Abramoff's influence has reached into Bush's White House, too, where chief procurement officer David H. Safavian resigned last month and then was arrested on charges of lying to authorities and obstructing a criminal investigation into Abramoff's lobbying activities.
Rep. Ney and former Christian Coalition leader Ralph Reed were among influential Republicans who joined Safavian and Abramoff on an infamous golf trip to Scotland in 2002. Safavian is a former lobbying partner of anti-tax activist Grover Norquist, another pillar of right-wing politics in Washington and another longtime Abramoff friend. [Washington Post, Sept. 20, 2005]
Abramoff also has boasted of his influence with Bush's top political adviser Karl Rove.
Abramoff told Tyco officials that "he had contact with Mr. Karl Rove" about Tyco's concerns, said Flanigan, who made the disclosures to the Senate during his confirmation hearing as Bush's nominee to be deputy attorney general.
A White House spokesman said Rove had no recollection of a discussion with Abramoff about Tyco, but Rove's personal assistant Susan Ralston had previously worked as Abramoff's secretary. [Washington Post, Sept. 23, 2005]
College Republicans
The roots of these latest scandals reach back a quarter century to the early days of the Reagan Revolution. During that heady period for young conservatives, Abramoff and Norquist won control of the College Republicans organization in Washington, with Abramoff as chairman and Norquist as executive director.
In the book, Gang of Five, author Nina Easton wrote that the Abramoff-Norquist leadership transformed the College Republicans into a "right-wing version of a communist cell - complete with purges of in-house dissenters and covert missions to destroy the enemy left."
Under Abramoff and Norquist, the College Republicans also allegedly began tapping into Rev. Moon's mysterious well of nearly unlimited cash. In 1983, Rep. Jim Leach of Iowa, then chairman of the GOP's moderate Ripon Society, released a study saying the College Republican National Committee "solicited and received" money from Moon's Unification Church in 1981.
Leach said the Korean-based Unification Church has "infiltrated the New Right and the party it wants to control, the Republican Party, and infiltrated the media as well."
Before Leach could finish the press conference, Norquist disrupted the meeting with accusations that Leach was lying. For its part, Moon's Washington Times dismissed Leach's charges as "flummeries" and mocked the Ripon Society as a "discredited and insignificant left-wing offshoot of the Republican Party."
To this day, largely through lavish spending on right-wing causes, Moon has made his cult-like movement a political powerhouse within conservative circles. However, evidence has continued to mount that Moon's operation is a complex web of secretive businesses and groups that launder millions of dollars from suspicious sources in Asia and South America into the U.S. political system.
Moon has subsidized not only media outlets, such as the pro-Republican Washington Times, but conservative infrastructure, including direct-mail operations, think tanks and political conferences. Moon's organization also has funneled money directly into the pockets of former President Bush and other leading politicians. [For details, see Secrecy & Privilege.]
Abramoff and Kidan, the co-defendants in the SunCruz fraud case, also became friends from their time with the College Republicans.
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