It came late in

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It came late in the day today, so we didn’t get a chance to get into it at TPMmuckraker. But a Justice Department IG Report came out late this afternoon. And this one looked into the long-simmering question of whether Jack Abramoff used his juice with the Bush White House to get the acting US Attorney in Guam, Frederick A. Black, fired just as the guy was opening a criminal probe into Abramoff’s activities on the island.

The report concludes, we think not altogether convincingly, that while Abramoff volubly took credit for getting Black canned, in fact he had nothing to do with it. It’s stunning how many things Abramoff took credit for, and everybody else thought he was responsible for, which turn out to have had nothing to do with him at all. But let’s leave that for another day.

But there’s something else that caught our eye.

We’ll let MSNBC’s Joel Seidman explain

The report also contained evidence of Abramoff’s strong ties to the Bush White House. One White House political official, Leonard Rodriguez, told Fine’s investigators he kept Abramoff aware of information relevant to Guam “at the behest of Ken Mehlman, the White House Political Director,” the report said. There was no explanation of why Mehlman would have wanted the information shared with Abramoff.

So Ken Mehlman, now head of the RNC, had a White House official keeping Jack Abramoff up to date on events in Guam, around the time Abramoff took credit for getting an investigation into his work on the island deep-sixed. We already know that at Abramoff’s behest Mehlman killed an appointment at the State Department because the would-be appointee, Allen Stayman, wasn’t good news for Abramoff’s sweat-shop owner clients in the Marianas islands.

At a certain point you start to detect a pattern, no? Mehlman was a fixer for Abramoff while Mehlman was political director at the Bush White House. And now he says he barely knew Jack Abramoff.

Maybe this deserves some follow-up?

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