What would be the perfect car for Jack Abramoff? It would need the right shine, the right glamor, with plenty of pimped-out features… How about a limo seized in a drug bust?
The government dumped almost three hundred pages of emails between Jack Abramoff and David Safavian into the public record Friday night, and they make for a highly entertaining read. Invaluable, really, for getting a sense of how these guys talked to each other. The Post and Newsweek touched on that in their coverage, but it’s really worth reading the emails themselves. Above all, one gets a sense of how they thought of the federal government as their personal sandbox. We’ll be posting excerpts throughout the day.
Safavian, who had earlier worked with Abramoff at Preston Gates, was the General Services Administration’s chief of staff at the time. The GSA is a mammoth and powerful government agency you hear little about – among other things, they’re the government’s landlord and the government’s “premiere” federal procurement agency. That’s a lot of money and resources to be at Jack Abramoff’s fingertips. And he certainly didn’t hesitate to ask for a favor.
So to kick off our email jubilee, here’s one little gem – in which Abramoff asks Safavian for some help in getting the right set of wheels.
