Murtha and ABSCAM: What Really HappenedA bit of odd-named retro-muck has surfaced in the House leadership race: A 26-year-old FBI sting dubbed “ABSCAM.”
The episode threatened to end the career of Rep. John Murtha (D-PA), who now seeks the position of House Majority Leader. He and his supporters brush off ABSCAM as old news, and accuse his opponents of lobbing baseless charges. “I am disconcerted that some are making headlines by resorting to unfounded allegations that occurred 26 years ago,” Murtha himself said in a statement yesterday. “I thought we were above [that] type of Swift-boating attack.”
But his detractors say it’s evidence that Murtha is at best a backroom dealer, and proves he shouldn’t be the face of a new, ethics-minded Congress.
But what was ABSCAM? How can anyone say it tainted Murtha — especially since he was never charged with any crime?
ABSCAM was the media’s name for an FBI undercover operation to catch corrupt lawmakers. Around 1980, agents and an informant met with several lawmakers posing as representatives of a fictional “sheik Abdul” to offer them $50,000 in cash for legislative favors. Murtha was one of the lawmakers who met with them.
Ultimately, six lawmakers went down on corruption charges stemming from the operation, nearly all of them Democrats. Murtha wasn’t one of them — but not, as Murtha implies, because his innocence was ever demonstrated.
You can see for yourself why that may have been hard to do. The American Spectator got ahold of the FBI’s ABSCAM tape of its meeting with Murtha, and you can view it on the magazine’s Web site. It’s 53 minutes long, but a representative sample can be seen if you start at around 15:23 and watch for a few minutes.
“I’m gonna be blunt,” an FBI man says to Murtha after laying out what favors he was looking to buy. “Are you telling me now. . . you don’t want any money on this thing?”
“There’s some places I’d like you to invest some money, in the banks, in my district,” Murtha responds. “I’d say some substantial deposits.” He explains later how he does so many favors for people that, if they weren’t all for individuals in his district, “people would say, that son of a bitch. . . is on the take.”
“Once they say that, what happens?” Murtha asks the FBI men rhetorically, ignorant of the fact that he was explaining his own M.O. to agents trying to bust him for corruption. “Then they start going around looking for the goddamn money. So I want to avoid that by having some tie to the district. That’s all. That’s the secret to the whole thing.”
With comments like that, and a zealous special prosecutor for the House ethics committee examining the evidence, how did Murtha avoid even a slap on the wrist? Easy: he was protected from even becoming the subject of investigation by Democratic leadership at the time.
In 1980, Tip O’Neill was House Speaker and the center of Democratic power in Washington, George Crile wrote in his book, “Charlie Wilson’s War.” Murtha was a member of O’Neill’s inner circle.
When O’Neill learned that the special prosecutor, Barrett Prettyman Jr., had set his sights on Murtha, “the Speaker immediately summoned [then-Texas Dem. congressman] Charlie Wilson into his office with an offer he couldn’t refuse” — a seat on the House ethics committee.
Wilson, a man of proudly compromised morals, protested that they would both get “laughed off the [House] floor” if he accepted. But O’Neill wanted Wilson on the panel to stop the probe from reaching Murtha, Crile reports. And he got it — by promising Wilson a lifetime appointment to the board of the Kennedy Center, which gave Wilson — a well-known womanizer — dozens of free tickets to performing arts events.
“Wilson arrived on the Ethics Commitee just as O’Neill had hoped — like a wrecker,” Crile wrote. “He told a Washington Post reporter that the committee was on a partisan witch-hunt and that what was really on trial was not John Murtha but the integrity of the House of Representatives. . . .
“[S]hortly after Charlie’s arrival the rules of the game changed completely and before [special prosecutor] Prettyman could fully deploy his investigators to move on the Murtha case, he was informed that the committee had concluded there was no justification for an investigation. ‘This matter is closed,’ proclaimed the newly appointed Ethics Committee chairman Louis Stokes, another of the Speaker’s reliables.”
Prettyman was stunned, Crile said, and resigned his congressional post in protest. Murtha kept his — and, come Thursday’s secret ballot election among his fellow Democrats, may take the top seat in the House.
