Bush and Abramoff sittin’ in the tree
Posted by Greg on January 23, 2006
It’s been amusing watching the White House spin away, downplaying the relationship between the Bush White House and disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff. As if.
Now they’re facing photographic evidence of Abramoff’s insider status, And now the AP reports:
As details poured out about the illegal and unseemly activities of Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff, White House officials sought to portray the scandal as a Capitol Hill affair with little relevance to them. Peppered for days with questions about Abramoff’s visits to the White House, press secretary Scott McClellan said the now disgraced lobbyist had attended two huge holiday receptions and a few “staff-level meetings” that were not worth describing further. “The President does not know him, nor does the President recall ever meeting him,” McClellan said.
The President’s memory may soon be unhappily refreshed. TIME has seen five photographs of Abramoff and the President that suggest a level of contact between them that Bush’s aides have downplayed. While TIME’s source refused to provide the pictures for publication, they are likely to see the light of day eventually because celebrity tabloids are on the prowl for them. And that has been a fear of the Bush team’s for the past several months: that a picture of the President with the admitted felon could become the iconic image of direct presidential involvement in a burgeoning corruption scandal like the shots of President Bill Clinton at White House coffees for campaign contributors in the mid-1990s.
Keep stonewalling friends…
In short, Abramoff was a big-time fundraiser for Bush, just as he was a big-time lobbyist on K Street. The White House (and the campaigns that got Bush there) were quite happy to know him (and to take his money) before his recent fall from grace. It makes sense why the White House would want to have nothing to do with him anymore, and why Abramoff is now such an embarrassment in Washington, but Bush and his cronies are merely re-writing history (i.e., lying) for the sake of political expediency (i.e., to avoid charges of comingling with corruption — corruption that has wormed its way throughout Republican Washington). Thankfully, they’re up against some pretty convincing evidence.
It sounds as if these pictures are indeed going to surface in a tabloid or somewhere, eventually. In any event, this report will only spur the press on to find out more juicy tidbits and see if they can come up with some quotes from people who’ve seen Bush and Abramoff together. The smartest course would have been to say “Yes, there was some contact but…” and then give some kind of explanation. This will keep the matter alive — and give it new life.
