National Center said it did
finance the trip. But its lawyer confirmed to NEWSWEEK that it had received
a substantial contribution from a "white shoe" law firm - which sources
identified as Cadwalader, Wickersham Taft - to cover the cost. Cadwalader
had been retained by Naftasib and a closely related firm, registered in the
Bahamas. The New York law firm in turn hired Abramoff's firm to do the heavy
lifting in Washington. Both firms were paid handsomely for their work,
collecting more than $440,000 in fees in 1997, primarily to set up meetings
for their Russian oil clients with members of Congress and federal agencies.

    Aides to DeLay insist he was in the dark about the Russian money behind
the trip. But one conservative think-tank analyst, Michael Waller, was
aggressively trying to warn congressional staffers about the Naftasib
connection. Even after the trip, he continued to press them. The excursion
was "bankrolled by influence peddlers tied to [the then] Prime Minister
Viktor Chernomyrdin," Waller wrote in a bulletin faxed and e-mailed to
congressional staffers shortly after the trip.

    DeLay's spokesman, Dan Allen, said Naftasib's business interests were
irrelevant to DeLay. "The main purpose of the trip was to talk about
religious persecution," he said. But DeLay's many political enemies in
Washington aren't likely to buy that explanation. And the one man who may
know best so far isn't talking, except to those he invites to his restaurant
for lunch.