Republican Degrees of Separation
by Hunter
Tue Sep 27th, 2005 at 13:13:25 PDT
Following up on Kagro X's post below, I'd like to riff off of Josh's excellent work at Talking Points Memo and continue to tease out this conversation. What is most interesting -- and possibly explosive -- about the Abramoff "bag man" investigation is that Abramoff seems tied to literally every major Republican player and power broker. Through his money connections, he represents the governing force behind the current Republican movement: if you want to play in Washington, you grease Abramoff's wheels, or DeLay's wheels, or those of one of the close "friends" they share between them.
As Josh points out, among those seeking to take advantage of Abramoff's much-used skybox in late 2000: John Ashcroft and staff. Josh has memos linking these conversations to Susan Ralston, who at the time was Abramoff's executive assistant but who later went to work for Karl Rove in the same capacity.
Now, you also might remember Ralston as a special assistant of Rove and Grover Norquist:
Norquist had a deal with Susan Ralston, who until recently was the assistant to Karl Rove. An unnamed Republican lobbyist recently told Salon.com: "Susan took a message for Rove, and then called Grover to ask if she should put the caller through to Rove. If Grover didn't approve, your call didn't go through."
Talk about pay-to-play. Any guesses on what wheels you needed to grease to get an appointment in the White House, under this arrangement? Something tells me we're going to find out.
The Ralston connections, and this shall-we-say curious Rove-Norquist arrangement to police White House access through the auspices of an outside Republican lobbyist, need to be far more fully explored. This is a White House that has been continually accused of being utterly beholden to lobbyists: as we're finding out, that's even more true than we realized. Republican-connected lobbyists literally determined, in advance, who got to talk to the White House at all.
And now those lobbyists are accused, as Kagro pointed out below, of a shakedown scheme -- manufacturing artificial legislative roadblocks in order to maneuver their clients around them. In exchange for large fees, of course.
Now add in today's arrests for the "gangland-style" murder of SunCruz figure 'Gus' Boulis in 2001. Boulis sold SunCruz Casinos to Abramoff and partner Adam Kidan in 2000, the transaction which currently has Abramoff under indictment. If you wanted a newsroom degrees-of-separation game between Republican lobbyist Abramoff, Tom DeLay, Ohio Representative Bob Ney, and the Gambino crime family, you've now got it.
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