For weeks now I’ve been hearing that the Justice Department investigation of the cluster of scandals going under the ‘Abramoff’ label is much larger than press reports have led us to believe. And in any case, there are so many different parts of it and so many different players that it’s more than a little hard to keep up.
There’s Jack Abramoff and Michael Scanlon, who are at the center of it. Then you have Ralph Reed and Grover Norquist in the mix funneling money in one direction or another. And then there’s the elected members of Congress including Tom DeLay, Bob Ney and others.
I’ve wanted to dig into this for a while. But until recently I didn’t have time, what with launching the new site and other miscellaneous stuff I’ve been working on. But now we’re ready. And we’re launching a new site that will focus on just this story. We call it Auction House, the name presumably speaking for itself, about a House of Representatives where everything is now for sale.
We’ll cover other political shenanigans there too, of course. But this is the core story because it is about the system of corruption upon which the DeLay machine is built.
I’ll be doing my own snooping and writing here. But we have a team of determined young researcher-reporter-writers who will be following this story at Auction House, digging into the stuff the dailies don’t have the time or interest for, telling you who the main players are, assembling the whole thing into a comprehensible storyline, and last but not least breaking news and advancing the story.
Along the way, as was the case with all the stories we’ve covered, we’ll need your help. Send us your tips, flag newspaper stories we may have missed, and let us know parts of the story we’re missing.
More shortly on what we’re going to be doing.
