In 2000 Hearing, Schaffer Executed Abramoff Lobbying Strategy — AgainAdd this to the growing catalog of former U.S. Rep. Bob Schaffer’s actions on behalf of the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI), Jack Abramoff’s longtime client. In a July 2000 House resources committee hearing, Schaffer — now a GOP candidate for U.S. senator from Colorado — took the lead in interrogating two officials from the Interior Department’s Office of Insular Affairs about alleged political activities on the job.
One of those officials was Allen Stayman, formerly the director of the Office of Insular Affairs in the Interior Department, and, as a persistent proponent of increased federal regulation of immigration and labor conditions on the islands, Abramoff’s nemesis.
“We intend to use the hearings to impeach Stayman and his campaign against the CNMI,” Abramoff wrote in a 1998 memo to Willie Tan, a garment manufacturing mogul who operated a number of plants on the islands. The Office of Insular Affairs, “led by Stayman, has been the main source of difficulty for the CNMI,” the memo said.
Schaffer had enthusiastically enacted Abramoff’s strategy in a 1999 hearing. Schaffer charged that Office of Internal Affairs officials had secretly paid laborers to participate in a protest against conditions on the islands when the Abramoff-organized Congressional delegation (including Schaffer) arrived.
The Abramoff strategy was still in effect in 2000. In a May 2000 billing statement to the Marianas, Abramoff wrote: “Continued close monitoring of OIA scandal developments and used opportunities thus provided to advance CNMI arguments against [legislation that would strengthen labor laws on the islands].”
The House resources committee, chaired by Rep. Don Young (R-AK), had launched an investigation of political activities by employees of the Insular Affairs office. During the first part of the hearing, the Interior Department’s inspector general Earl Devaney had testified about the results of an investigation into an official who’d worked under Stayman, David North. Devaney found that North had “repeatedly engaged in partisan political activity in an effort to lobby support for legislative change” on the islands.
In the latter half of the hearing, Schaffer led the questioning of Stayman and Ferdinand Aranza, then the director of the office. Stayman had left the office in 1999 for a spot at the State Department.
Had Stayman or Aranza known about North’s activities? Schaffer wanted to know. He brandished a 1997 memo allegedly written by Stayman to the Democratic National Committee urging them not to support the then-governor of the CNMI, a Democrat, because of his support of the lax labor laws there. Stayman admitted that he’d signed the memo, but said that after some debate about its propriety, it had not been sent.
Schaffer also quizzed Aranza about how Abramoff’s memo had come to be leaked to the press.
Unsatisfied by the answers he’d gotten, Schaffer ended the hearing by declaring that the matter was not over yet.
And for Stayman, it was not. One year later, Abramoff succeeded in getting Stayman fired from his position at the State Department with the help of Ken Mehlman, then the White House director of political affairs. “[Mehlman] said that he would kill him,” one Abramoff associate wrote another in an email. “Excellent,” the other replied.
Stayman, now a staffer with the Senate energy committee, declined to comment for this piece.
