We’ve written about Susan Ralston before. Pat Lang wrote about her back in November and Susan featured her all the way back in August. Both of those articles were related to her testimony before the Grand Jury in l’affair plame. Now her name is coming up in relation to the l’affair Abramoff.
From the National Affairs Desk of Rolling Stone:
Did you know that Jack Abramoff and Karl Rove shared an executive assistant?
In 2001, Karl Rove needed a Gal Friday, someone to help oversee the “strategic planning, political affairs, public liaison, and intergovernmental affairs efforts of the White House.”
He chose Susan Ralston, who came highly recommended from a friend: Jack Abramoff. Ralston performed similar duties for the Don of K Street — that is until Abramoff realized she’d be far more useful embedded in the West Wing. (Ralston had also previous worked for Abramoff and Rove’s fellow College Republican crony Ralph Reed.)
Installing his top assistant as Rove’s gatekeeper appeared to pay dividends. In 2003, Abramoff was hired by scandal-ridden Tyco to help the corporation secure lucrative federal contracts despite its being incorporated — for tax-evasion purposes — in Bermuda. According to the Washington Post, Abramoff later bragged that he’d been able to lobby Rove directly on the issue. The article targets Ralston as the only likely conduit.
Of course, such Abramoffian entanglements are now radioactive. According to Time, Bush has ordered his aides to round up all pictures of him and Abramoff to head off any bad press. Perhaps Bush should instruct them to widen the search to include photos like this buddy-buddy pic of him with Ralston.
Ralston is the thread that connects the whole rotten corpse of the modern GOP. She probably engaged in an obstruction of justice by giving misleading testimony to Fitzgerald about the phone logs in Karl Rove’s office. She served as a conduit for Jack Abramoff into the West Wing. She has connections to Ralph Reed and Grover Norquist, who are also implicated in the Abramoff scandal.
The Abramoff operation reached into the White House through Ralston and it was corrupt from the very beginning:
You can see how tied together the Abramoff network was to the Norquist operation, the DeLay operation, and the Rove operation, by looking at their coordination of the 2004 gay-bashing campaign:
Abramoff did more than hire anti-gay luminaries as Rev. Lou Sheldon (head of the Traditional Values Coalition) and Ralph Reed (former head of the Christian Coalition) with money from Abramoff’s clients and front groups to lobby for special interests. Abramoff also funded an anti-gay group close to the lobbyist’s best buddy and biggest water-carrier, Rep. Tom Delay (right) — the U.S. Family Network — with laundered money that has been traced to Russian oil interests.
Let’s start with Rev. Sheldon (right). He’s such a professional anti-gay wacko that even conservative pundit Tucker Carlson has denounced him for it. In a Jan. 4 column Carlson wrote for MSNBC’s website, Carlson (left) recounted an interview he had with Sheldon, who told him, “You want to know what the single biggest problem facing inner-city black neighborhoods is? Homosexuality.” Carlson‘s reaction: “Homosexuality was the biggest problem in the inner cities? Bigger than crime? And unemployment? And poverty? And broken families? And AIDS?… Nope, there was no way around it. What the Reverend Lou had said was bizarre. And creepy too.”
Sheldon’s Traditional Values Coalition received at least $25,000 from an Abramoff client, eLottery — an online lottery company — as part of the $2 million the company spent to defeat an anti-gambling bill. (The Washington Post reported that Abramoff referred to Sheldon as “Lucky Louie.”) What makes this all the juicier is that the Traditional Values Coalition has long proclaimed its hostility to gambling and crusaded against it. Thus, while Sheldon was proclaiming that it was the “homosexual agenda [which] is destroying America’s moral fibre,” he was secretly on the take from gambling interests whose usurious gouging he opposed in public. This sort of blatant hypocrisy scandalized even a bona-fide right-wing frother like Carlson, who wrote in his column that Sheldon was a “weirdo and charlatan” for preaching gay-hating morality while pocketing Abramoff’s corrupt cash.
Ralph Reed (left, on the cover of TIME), as head of the Christian Coalition from 1989-1997, has been widely credited for the “Republican Revolution” — the 1994 election victory that gave the GOP control of the House for the first time in five decades. How did Reed do it? He mobilized Christian right voters with an anti-gay sleaze campaign linking Democratic members of Congress to wanting gays in the military — a hot issue that year. Christian Coalition Congressional “scorecards” for voters massively distributed in every election cycle regularly targeted votes by Democrats for gay civil rights legislation to defeat them — another Reed invention.
E-mails released by federal investigators in June of last year show that Reed “secretly accepted payments,” as the Washington Post put it, to lobby against approval of some Indian casino gambling competitive with the casinos owned by Abramoff’s now-famous Indian gambling clients. Abramoff also recruited Reed to join Sheldon in lobbying for eLottery — on whose behalf Reed also lobbied against an Alabama education lottery. Reed, who became chairman of the Georgia Republican Party four years ago by making himself the spokesman of those who wanted to keep the Confederate flag flying on state buildings, is now running for lieutenant governor of the Peach State — where the newspapers and Reed’s opponents are having a field day exposing the sordid hypocrisy of “family values” crusader Reed’s secret links with Abramoff.
Grover Norquist (left) has been dubbed “The Lenin of the Right.” As head of Americans for Tax Reform (ATR)– a hard-right lobbying group — Norquist convenes and presides over weekly meeting of the leaders of more than a hundred conservative organizations. It was at these meetings that the successful anti-gay strategy targeting gay marriage as the Republicans 2004 key to election victory was hatched and refined. Norquist allowed Abramoff to launder money through ATR to help an Abramoff client — which wanted to sell state lottery tickets online — whip up opposition to an anti-gambling bill that would have put Abramoff’s client out of business.
But the most bizarre and Byzantine Abramoff scam was the laundromat called the U.S. Family Network, established in 1996 by DeLay’s former chief of staff, Edwin Buckham. The group, which promoted DeLay’s economic and family values agenda, spent money on radio ads that targeted Democratic members of Congress for their alleged fealty to “the homosexual agenda.” In 2004, the Network was found by the Federal Elections Commission to have illegally accepted $500,000 from the National Republican Congressional Committee (the House GOP’s campaign arm, controlled by DeLay).
In a lengthy piece of Pulitzer-quality investigative reporting on December 31 (little-noticed because it ran on a Saturday, which was New Year’s Eve day to boot), the Washington Post’s Jeff Smith exposed how Abramoff arranged funding for the U.S. Family Network, routed through London lawyers, from Russian energy executives who got DeLay to support Congressional funding for an International Monetary Fund bailout of the Russian economy. These Russian oiligarchs forked over a cool $1 million for the Network. Buckman, the U.S. Family Network’s guru, put DeLay’s wife on the payroll of his consulting firm — for what the Post paints as a no-show job.
Other corporate interests with little stake in the “family values” agenda also lavished money on the U.S. Family Network — like the $500,000 from textile companies headquartered in the Mariana Islands, who wanted — and got — DeLay’s public commitment to block legislation that would boost their labor costs. Or the $250,00 from Abramoff’s biggest client, the Choctaw Indians, who got Delay’s help in blocking legislation that would have taxed their casino profits.
Our job is to break through the media laziness and make clear to the voting public how deeply cynical, hypocritical, unethical, and connected the family values crowd is to the anti-tax crowd, and the lobbyists, and the GOP leadership.
The public has a basic understanding that politicians are corrupt. They need to understand how the mechanism of corruption and media manipulation works. They need to understand that many of the religious leaders that are leading the charge against gay marriage and the ‘War on Christmas’ are accepting kickbacks from the same people that are pushing for less progressive taxation.
When the mechanism of the GOP’s strategy to obtain a ruling majority is held up to the light it is too disgusting for any but the most ethically challenged to support.
The Democrats need to tug on the thread until the whole ball unravels. 2006 is going to be the year when truth about the Republicans comes out. A successful Congressional campaign must shine a bright light on the players: Jack Abramoff, Susan Ralston, Ralph Reed, Grover Norquist et al. If the public sees these people for what they really are, they will run them out of Washington on a rail. But, if we don’t make it clear that this network of thugs is more corrupt than the garden variety corruption that routinely goes on in Washington, the public will not see the solution in voting for Democrats, but in not voting at all.