Abramoff Used White House To Help Get Rid of Roadblock

[DogPoundPup]

Source: WaPo

E-Mail Shows How Key Officials Aided Lobbyist in Ousting Foe.

If lobbyists find the path to their clients' riches obstructed by an implacably hostile federal official, they might achieve success by an end run or an appeal to more senior authorities. But a more extreme solution -- if the foe has high-level support -- is to pull strings at the White House and orchestrate the official's removal.

That option was chosen by Jack Abramoff and his colleagues at the Washington office of Greenberg Traurig in the Bush administration's early days, to oust Alan Stayman from a State Department negotiating job. Stayman had earned their ire by advocating labor reforms in the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. protectorate where Abramoff's clients wanted to keep paying immigrants less than the federal minimum wage to work in textile factories.

Stayman was supported by James A. Kelly, who was a White House aide to President Ronald Reagan and served as the State Department's assistant secretary of state for East Asia and the Pacific from 2001 to 2005. Kelly, citing ongoing negotiations with Micronesia and the Marshall Islands, told his department's personnel office on May 1, 2001, that he wanted Stayman to remain for two more years.
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But Abramoff's path to success in what an aide called "the Stayman project" is spelled out in a set of internal White House, State Department and Greenberg Traurig e-mails provided to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and made public last week.

Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/18/AR2008061803137.html?nav=rss_politics/fedpage

[WillParkinson]

1. If this is one of the E-mails they didn't delete...

Can you imagine what's on the e-mail they did?

[NM Independent]

2. Not the first time...

I've called him a dirty damn bastard. How sick do you have to be to lobby for rich people to continue to take advantage of the poorest people.

Somehow I doubt he'll ever get what he deserves.

[McCamy Taylor]

3. Kickiepoo!

[sofa king]

10. Heh. That's a good one.

http://www.indianz.com/News/2006/012895.asp

"The former chief of the Kickapoo Tribe of Texas and his non-Indian associate are insinuating that Jack Abramoff helped orchestrate their ouster...."

Don't tell me if you dropped that line as a coincidence. I'd prefer to think of it as stellar inside joke.

[Kolesar]

12. Reccy-too!

[freefall]

4. And of course if you are making stuff in the Mariana Islands you

can put a "Made in USA" label on it. Jack should have to spend his jail time working in one of those factories, undoubtedly worse conditions than the jail he is in now.

[underpants]

15. Yeah like forced abortions MADE IN THE USA

Paradise Lost
Greed, Sex Slavery, Forced Abortions and Right-Wing Moralists
http://www.msmagazine.com/spring2006/paradise_full.asp


http://www.alternet.org/story/13140/
Human rights groups, long up in arms over the work conditions on the islands, charged that sweatshop operators did not appreciate it when their female employees got pregnant. Numerous allegations of forced abortions surfaced over the years.

The protests began to reach the ears of Congress. Rep. George Miller, (D-Ca) and others began to demand that US labor and environmental laws be applied to the Marianas. Tom DeLay and his friend Jack Abramoff swung into action and fashioned a vigorous and largely successful counter-attack.

[Rageneau]

5. The Smirk administration has been worse than even the worst pessimist could have envisioned.

It's hard to believe that people can actually be as corrupt as these bastards actually are.

Makes me sick.

[StClone]

6. Wealth?

No longer by luck, planning, sweat, stamina and dreams! Wealth today is mostly generated by scams, schemes, the sweat of slaves and manipulation, highly unconscionable if not all illegal.

[acmavm]

7. Behind every great fortune is a great crime.

[L. Coyote]

8. HELLO PROSECUTORS = 10,000,000 missing White House E-mails!!!

[Supersedeas]

13. Mukasey no see, Mukasey no hear, Mukasey no do

[UpInArms]

9. here's a place with a wealth of information

the Jack Abramoff Research thread

Abramoff -- His Crimes and Connections to Public Figures

[hootinholler]

11. Hmmm, add this to the firing of Frederick Black, US Atty.

From the Boston Globe.

In Guam, a US territory in the Pacific, investigators were looking into Abramoff's secret arrangement with Superior Court officials to lobby against a court reform bill then pending in Congress. The legislation, since approved, gave the Guam Supreme Court authority over the Superior Court.

In 2002, Abramoff was retained by the Superior Court in what was an unusual arrangement for a public agency. The Los Angeles Times reported in May that Abramoff was paid with a series of $9,000 checks funneled through a Laguna Beach, Calif., lawyer to disguise the lobbyist's role working for the Guam court. No separate contract was authorized for Abramoff's work.
...

The transactions were the target of a grand jury subpoena issued Nov. 18, 2002, according to the subpoena. It demanded that Anthony Sanchez, administrative director of the Guam Superior Court, turn over all records involving the lobbying contract, including bills and payments.

A day later, the chief prosecutor, US Attorney Frederick A. Black, who had launched the investigation, was demoted. A White House news release announced that Bush was replacing Black.

They indeed were all over it.

-Hoot

[atommom]

14. kick

[Enrique]

16. I hope Susan enjoyed the games

Ralston resigned from the White House in 2006, a week after the House committee revealed that she had accepted tickets to nine sporting and entertainment events from Abramoff.

[MasonJar]

17. What is wrong with a country that uses other citizens of the world so

viciously in order to make more MONEY? Most of these "morans" already have richest beyond any possible means of spending them. Man is not a step above the other creatures; he is definitely inferior. Too bad the magnificent and totally intelligent and loving whales and dolphins did not get the thumb. I am not kidding; I am serious.