It makes it way too easy for someone to document their crimes.

An internet agitprop artist publishing the website "Republican Offenders dot com" has produced a list of 272 Republicans charged with criminal activity, 60 of which are pedophiles. Each name is linked to a group heading of the type of crime alleged or convicted. (Among the categories are rape, bribery and "assorted felonies".)

The list really has to be seen to be appreciated.

Howard Dean his own self could not have thought the culture of corruption ran this wide and deep. h/t Contextual Criticism.

  AP via YahooNews:

Republican Rep. John Doolittle, who is under investigation in a congressional lobbying scandal, plans to announce Thursday that he'll retire from Congress at the end of his current term, according to a Republican official who spoke with Doolittle.

The official spoke on condition of anonymity pending a public announcement in Doolittle's Northern California district.

The development comes as Doolittle, in his ninth term, faced growing political pressure from fellow Republicans who considered him a liability because of his involvement, along with his wife Julie, in the Jack Abramoff influence-peddling investigation. House Republicans, still smarting from losing control of Congress in 2006, are eager to put that ethics taint behind them.

Blue America has been supporting Charlie Brown in his race for Doolittle's seat, so this is great news for Charlie.  Your donation is appreciated.

AP:

GOP Rep. John Doolittle's two top aides have been subpoenaed to testify before a federal grand jury investigating ties between Doolittle, his wife and jailed lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

The grand jury subpoenas from the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia were issued to Chief of Staff Ron Rogers and Deputy Chief of Staff Dan Blankenburg. They were announced on the House floor as Congress returned from its August recess Tuesday after the aides informed the House speaker about the subpoenas, as required under House rules.

Doolittle, R-Calif., said in a statement that the aides would testify before the grand jury this week "with hopes of putting the matter to an end."[..]

Doolittle has numerous ties to Abramoff, including accepting campaign cash from the lobbyist and intervening on behalf of Abramoff's Indian tribe clients. Doolittle considered Abramoff a good friend.

Abramoff's lobbying firm also paid Julie Doolittle's Sierra Dominion Financial Solutions Inc., a near-monthly $5,000 retainer from September 2002 to February 2004, mostly to work on a fundraiser that was canceled in March 2003. Sierra Dominion's records were subpoenaed by the Abramoff grand jury in 2004.

Blue America is supporting Charlie Brown for Doolittle's seat. Please consider helping Charlie bring ethics back to Congress.

WESH:

Authorities in Orange County are investigating the discovery of three dead bodies inside a home in east Orange County on Thursday.---According to records from the Orange County Property Appraiser's Office, the home is owned by Rafael Gonzalez, who is known to be a prominent Republican party strategist. It is not known if Gonzalez is one of the victims.

The address of the home is also listed as the office of the Strategum Group, a political firm whose president is listed as Ralph Gonzalez, who served as executive director of the Georgia Republican Party.

UPDATE:  WESH 2 News has confirmed Republican political strategist Ralph Gonzalez was one of three people found dead inside a home in East Orange County on Thursday.

ABC:

A Republican activist will plead guilty to obstructing Congress in the influence-peddling scandal centered around former lobbyist Jack Abramoff, her lawyer said on Wednesday.

Italia Federici also will plead guilty to tax evasion at a court hearing on Friday, lawyer Jonathan Rosen said.

Federici had close ties to senior Interior Department officials as head of the Council of Republicans for Environmental Advocacy, or CREA, a nonprofit group founded by former Interior Secretary Gale Norton.

According to criminal charges filed by the government, Federici in 2001 introduced Abramoff to her sometime boyfriend, ex-Deputy Interior Secretary Steven Griles.[..]

Over the next several years, Federici served as a go-between for Griles and Abramoff, the charges say. Abramoff donated roughly $500,000 to her group during that time. Read on...

Another one bites the dust...

Ruh roh, another former White House staffer is afraid the truth will land her in jail.

Via Raw Story:

Susan Ralston, the former executive assistant to top White House adviser Karl Rove, invoked her rights against self-incrimination while she was being asked to answer questions by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, the Committee's Chairman, Rep. Henry Waxman, announced in a memo Tuesday. The deposition for which she sat concerned contacts between convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff and Rove, as well as the White House more broadly.

"The subjects this morning that she will be unable to testify to...are the subjects of the relationship between Jack Abramoff and his associates and White House officials, including Ms. Ralston, and the subject of the use by White House officials of political e-mail accounts at the RNC," Ralston's lawyer, Bradford Berenson said, during the May 10 deposition. "She has material, useful information about both of those subjects."

According to Waxman's memo, which was sent to Oversight Committee members, Ralston is seeking immunity from prosecution.

"She is more than willing to provide it to the committee. However, she will, as we have previously discussed, require a grant of immunity before she is comfortable going forward," Berenson also said in the deposition. Read more...

 Ralph Reed is now labeled as a "Republican Strategist." That's about as low as you can go when being put on the air. Hypocrisy fills the ranks of the "moral majority," and he epitomizes it. I pulled this graphic off of FOX when Hitchens mocked his Abramoff ties on H&C last week. He was the big time Christian/College Republican leader that was going to carry on into the 21st century.

"People of faith," he once wrote, had become the new "Amos and Andy," and he was determined to push to the center of American politics their "cluster of pro-family issues" so they could attract "a majority of voters." But Reed forgot his own lessons. In the face of incredibly damning evidence, he insisted that he hadn't done anything wrong and that he didn't know he was consorting with a friend nicknamed Casino Jack or taking money from gambling interests. He thought he could convince his base that they shouldn't believe their eyes and ears, that they should trust him instead. In the end, not enough did.

(courtesy SN&R )

Via Get In Their Face!:

I just read this great article. It is very informative about the future of Congressman John Doolittle and definitely worth a read. And the graphic is priceless.

Will Doolittle do time?

Does the downfall of a local congressman mean something more than the latest corruption of a politician? Read more...

 

This actually happened three weeks ago, but it just got press on Friday.  Hmmm....remind me again, what was happening at the DoJ about that time?

McClatchy:

A senior Justice Department official has resigned after coming under scrutiny in the Department's expanding investigation of convicted super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff, according to a Justice Department official with knowledge of the case.

Making the situation more awkward for the embattled Department, the official, Robert E. Coughlin II, was deputy chief of staff for the criminal division, which is overseeing the Department's probe of Abramoff.

He stepped down effective April 6 as investigators in Coughlin's own division ratcheted up their investigation of lobbyist Kevin Ring, Coughlin's long-time friend and a key associate of Abramoff.[..]

Coughlin appears to be the first Justice Department official to come under scrutiny in the wide-ranging probe that has implicated a veteran congressman, a deputy Cabinet secretary, a White House aide and eight others. Abramoff has pleaded guilty to three counts in the corruption probe and could face up to 11 years in prison.

Burnt Orange Report:

In the fall of 2005 dominos were falling fast in the Jack Abramoff investigation. And they were falling in one very clear direction, closer and closer to Tom DeLay.

First DeLay's former communications director fell [..]

Then DeLay's former deputy chief of staff fell [..]

And it looked like the former Chief of Staff was next [..]

In January 2006 Buckham shut down his business. In June 2006 the Washington Post revealed this choice nugget:

A registered lobbyist opened a retirement account in the late 1990s for the wife of then-House Whip Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) and contributed thousands of dollars to it while also paying her a salary to work for him from her home in Texas, according to sources, documents and DeLay's attorney, Richard Cullen.

The account represents a small portion of the income that DeLay's family received from entities at least partly controlled by lobbyist Edwin A. Buckham. But the disclosure of its origin adds to what was previously known about the benefits DeLay's family received from its association with Buckham, and it brings the total over the past seven years to about half a million dollars.

Since then.....nothing. No Buckham plea. No indictments. Nothing.....was a U.S. Attorney fired to prevent the investigation from continuing to inexorably close in on Tom DeLay?

Nope. But something very fishy did indeed take place. The lead investigator was given a Federal Judgeship, a new division chief with connections to the GOP machine was appointed (AND REPORTEDLY, TO THE DELAY DEFENSE TEAM ITSELF) and presto...no more momentum in the investigation.

Guardian:

Federal prosecutors took the first steps toward reducing the prison sentence of former Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff, currently scheduled for release in 2011 for a Florida fraud conviction.

Documents filed in federal court say Abramoff has provided ``substantial assistance'' in a separate Washington corruption scandal investigation and continues to work with investigators from his prison cell in Cumberland, Md.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Paul F. Schwartz did not recommend how much Abramoff's sentence should be cut.

Given what's come out about the US Attorney purge in the last few weeks, this should raise a few alarms.  Shall we wait to see if any indictments/convictions result from Abramoff's "substantial assistance"?

I can't believe how inter-related all these Bush administration scandals are becoming.  First we got Rove and Gonzales involved in it, and now good old Jack Abramoff rears his corruption-ridden head too.

Boston.com:

A US grand jury in Guam opened an investigation of controversial lobbyist Jack Abramoff more than two years ago, but President Bush removed the supervising federal prosecutor, and the probe ended soon after.[..]

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.

The timing caught some by surprise. Despite his officially temporary status as the acting US attorney, Black had held the assignment for more than a decade[..]

His replacement, Leonardo Rapadas, was confirmed in May 2003 without any debate. Rapadas had been recommended for the job by the Guam Republican Party. Fred Radewagen, a lobbyist who had been under contract to the Gutierrez administration, said he carried that recommendation to top Bush aide Karl Rove in early 2003.

(h/t CREW, who unearthed this photo taken at a 2003 campaign fundraiser.)

ABC News via HuffPo:

The White House and the Secret Service quietly signed an agreement last spring in the midst of the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal declaring that records identifying visitors to the White House are not open to the public.

The Bush administration didn't reveal the existence of the memorandum of understanding until last fall. The White House is using it to deal with a legal problem on a separate front, a ruling by a federal judge ordering the production of Secret Service logs identifying visitors to the office of Vice President Dick Cheney.

Just like the Valerie Plame scandal, the obfuscations and plot twists of the Abramoff story can be overwhelming for even for the most ardent political news junkie to follow. Luckily, Bill Moyers of PBS produced an incredibly in-depth and definitive special called Capitol Crimes. In it, he traces Abramoff's roots back to his days as a college Republican where he and other sleazeballs like Ralph Reed & Grover Norquist effectively hijacked the GOP House -- along with, who else, Tom DeLay -- vis a vis the K Street Project.

I'd be remiss if I didn't link to this hilarious Daily Show clip where Stewart absolutely demolishes Scott McClellan's lame attempts to "answer" questions about Abramoff's White House visits.

ABC News :

Convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff is scheduled to report to federal prison tomorrow, over the objections of federal prosecutors who say they still need his help to pursue leads on officials he allegedly bribed.

Sources close to the investigation say Abramoff has provided information on his dealings with and campaign contributions and gifts to "dozens of members of Congress and staff," including what Abramoff has reportedly described as "six to eight seriously corrupt Democratic senators."

The sources say Abramoff was about to provide information about Bush administration officials, including Karl Rove, "accepting things of value" from Abramoff. Read on...

I can't decide how I feel about this.  On one hand, if there are "seriously corrupt" Senators (no matter what the initial is by their name), let's get their names and let's get them out.  However, there's another niggling part of me that wonders if this isn't an attempt on someone's part to be "balanced" as so many tried to do during the early days of this scandal or to bury Rove's participation.  What do you think?

WaPo : 

A federal judge yesterday sentenced David H. Safavian, a former top Bush administration official, to 18 months in prison for lying and concealing unethical dealings with lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

During an unusual hearing that lasted much of the day, U.S. District Judge Paul L. Friedman wrestled with how to mete out justice to Safavian. He said Safavian was a man who had "pulled himself up by his bootstraps" and had been "a very good person to a lot of people." But, the judge said, Safavian also committed "an abuse of the public trust" in his relationship with the lobbyist.

"Did he believe in public service? I guess he did," Friedman said. "But he also wanted someday to join Mr. Abramoff in that lucrative lobbying business."

Friedman lamented that Washington has become "more and more corrupt," increasingly a home to greedy lobbyists and politicians on the take.  Read on...