« Way To Go, Chuck & Harry | Main | The 95-10 Initiative »
February 15, 2006
Those Pesky Facts Rear Their Heads
As much of the blogosphere is consumed with Vice President Cheney's accidental shooting of his friend Harry Whittington, an Austin attorney and longtime GOP booster, and apparent inconsistencies in official account of what actually happened, we have other fish to fry.
In today's LA Times comes a report that fallen super-lobbyist, turned government witness Jack Abramoff did indeed have close ties and access to the highest levels of the White House, despite the Bush administration's claims to the contrary.
It seems that in 2002, not long after 9/11, Mr. Abramoff brokered a meeting between his former client, the government of Malaysia and President Bush, despite then Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad's history of making anti-Semitic statements and a poor human rights record in his country. Abramoff was paid over a million dollars for his work on behalf of the foreign government.
Abramoff's contact at the White House? Political guru and Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove. Turns out Mr. Abramoff's former assistant is now Mr. Rove's assistant, and that Abramoff often bragged of his access to Rove and the upper echelons of the administration.
In the wake of Mr. Abramoff's recent plea agreement, and his ongoing role assisting a broad federal investigation, the White House has sought as much distance from him as possible. In fact, Mr. Bush claimed never to have met Abramoff, only to have numerous pictures of the two together surface in the press.
So once again, inconvenient facts get in the way of a Bush administration story line, this time its involvement with the man at the center of a large (and potentially huge) federal corruption scandal. Just par for the course these days.
Posted by houtopia at February 15, 2006 02:47 PM