The Post’s Chris Cillizza has a post on a topic I’ve wanted to know more about for a while: Grassroots Interactive, one of the many paper companies Jack Abramoff apparently had on hand to steer money to. From there, well, who knows what happened to the money once it went through the GRI rinse? The outfit was founded in May 2003 and its registered agent in Maryland was Edward B. Miller.
Miller subsequently became Deputy Chief of Staff to Maryland Gov. Bob Ehrlich (R). Apparently he’s been cooperating with the DOJ investigation for more than a year.
This article from September suggests that of $2 million Tyco paid Abramoff to buck legislation that would have forced the company to pay taxes, $1.5 was diverted to entities like GRI, and then apparently used on other things beside helping Tyco stay one step ahead of the IRS.
In all the reporting on these stories the assumption is that Abramoff funnelled all this money, somehow or another, back to himself. And in the narrow sense of control of assets I’m sure that was often the case, at least for some period of time. But while Abramoff moved through many tens of millions of dollars quite a lot got pumped back into the DC Republican political machine.
Let’s start with GRI. What happened to that money?
