SURPRISE!

On the eve of my 60^th birthday two years ago, Congressman Dana Rohrabacher called me up and suggested we have dinner at his favorite pizza parlor on Capitol Hill. On our way, he said, he had to drop something off for a colleague at a restaurant called Signatures.

There’s a private dining room at Signatures, and when we walked into it, a group of people jumped up and yelled, “Surprise!” I had been pleasantly set up. Many of my dearest friends in Washington were there, such as Congressmen Chris Cox (now SEC Chairman) and Ed Royce, and the owner of Signatures who had arranged my Surprise Party – Jack Abramoff.

There was no business or politics or “lobbying” discussed – just friends reminiscing and telling stories, mostly of the Reagan days. Since I was the guest of honor, everyone had to laugh at my jokes. We all had a great time.

Since it’s times like this that I think of when I see Jack Abramoff portrayed in the media as an arch-villain out of a comic book, you can imagine how saddening all of this is to me.

What is most puzzling to me is Jack’s silence. For well over a year now, the Washington Post has been carrying on a hysterical front-page vendetta against him, and he never uttered a word in his defense. Not once, for example, did he call a press conference and expose John McCain’s staffers for providing his subpoenaed emails to the Washington Post, or the fascism of “mail fraud” indictments.

I discussed this a year ago in We’re All Criminals Now. Here are two key quotes:

Suppose, for example, you are called to testify at a Senate hearing. The committee you must testify before subpoenas your records and correspondence, including all your personal emails. The committee staffers proceed to examine your emails, pluck some juicy quotes from them that, taken out of any context, are the most damaging – and gives them to a reporter for the Washington Post who writes a hit piece on you.

Unlike court-subpoenaed documents, there is no confidentiality with Congressional-subpoenaed documents. Whatever you are compelled to give a House or Senate committee, the committee is legally free to distribute to the world. And that is just what Senator John McCain and his staffers did to Jack Abramoff.

After the WaPo’s first hit piece on Abramoff, McCain’s staffers then went to his clients, the Indian tribes for whom he had lobbied for years. The staffers didn’t bring copies of entire emails, just selected quotes which, with no context, could be imaginatively construed as criticizing them. “Look what Abramoff said about you in these private emails,” the staffers told the tribal leaders. “We think you should consider canceling your contract with him, and testifying against him at our hearings.” They successfully convinced the tribal leaders – who had previously told a WaPo reporter that Abramoff had saved them hundreds of millions of dollars – they were now “victims” of a racist scheme.

******
Congress has now increased the penalties for mail and wire fraud to 20 years in prison. What constitutes wire fraud? Anything the prosecutor wants. All he needs is a “victim” and the use of the “mail” – which need not have anything to do with the federal Post Office, and includes electronic transmissions (“wires”) over privately-owned Internet services.

I want you to think very hard and long on this: any email you have ever sent can be grounds for felony federal wire fraud prosecution threatening you with 20 years in prison. The email, or “electronic transmission,” does not itself have to be fraudulent. It can still be “wire fraud” if it is only somehow “involved” in what the government deems to be a “fraudulent scheme.”

The prosecutors’ game is to threaten you with an innumerable number of counts, any one of which could put you in the slammer for years if found guilty, so you’ll “plea bargain” – plead guilty on a selected set of counts. In exchange, you’re in prison for far fewer years. The alternative is to fight all their charges, bankrupting you with legal fees, and risking most of the rest of your life behind bars.

So Abramoff capitulated, remaining a mute punching bag for the media, refusing to say a word in his defense or in exposing prosecutorial blackmail. The entire newsroom of the Washington Post is in high-fiveing euphoria. But the WaPo is in for a disappointing surprise.

The WaPo got Jack Abramoff’s scalp, but it won’t get Tom DeLay’s. Abramoff is just a stalking horse, a pawn in the Democrat media’s game of criminalizing the Republican Party. The game plan called for Plamegate to criminalize Karl Rove, but all that amounted to was the indictment of Scooter Libby for misremembering what he said to reporters – and then get Abramoff to finger Tom DeLay. That won’t happen.

The game can only work by conning the voting public into believing only Republicans are corrupt while Democrats are so pure and innocent they would never be influenced by a lobbyist’s favors. Voters, however gullible, won’t buy that Brooklyn Bridge.

The Democrats and their liberal media henchmen think they have victory in November in the bag. Eleven months is forever in politics. We’ll have a lot of surprises to talk about in those months. And come November, it is the Dems who’ll be disappointingly surprised.

In the meantime, serious people need to look beyond the black cartoon figure being drawn of Jack Abramoff, and beyond his coerced guilty pleas, to the terrifying prosecutorial fascism in America. What has happened to Jack Abramoff can happen to any of us – because state and federal prosecutors have the power to do so, particularly with the liberal media behind them.

It is too much to dream that the Abramoff scandal would result in exposing this power and have it taken away from prosecutors – just as it is too much to dream that exposing the sleaze of Washington lobbying will result in taking the power to dispense the money lobbyists beg for away from politicians.

Neither of these dreams will happen. That’s no surprise at all.

(Note: I suppose an obligatory disclaimer is called for: I’ve never done any business with Jack Abramoff in any way. I have little or no knowledge about his business dealings as we rarely discussed them, and I have refrained from asking him about the circumstances of his plea bargain. I only know him as a friend of long-standing, with whom our favorite topics of discussion are geopolitics and security for Israel, and who remains my friend. My heart goes especially out to Jack’s wife, Pam, and their five children who will now grow to adulthood without their father.)