Email: Abramoff Associate Urged Funds for GOP Sen. Who “Never Said No”Washington runs on money — no one understood that better than Jack Abramoff, who built his empire directing huge volumes of sometimes clean, sometimes dirty money from interest groups to politicians (and directed political favors back the other way).
Another man who understands the maxim is Sen. Thad Cochran (R-MS), a senior lawmaker who has helped control the flow of billions of dollars from his seat on the Senate Appropriations Committee for many years.
As it turned out, Abramoff had a fat contract to represent one of the wealthiest interests in Cochran’s home state, the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians. So it’s no surprise that in the relationship between the three — Abramoff, Cochran, and the Choctaws — one might find the purest example of the way money can put politicians to work. And vice versa.
An email obtained by TPMmuckraker and never before published provides perhaps the best example of a lobbyist hitting up his colleagues for donations to a friendly lawmaker. In it, one of Abramoff’s lobbyists makes a strong pitch for contributions to Cochran in the midst of his 2002 re-election campaign because “Sen. Cochran’s office [had] never said ‘no'” to the Mississippi Choctaw — the casino-owning tribe that was one of Abramoff’s prime clients since the beginning of his lobbying career.
“[W]e have been hitting them up for projects almost everyday [sic] the last couple of months,” Abramoff associate Todd Boulanger wrote of Cochran’s office. The Choctaw tribe is one of the largest employers in Mississippi.
Abramoff and his associates had already donated thousands to Cochran’s campaign committee at the time of the email. That was “good,” Boulanger allowed, “but not good enough for the member who keeps the lights turned on here at Greenberg.”
The lights at Abramoff’s law firm Greenberg Traurig were expensive lights to keep on, of course. The Choctaw paid millions per year to retain Abramoff’s services. Abramoff continues to cooperate with prosecutors as part of a sprawling corruption investigation. He’s currently serving a sentence for another crime in a minimum security prison in Maryland. Cochran, unlike Sen. Conrad Burns (R-MT) and Rep. Rep. John Doolittle (R-CA), has never been reported to be a subject of interest to prosecutors.
“I know it’s pricey,” Boulanger concluded, “but nobody comes even close (except for Doolittle, maybe) to doing as much for our main clients as Senator Cochran.” (We’ll have more on Doolittle later.)
After the email, which called for contributions from Abramoff’s team members and clients, they contributed thousands of dollars to Cochran’s leadership political committee, The Senate Victory Fund.
Fred Wertheimer, the Executive Director of government watchdog Democracy 21, observed that the email provides a very “non-subtle” glimpse into Abramoff’s lobbying tactics. Abramoff’s team “believed that … the key to their ability to function in Congress was to provide substantial sums of money to members they were trying to influence,” Wertheimer told me.
Abramoff, his associates and clients delivered $18,500 to Cochran’s leadership PAC following the email, just a fraction of the $69,000 that Abramoff, his associates and clients contributed to Cochran’s various committees since 2000.
In a statement, Cochran’s spokeswoman Jenny Manley responded that Cochran “has no recollection of making any request in behalf of his campaign fund or any political action committee for contributions from Mr. Abramoff, and he has never taken any action on behalf of anyone in exchange for campaign contributions.”
Cochran was a valuable ally for Abramoff. In 2001, for instance, Cochran helped to set aside $16.3 million in federal funds for the Mississippi Choctaw to build a jail. The Justice Department objected to the appropriation, arguing that the Choctaw, a very wealthy tribe, didn’t need the funds. Only appoximately $9 million would be released. Abramoff panicked, fearing that he’d lose one of his rainmaking clients: “We MUST stop this. This would be SUCH a HUGE embarrassment,” he wrote in a March 2001 email. That November, shortly after one of Abramoff’s colleagues wrote in an email about the need for a statement on the Senate floor reiterating that the jail project should be fully-funded, Cochran made such a statement. It was merely one part of an aggressive lobbying effort by Abramoff that also targeted White House officials Ken Mehlman and Karl Rove. Eventually, Abramoff got his way and all of the funds were released.
It was just another example of Cochran pulling strings for the Choctaw for Abramoff — some acts more significant than others. In 1997, Peter Stone reports in his book Heist, Abramoff lobbied Cochran to insert “a sentence of nineteen words into a mammoth appropriations bill that exempted the tribe from regulatory scrutiny by the National Indian Gaming Commission. Cochranâs legislative maneuver also allowed the Mississippi tribe to avoid the fees that the gaming body levied on other tribes, which saved the Choctaws about $180,000 a year.”
After being shown a copy of the email, Boulanger, the author, who is currently a lobbyist at Cassidy and Associates, cautioned that Cochran had long been a friend to the Choctaw; “Therefore, it would be grossly inaccurate to assume anything from this email other than my enthusiastic support for the Senator and his long-held positions.”
