Nightline 6/21: Jack Abramoff, Tom DeLay's good buddy

[Bozita]

This'll be on late due to the basketball game.

CASINOS, CASH, AND CONGRESS: Is a Summer Scandal Brewing in Washington?

June 21, 2005


Today is the first day of summer and, here in Washington, that means we are due for some sort of scandal. In this town, after all, summer scandals seem to break out as reliably as unbearably hot and muggy afternoons.


In fact, a scandal is brewing this summer in Washington and, as we like to say in the news business, this one looks like it has "legs."

It involves a well-connected Washington lobbyist, Indian tribes flush with casino cash, key members of Congress, and a political operative best known for his work with the Christian Coalition.

The lobbyist, Jack Abramoff, is under investigation by two Senate committees, the Justice Department, the FBI, and other federal agencies. Abramoff and his business partner, a former spokesman for Rep. Tom DeLay, collected more than $80 million from Native American tribes to protect their casino interests, and now some tribes say they were defrauded. The lobbyists also raised eyebrows by hiring Ralph Reed, the former head of the Christian Coalition who's now running for lieutenant governor in Georgia. Reed whipped up anti-gambling sentiment against Indian casinos in Texas, among other places, while taking millions from Abramoff's gaming clients. (Reed insists he didn't know the exact source of the money.)

Tomorrow, Sen. John McCain, who chairs the Indian Affairs Committee, resumes public hearings on this tangled web of influence-peddling. But the developing scandal is instructive for what it reveals about how big money is solicited from special interests and spread around Washington. It's an eye-opening look at the hidden costs of doing business with our elected representatives.

Even other lobbyists in town are worried about the lasting stain they fear this episode will leave.

We hope you'll join us in welcoming summer to Washington tonight.

Chris Bury & the "Nightline" staff
Correspondent
ABC News Washington Bureau

[Goldmund]

1. Whatever

They'll take a smaller scandal if they can push a bigger scandal off the stage.

[seemslikeadream]

2. THE SECRET WORLD OF JACK ABRAMOFF: TERRORIST TORPEDOS & REPUBLICAN 'MUSCLE

At MadCow Morning News

THE SECRET WORLD OF JACK ABRAMOFF: TERRORIST TORPEDOS & REPUBLICAN 'MUSCLE'
June 21, 2005 Venice, FL--The 'secret world' of Jack Abramoff being probed by investigators today has definite connections and unmistakable links to the one inhabited during their final year in the U.S. by Mohamed Atta and the other hijackers.

As the scandal embroiling House Major Domo Tom Delay and Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff grows hotter, there may be new revelations about the 9.11 attack.

Less than a week before the 9.11 attack, for example, Atta and several other hijackers made a still-unexplained visit onboard one of Abramoff’s casino boats.

What were they doing there? No one professes to know.

The MadCowMorningNews recently learned exclusive new details about the gangland-style murder in Florida which figures so prominently in lobbyist Abramoff’s rise to power.

What does a scandal involving Indian casinos, gambling boat “cruises to nowhere” & pay-for-play government officials have to do with the story of 19 hijackers planning a mass murder in supposed isolation in Florida?
www.madcowprod.com/



First, there is Leventhal's association with apartheid South Africa's infamous "Project Babushka." According to a July 16, 1995 story in Newsday, during the 1980s, South Africa's military established a dummy front called the International Freedom Foundation (IFF). The IFF was an influence-peddling organization used to counter critics of the apartheid regime and buy off right-wing American politicians to campaign against economic and military sanctions against the apartheid regime.

According to former South African top spy Craig Williamson, IFF and Project Babushka enrolled such right-wing Republicans as North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms, Henry Kissinger, California Republican Representative Robert Dornan, Indiana Republican Representative Dan Burton, Illinois Republican Representative Phil Crane, and right-wing GOP kook Alan Keyes. Helms even served as chairman of the editorial advisory board for the IFF's publication branch—a group that pumped out all sorts of propaganda claiming that the African National Congress and Nelson Mandela were Communists.

Helping to run the IFF's Washington, DC, office at 200 G Street, SE (and next door to the right-wing Free Congress Foundation) was none other than Jack Abramoff, who is now embroiled in a series of kickback and payola allegations involving House Majority Leader Tom DeLay.

Abramoff, a former Hollywood movie producer, helped the IFF to produce the movie "Red Scorpion," a film about an anti-Communist African guerrilla leader battling Marxist forces with the assistance of South African military advisers. Of course, the film was a propaganda piece aimed at extolling Angolan anti-Communist UNITA leader Jonas Savimbi, who was fighting Angola's Marxist government with the overt assistance of South Africa and the covert (and illegal) assistance of the Reagan-Bush administration. As late as 1990 and after Mandela's release from prison, the IFF was running anti-ANC and Mandela ads in American newspapers.

www.onlinejournal.com/Special_Reports/041805Madsen/041805madsen.html

[Goldmund]

4. Now THAT's pretty interesting.

[LightningFlash]

6. This just screams of inter-cut relationship to the one and only.....

.......Theocratic cult of deception who's long standing ties to PNAC show us there's more to 9/11 than any skeptic would have had one believe......

You all need to read up on them, the Council of National Policy.
http://www.seekgod.ca/cnp/

Their games been on the backburner for a long time now. :smoke:

[seemslikeadream]

7. ABRAMOFF AND DELAY FOCUS WASN'T SWEATSHOPS. IT WAS GAMBLING!!!

The casino boat ‘industry’ can be traced back to a few seemingly inconsequential sentences buried in a 1992 federal law called ''An Act to provide for the designation of the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary.''

(The “Flower Garden Banks” are the northernmost coral reefs in the United States, located off Texas and Louisiana.)

The obscure bill offered the perfect place to slip in a few sentences, which, deciphered, added ships of U.S. registry to vessels already covered under the Johnson Act of 1951, which regulated the transportation of gambling devices, and allowed ships of foreign registry, which often offered gambling, to dock at U.S. ports as long as no one used or repaired gambling equipment while in U.S. territorial waters.

The amendment was a Trojan horse which extended this privilege to U.S. ships…

And the result was a burgeoning new industry in Florida, and the state was soon encircled by almost thirty casino boats swarming the peninsula’s ports like the bloodthirsty pirates of yore. The booty these pirates were plundering was the mad money of bored retirees.

They were called “cruises to nowhere.” And in short order the boats were generating hundreds of millions of dollars a year in revenues. Hundreds of million of dollars of unregulated revenue…

While not getting ahead of ourselves, we still note that this was more than enough money to help tip the balance in the last two Presidential elections. At a minimum, for the casino operators it provided instant access to anything and anybody worth being accessed.


...

Almost every article we'd read cites Abramoff & Delay's interest in the Marianas being sweat-shop related. Meaning they're in favor of them. Their primary focus wasn't sweatshops. It was gambling.



http://www.madcowprod.com/06202005.html

[LightningFlash]

3. RNC deflecting attention back to Tom DeLay....

Pure signs of desperation. Tom DeLay was paid by all those special interests to represent them, and represent them he did until he started threatening federal Judges with "murder" proned statements.

But if it brings it home......The truth just keeps getting uglier.

[KharmaTrain]

5. Wake Up Folks...This Is A Big Story

This Indian Casino scandal is the key to getting rid of DeLay and a whole bunch of those ratbastards. Millions were stolen and the investigation is sniffing right up Abrahamoff's tail...and then into DeLay and other pockets. That's where the junkets and other things came from.

Here's hoping Nightline does its homework and follow the money. I see Reed's name mentioned, but I've heard others as well, and maybe those will come out tonight as well.

Hopefully someone will capture some or all of the report...something more people here should be aware of.

[Bozita]

8. I agree. I'm staying up late for this one.

[Bozita]

9. kick