Mr. Abramoff's Meetings, Again
Saturday, January 28, 2006; A20
IF A TYPICAL picture is worth a thousand words, a picture of President
Bush with Jack Abramoff, we suppose, might be worth about 10,000. And
so we understand the desire of our more visually inclined colleagues
to obtain photos of the president and the criminal. But the focus on
the photos distracts from a more important question that the president
managed to duck in his news conference Thursday: Who in the White
House and administration met with Mr. Abramoff, and what were those
meetings about?
It is no answer to this question to say, as Mr. Bush did, that "there
is a serious investigation going on by federal prosecutors" and "if
they believe something was done inappropriately in the White House,
they'll come and look, and they're welcome to do so." It is no answer
to dismiss questions about Mr. Abramoff and the White House, as press
secretary Scott McClellan has, by calling them a "fishing expedition."
If there is one thing that is now clear, anything involving Mr.
Abramoff is, by definition, fishy.
There are any number of matters of legitimate inquiry and public
concern involving Mr. Abramoff and his White House dealings that might
not rise to the level of a criminal prosecution. Mr. Abramoff has
admitted bribing public officials. He collected at least $100,000 for
Mr. Bush's reelection. He took David H. Safavian, then the chief of
staff at the General Services Administration and later the
administration's top procurement official, on a luxury golfing trip to
Scotland; it was, as Mr. Abramoff said in an e-mail, a "total business
angle."
The president himself attended a White House meeting with some of Mr.
Abramoff's clients. How did that get set up? The White House
acknowledges that Mr. Abramoff had some "staff-level meetings" there.
With whom, and about what?
Republicans didn't tolerate this kind of behavior from the Clinton
White House in the midst of its fundraising scandal. "At every turn,
they are stonewalling, covering up and hiding," Haley Barbour, then
the head of the Republican National Committee, said as the Clinton
administration tried to brush off questions about its fundraising
before the 1996 election. Mr. Barbour complained of the
administration's "utter contempt . . . for the public's right to
know."
Such obstructionism is no more acceptable now. The public understands
this: Three-fourths of those surveyed in a new Washington Post/ABC
poll said the White House should disclose the contacts. "This needs to
be cleared up so the people have confidence in the system," Mr. Bush
said. Our point exactly.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/27/AR2006012701413.html
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