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August 1, 2008
BILL MOYERS: Welcome to the JOURNAL.
We return to Capitol Crimes because while Jack Abramoff is in jail, the investigation into this epic scandal is expanding - with new revelations about the rot at the core of our government. A major new book to be published next week puts it all into context. Thomas Frank's THE WRECKING CREW - excerpted in HARPERS' Magazine, now on the newsstands-describes the rise of a ruling coalition dedicated to dismantling government by simply selling it off. That was the theme of our report on "Capitol Crimes", produced by my colleague Sherry Jones. Take a look at this and stay tuned for an update.
BILL MOYERS: The story begins in 1984; a young Jack Abramoff was introduced to the Republican National Convention.
SPEAKER: One of the ever-growing list of young people who have joined in the Republican cause, the chairman of the College Republican National Committee, Jack Abramoff, for purposes of addressing the convention.
BILL MOYERS: A self-described "rabid right winger," he now headed the organization that had launched the careers of Republican power brokers from Lee Atwater to Karl Rove.
JACK ABRAMOFF: Fellow Republicans, I come before you today representing American students - the future of our Republican party.
SAM HARBEN: When I heard it for the first time, when they mentioned Jack's name, I said to myself, "He did it." Because that's what he did when we were College Republicans. We wanted to entertain Congressmen. That was like winning a football game.
BILL MOYERS: The team headed by Abramoff had lots of connections and lots of plays.
SAM HARBEN: One of the favorite ones was: Can we create a hospitality suite with plenty of liquor and plenty of college girls and see if we could get a Congressman to come to that? And you could.
BILL MOYERS: As college students, Jack Abramoff and another young Republican, Grover Norquist, organized campuses for Ronald Reagan. Now Norquist had become Abramoff's executive director. Together they intended to remove liberals from power, as Abramoff put it, "permanently."
SAM HARBEN: We were idealists. We were young people who thought that we were going to save the world for democracy. I mean we were fighting for the liberty of the world. And in that sense, we viewed everything as ideology. It either helps our fight against the Communists or it doesn't.
BILL MOYERS: They dreamed up headline-grabbing stunts, like this one in the shadow of the Capitol, to support Reagan's anti-communist foreign policy.
RALPH REED: Good morning. My name is Ralph Reed. I'm the executive director of Students for America...
BILL MOYERS: Ralph Reed, a junior from the University of Georgia, joined the hard-charging team as a $200 a month intern.
SAM HARBEN: It was very simple, very black and white. We used army metaphors. We talked about being "hard core."
BILL MOYERS: Volunteers sent out to organize the grass roots were told to memorize a speech from the movie Patton. But for the word "Nazis" they were to substitute the word "Democrats." "Wade into them," the young recruits repeated. "Spill their blood!"
JACK ABRAMOFF: If we're the party of composure - and not the party that ducks disclosure - then we're riding our wave. If we equivocate, capitulate, accommodate, negotiate...
BILL MOYERS: From the beginning, Abramoff played fast and loose with the money.
JACK ABRAMOFF: If we try to outspend big, fat Tip O'Neill...
SAM HARBEN: We were bankrupt and we owed thousands and thousands of dollars. And I was going, "There's no way we..." We had people call us every day... printing companies and ...wanting money. And I played that horrible game for six months or three months of going, "I don't have the bill. Send me a bill." You know, "What's it for?" And so forth, because we were inundated with just tons of debt that Jack had run up.
MICHAEL WALLER: Two of my colleagues and I quit working with him in 1983, because we thought he was completely unethical. And I never went back to talk to him since.
JACK ABRAMOFF: And so it is to our party that they come. It is with us that they trust their dreams. And it is in us that they place their hopes.
SAM HARBEN: He seemed to be very much a man of principle. Until you got into it with Jack and began to see what he did. When it came to money, Jack had no principles.
JACK ABRAMOFF: And it is for them that we must restore liberty and righteousness throughout the world. Thank you.
BILL MOYERS: In November 1994, Republicans won eight new Senate seats and a whopping 52 seats in the House. The revolution imagined by Abramoff and his College Republicans was embodied in Newt Gingrich, the new Speaker of the House. Gingrich put Washington on notice: "If you want to play in our revolution," he said, "you have to live by our rules."
BILL MOYERS: And at the center of the action was Grover Norquist, a chief architect of the revolution.
BILL MOYERS: Poring over lists of campaign contributions, Norquist concocted a scheme to turn Washington into a Republican town: insist that only Republicans be hired as lobbyists and make sure the lobbyists contribute only to Republicans. The result would be a lucrative money machine for the party. He dubbed it the K Street Project - after the lobbyists' main drag in downtown Washington.
HILARY ROSEN: One day my Republican head of government relations came back from a meeting at Grover's shop. And he said that they had distributed a list of the biggest Democratic contributors that year who were registered lobbyists.
BILL MOYERS: Grover's shop is called Americans for Tax Reform. And it's the conservative movement's nerve center. Every Wednesday morning, Norquist commands a strategy session of Congressional staff, party activists, and think tankers.
BILL MOYERS: On Capitol Hill, Tom DeLay of Texas had moved up to number three in the new House leadership. He became the K Street Project's enforcer.
LOUS DUBOSE: And he called lobbyists in one at a time, and he put this ledger in front of them and said, "Here's the book. You've contributed too much money to Democrats. You've got to contribute more money to Republicans. We're in power now."
LOUS DUBOSE: His ambition was to create a vertically integrated political machine that controlled who was in the lobby at the top, controlled who got big lobby jobs. Some of them a million five a year, some of them a million a year, some of them - the lower paying jobs $250,000 a year. If they could control who got them, then they could control the political contributions that lobbyists and their clients made. So that was the top of this vertically integrated shakedown machine.
BILL MOYERS: Every lobby shop in town was searching for an in with the new GOP majority. Among them was the venerable Seattle firm of Preston Gates.
LAURENCE LATOURETTE: Their old connections weren't anywhere near as effective. And to sort of have contact and be able to talk with the new crowd, they needed somebody who had the bona fides to talk to them. Jack did.
BILL MOYERS: The K Street Project paved the way for Jack Abramoff. The firm announced its new hire with a press release touting Abramoff's ties to the Republican National Committee, to the Christian Coalition headed by his old pal, Ralph Reed, and to the new leaders of the House, Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay.
But there was no one more indispensable to Abramoff's rise than Grover Norquist.
MICHAEL WALLER: They were probably about as inseparable as two political people can get.
BILL MOYERS: "What the Republicans need is fifty Jack Abramoffs," Norquist said. "Then this becomes a different town." So it did.
MICHAEL WALLER: If it wasn't for his relations with Grover Norquist, Jack Abramoff would never have been able to become the super lobbyist that he became, and to charge the huge rates that he charged because he had this unique relationship with certain Republican leaders.
BILL MOYERS: The hefty fees would enrich Abramoff. And he, in turn, would direct his clients to enrich the conservative political machine.
One of his first was the wealthiest gambling tribe in America - the Mississippi Choctaw. To keep their huge casino earnings from being taxed, the tribe needed connections to the right people in Washington.
SEN. BEN NIGHTHORSE CAMPBELL (R-CO): It appears from their own words Mr. Abramoff and Mr. Scanlon held their tribal clients in absolute contempt. In an e-mail discussing a dinner meeting with a client, the reason Mr. Abramoff could not attend: "I have to meet with the monkeys from the Choctaw Tribal Council." Mind you that these "monkeys' had enriched him over a 5-year period with over $7 million in lobbying fees. It is a story of greed run amok.
BILL MOYERS: In 1995, Jack Abramoff had convinced the Choctaw he was their man.
BILL MOYERS: And Grover Norquist had just what Abramoff needed to prove his worth to the Choctaw: an organization dedicated to opposing all tax increases "as a matter of principle." The two old college comrades framed the casino tax as a tax increase that Conservatives should oppose. All of a sudden, activists at Norquist's weekly meetings found themselves discussing Indian tribes.
MICHAEL WALLER: We didn't know one tribe from another. So what? Let them have their casino. We didn't know. Nobody knew they were multi-billion dollar entities. It's not something anybody paid attention to.
BILL MOYERS: But Norquist was paying attention, and the Choctaw were putting up the money to organize anti-tax groups across the country to lobby their cause.
MICHAEL WALLER: Why in the world would Grover Norquist care about -- care so deeply about Indian tribes, unless there was something else going on. We all suspected something pretty fishy.
BILL MOYERS: In fact, the Choctaw became a major contributor to Norquist's organization. And Norquist in turn was moving much of the money to this man - the third member of the old College Republican troika. In 1989, Ralph Reed had become head of Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition. His skill at mixing religion with hardball politics landed him on the cover of Time magazine at the age of 33.
RALPH REED: This reflects what we believe is one of the greatest cancers growing on the American body politic, and that is the scourge of legalized gambling.
BILL MOYERS: In the mid-1990's, Reed left to set up his own political consulting firm, and he sent an e-mail to his old friend Jack Abramoff, who was now known on K Street as "Casino Jack." This is what Reed wrote:
[E-mail from RALPH REED]: Hey, now that I'm done with electoral politics, I need to start humping in corporate accounts! I'm counting on you to help me with some contacts.
BILL MOYERS: And humping they did go. Despite Reed's long-time opposition to gambling, he and Abramoff set out to protect the Choctaw casino against competition. The scheme called for Reed to organize his fellow Christians on moral grounds - to oppose threats to Abramoff's client without telling them that that client was actually in the gambling business.
E-mails between the two make clear there was no doubt where the money came from. When Reed pushed for a "green light," for example, to begin organizing devout gambling opponents in Alabama, Abramoff told him approval would first have to come from the Choctaw, and asked:
[E-mail from JACK ABRAMOFF:] ...get me invoices as soon as possible so I can get Choctaw to get us checks ASAP.
BILL MOYERS: Reed wrote back with a list and a total:
[E-mail from RALPH REED]: We have fronted $100K, which is a lot for us.
BILL MOYERS: Abramoff promised to do what he could:
[E-mail from JACK ABRAMOFF]: Any chance that a wire from Choctaw directly would be OK?
BILL MOYERS: Just days later, Reed tells Abramoff:
[E-mail from RALPH REED]: We are opening the bomb bays and holding nothing back.
[E-mail from JACK ABRAMOFF]: Yeaaaa baaabby!!!
BILL MOYERS: To keep secret the source of the Choctaw money paid to Reed and the Christian groups he recruited, Abramoff turned to their old friend Grover Norquist. When Norquist needed money for his own organization, he turned to Jack.
[E-mail from GROVER NORQUIST]: What is the status of the Choctaw stuff. I have a $75K hole in my budget from last year. Ouch.
BILL MOYERS: In a reminder to himself, Abramoff notes:
[E-mail from JACK ABRAMOFF]: Call Ralph re Grover doing pass-through.
BILL MOYERS: And then tells Reed:
[E-mail from JACK ABRAMOFF]: I need to give Grover something for helping, so the first transfer will be a bit lighter.
BILL MOYERS: But not to worry with the next $300,000. So when Norquist again kept a cut for his cause, Abramoff registers his surprise:
[E-mail from JACK ABRAMOFF]: Grover kept another $25K!
BILL MOYERS: The money spigot was now wide open. Abramoff was being paid millions as a lobbyist. Reed was being paid millions to dupe his fellow Christians, and Norquist was feeding his political operation by acting as their cover.
The three College Republicans first came to Washington to run a revolution. It was turning into a racket.
SEN. BYRON DORGAN (D-ND): And what's the basis for your tribe making a donation to Americans for Tax Reform?
BERNIE SPRAGUE (Subchief, Saginaw Chippewa Tribe): I have no idea, Senator. I did not understand it then. I opposed it, and I don't understand it today.
SEN. KENT CONRAD (D-ND): Did you, Mr. Abramoff, you and your partner, colleague, Mr. Scanlon, give $4 million to Ralph Reed?
JACK ABRAMOFF: Senator, I respectfully invoke the privileges previously stated.
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