Abramoff Had Access to DoJ, Ashcroft

“John Ashcroft” is a name that doesn’t come up very often in the Jack Abramoff mucky muck. But it should.

The former Attorney General and his staff had extraordinary ties to Abramoff and his team, as numerous emails and the recent report out from the Justice Department Inspector General make clear.

With Ashcroft, as with so many other power players, Abramoff gained access by hiring someone who already had it. It was former Ashcroft aide Kevin Ring, who joined his firm in 2000. Ring had been Ashcroft’s counsel when he was a Senator on the Judiciary Committee.

After Ring left Ashcroft’s office, the two stayed in close contact. An Abramoff email shows that the two played basketball together while Ring was with Abramoff (let the eagle soar!). And you can see Ring graciously inviting Ashcroft’s staff to bask in the splendor of Abramoff’s MCI Center skybox in this email obtained by TPM. In late September of 2001, Abramoff learned of a classified report on the Northern Marianas from Ashcroft’s Chief of Staff, who was in Abramoff’s box at the FedEx Field.

That access came in handy. Abramoff used it when he set out to “get rid of Fred Black,” the pesky US Attorney for Guam and the Northern Marianas. In March of 2002, Abramoff dispatched Ring to work his insider connections with Ashcroft’s office to find out how Black could be booted. Another Abramoff aide, Tony Rudy, worked contacts at the DoJ and White House as well.

The recent IG report also disclosed that Abramoff’s buddy Ken Mehlman in the White House’s Office of Political Affairs made an effort to keep Abramoff up to date on issues related to his client. Earlier, we learned that Mehlman had killed the nomination of one Interior Department official, and in this case he’d assigned the underling dealing with Guam and Marianas to reach out to Abramoff to make sure that he was happy with the US Attorney nominations.

So at one point – but too late for Abramoff to act on it – Mehlman’s staffer, Leonard Rodriguez, called up Abramoff to give him the message that he should “feel free to contact me directly for any requests from Guam.”

This access, both to Ashcroft and Mehlman, didn’t turn out to be needed in the case of Fred Black. But they would have come in handy in the fall of 2002 when the Departments of Justice and Interior were on the brink of acting on a DoJ report on the Marianas. The report said the lax immigration standards on the islands was a national security threat and recommended federal intervention – a nightmare for Abramoff’s garment industry clients, whose business depended on immigrant labor.

For some reason, the report never made it to Congress, where it would surely have been acted on.

That’s up next…