DoJ Report: Abramoff Too Late to Sink Prosecutor with Too Many Enemies

I have to admit that I was mighty suspicious when I heard the results of the Justice Department Inspector General’s investigation into Frederick Black’s demotion. Jack Abramoff had wanted the guy canned, the report concludes, but even though he tried to take credit for Black’s demotion when it happened, he didn’t actually have anything to do with it.

I spent yesterday afternoon making my way through the 41 page report (available as a pdf here). First, I have to say that the IG’s findings on the narrow question of Abramoff’s responsibilty for Black’s demotion seem rock solid. It seems he really didn’t have anything to do with it.

But there is a broader point that shouldn’t be missed. The report makes clear that if Abramoff had needed to take out Black, he could have — he had the access. It just so happened by a happy coincidence that Abramoff didn’t have to go to the trouble.

In a subsequent post, I’ll detail Abramoff’s access to the higher-ups in the White House and at Justice. But first, in order to satisfy the curiosity and skepticism of TPMm readers, I wanted to lay out how it is that Black happened to be demoted right when Abramoff most wanted him gone. And the report makes some memorable addditions to the growing volume of Abramoff’s candid email correspondence that shouldn’t be missed (Abramoff’s quotes are in bold below).

So let’s dig in.

Who is Frederick Black?

Black was the interim U.S. Attorney for Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands from 1991 until his demotion in May of 2003; that made him the chief federal prosecutor in Abramoff’s playground and so a natural enemy. Back in August of last year, the LA Times broke the story that Black had been demoted from his position the day after he’d issued a grand jury subpoena as part of an investigation into Abramoff’s lobbying for the Superior Court of Guam.

In October, Bloomberg News added another wrinkle to the story. Black had requested a Justice Department report on the national security risk posed by the immigration policy on the Northern Mariana Islands, but the report, which strongly urged more federal control over the Marianas, never saw the light of day (until earlier this month). Though completed in May of 2002, it was suppressed, and everyone who’d had anything to with it had been either demoted or transferred out of their assignment.

In his investigation, the IG found that the the report had been leaked to Abramoff in June of 2002 by someone in the Department of Interior, and that Abramoff had been on the war path to have it squashed. Since that whole affair was outside the rather narrow scope of his investigation, he states in the report that he’s made a referral to the FBI to investigate the matter.

But I’ll get into that in my next post. Let’s concentrate on Fred Black. The IG found that Black’s removal had nothing to do with the DoJ’s report on the Marianas or the investigation of Abramoff. How could it be that Abramoff had no part in removing such a thorn in his side? Simple — Black had plenty of other enemies on the islands. And they got to him first.

Here’s how it went down. Thankfully, the IG provides a helpful timeline of its investigation, which we’ve posted here (apologies for the image quality – blame the DoJ).

After Bush was elected, er, ruled president, his administration began a massive effort to replace the Clinton era U.S. Attorneys with their own picks, which is, I understand, a normal process. In order to ensure that their picks fit their mold, the White House sought nominations from across the country. The pick was made by the Republican leaders in the USA’s district, usually that state’s Republican Senator. If the GOP didn’t have a Senator in power there, whoever was the GOP honcho there got to make the pick.

In accordance with that process, the Republican Speaker of the House in Guam nominated a local named Leonardo Rapadas to fill the position in December of 2001. With the help of a Republican lobbyist named Fred Radewagen, Guam’s Speaker made sure that the White House knew that Rapadas was the man for the job.

The nomination and vetting process — which was established to run through dozens and dozens of picks, rolled on from there. Rapadas was really the only serious candidate, and after the FBI’s background check was finally completed in November 2002, he was announced as the nominee.

So why didn’t Black make the list? The Speaker told the IG that he’d wanted a local to fill the position. But the real explanation is that Black just had too many enemies on the islands. He’d never actually been nominated for his position (which he’d filled for ten years on an interim basis), because in his words, “the kind of people that recommend the U.S. Attorney position are the very people we are investigating.” Black never had a chance.

Guam and the Marianas are, by all accounts, overflowing with public corruption. The USA office there seems to investigate little else, and they’ve even organized a Guam Public Corruption Task Force to handle the load.

And here’s where Jack Abramoff comes in. Apparently Guam is so corrupt that Abramoff got along swimmingly with the Democratic governor there, Carl Gutierrez. And Gutierrez wanted Black gone because Black was conducting a massive investigation of Gutierrez’s administration.

So in February 2002, armed with a letter that Gutierrez had written on Black’s behalf in 1995 calling Black a “good Democrat,” Abramoff started agitating to get Black replaced (you can see a pdf of the letter here).

On February 25, 2002, he wrote in an email to his henchmen at Greenberg Traurig that Black “was a total commie and has been bashing the CNMI [the Northern Marianas] non-stop in the past…. We need to get this guy sniped out of there.” Using the letter tarring Black as a “good Democrat,” they thought they could get the White House to toss Black out on his ear.

Gutierrez forwarded his pick for Black’s replacement, a D.C. lawyer from the giant law firm Patton Boggs. And armed with this pick, Abramoff’s colleague Tony Rudy was set to approach the White House.

But then they found out that the White House already had a pick for the replacement. So now they had a dilemma: go with the GOP’s man? or with the one pushed by their corrupt Democratic buddy?

Abramoff didn’t care. As he wrote in a March 6, 2002 email:

“We are opposed to Black. He has been screwing us for years on the CNMI, so this is good payback. I don’t care if they appoint bozo the clown, we need to get rid of Fred Black.”

Just two days later, Abramoff’s people found out from the DoJ that Rapadas was the pick for sure. Abramoff, in order to curry favor with Gutierrez, decided to claim responsibility. As the report reads:

…Abramoff instructed [his colleagure Michael] W’illiams to tell their contacts in Guam the “good news” that “Black is gone.” He told Williams that he should “play it” as though Black had been under consideration for the position but their lobbying efforts had “killed” Black’s nomination. Abrarnoff also told Williams he should say that Black and Rapadas had been the final two candidlates when they “killed Black,” so Rapadas would probably get the nomination. Abramoff added in the e-mail that they should tell them that the Patton, Boggs attorney was “out of the process already. Spin spin spin.” [my emphasis]

I think that’s pretty conclusive.

But wait! What about that investigation Black opened in November into Abramoff? Did Rapadas’s nomination stifle it?

As the report makes clear, Black himself was the one to pull back on the investigation. It took until May 2003 for Rapadas to be confirmed as the USA. In April of 2003, while Black was still in charge, he wrote Noel Hillman, the former head of the DoJ’s Public Integrity Section, to say that he was putting the Abramoff investigation on the “back burner” in order to concentrate on the massive investigation into Gutierrez’s administration.

God knows that Abramoff did plenty of criminal stuff in his time. But it appears that the focus of Black’s investigation, the Guam Superior Court’s scheme to keep their employment of Jack Abramoff below the radar, wasn’t quite as red hot as it’s been made out to be. Black told the IG that “at the time he did not press for additional investigation into the matter because he did not want to get ‘sidetracked’ on a case that was a misdemeanor.”

So there. Odd, but true.

Like I said above, the real thing to take away from this report is that Abramoff could have taken out Black if he’d needed to. He was successful, for example, in stifling the DoJ’s report on the CNMI’s risk to national security. And that’s a scandal in itself.

But that will have to wait until my next post.

Update: I’ve added a link to the letter Guam Governor Carl Gutierrez wrote on Black’s behalf back in the mid-90s.