We’ve told you about Ann Copland, the former aide to Mississippi GOP senator Thad Cochran, who, according to court documents, accepted tickets to ball-games, concerts, and other events from Abramoff crony Todd Boulanger, in return for getting Cochran to take actions benefiting Abramoff’s clients.
Well today the Associated Press offers some more great details about how things worked between Copland and Boulanger.
In June 2003, Copland emailed Boulanger from a suite a luxury suite at Baltimore’s Camden Yards, where she had taken a group to watch an Orioles game:
“Ackkk. Only beer and no Hebrew National hot dogs,” complained Copland.
Ackkk indeed.
That email was included in Boulanger’s plea agreement last week, when he pleaded guilty to bribing several Hill aides.
Here’s another good exchange. Reports the AP:
Copland apparently grew so comfortable accepting gifts that she sounded angry in one e-mail from the firm’s box suite at a Washington ice-skating event after no food had arrived for her party of 14 people.
“I’m freaking out here,” she wrote Boulanger.
He responded that she would be reimbursed if she had to buy food herself.
What was Copland giving in return? The AP explains:
For example, when Copland asked Boulanger for the suite at the Orioles game in 2003, he responded in part by asking whether a Choctaw provision the firm no longer wanted had been removed from an appropriations bill.
Copland assured him it had, and the final version of the bill contained an explicit statement that the provision “is no longer necessary.”
Boulanger once wrote to Abramoff, of Copland:
She’s more valuable to us than a rank and file house member.
