JACK ABRAMOFF’S OCTOBER SURPRISE FOR JOHN MCCAIN

As Chairman of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, it was John McCain who launched the investigation of lobbyist Jack Abramoff. 

Those investigations provided the springboard for the incredible media frenzy of the "Abramoff lobbying scandals."  The Washington Post, for example, ran over 50 above-the-fold front page headline stories on Abramoff to feed the frenzy.

Jack Abramoff is in jail today because of John McCain.  Now it's payback time.  Abramoff will be setting off a bombshell timed to do maximum damage to his nemesis right before the election. 

And in so doing, he will be ripping the lid off and exposing the dirtiest secret of how Washington really works.  The way it works is like this.

Wander around Capitol Hill – in the Congressional office buildings like Rayburn or Canon, in the Senate office buildings like Dirksen or Russell, or at pubs like Bullfeathers or the Dubliner – and you'll quickly notice all the kids.

These are the twenty-something staffers (at my age, anyone under 30 is still a kid) who are willing to work for a United States Congressman or Senator for peanuts.  These kids run Capitol Hill and Congress.  No Congressista or Senator can have any real familiarity with the issues they are making laws about, other than a tiny handful of personal importance.

So the kids do the research and make the recommendations on how to vote, which their boss usually takes.  They cabal with each other to line up who owes who ("Well, my guy voted for your guy's bill last time so your guy owes us to vote for my guy's bill this time"), and over a few years (normally ten at the most) develop a network of Capitol Hill friendships and contacts.

If they do it right, they then get hired by one of the hotshot K Street lobbying firms who has been courting their boss and whom they've been courting in turn to get offered low to mid six figures a year, several multiples of what they were making before.

By now they know exactly how the K Street Game is played, which is to charge clients enormous sums to get the clients just enough of what they want legislatively so they keep paying the monthly fees, but never ever enough that it solves the clients' problems.

What Jack Abramoff did so that he ended up in the slammer was not play the game by these rules.

The staffers on McCain's Indian Affairs Committee did.  They went off and became lobbyists who got various Indian tribes to pay them enormous fees for doing just enough.

Abramoff told the tribes what was going on, and that if they hired him as their DC lobbyist he would accomplish a lot more than just enough.  So a number of tribes did, and just as Abramoff promised, he solved more problems for them than they thought possible.

This meant, however, that he had taken Indian tribe clients away from McCain's staffers-turned-lobbyists, along with  the millions of dollars in fees the tribes were paying them.  So they decided to get even by getting McCain to hold hearings and investigate Abramoff criminally.  The rest is history.

That is the basis for a book due to hit the stands in mid-September.  Entitled The Perfect Villain, the subtitle is John McCain and the Demonization of Jack Abramoff.

The author is Gary Chafetz, a journalist for the Boston Globe.  The book is embargoed until release and I have not seen a copy.  I have talked to him, however, and he describes himself as being interested initially in thoroughly chronicling the whole story, just straight journalism although he assumed Abramoff was guilty like everyone else thought.

But the more he dug into it, he says, the more things didn't add up.  In the end, as he writes in a blurb for the book, he "uncovered a Shakespearean tragedy of deceit, betrayal and political vendetta in which the true villains are Presidential aspirant John McCain, the Washington Post newspaper and the U.S. Department of Justice — all of whom participated in the railroading of an innocent man."

Although I didn't confirm my account of events above with Chafetz, I know enough about how Washington works, and enough about Abramoff's account of events to be confident my description is overall accurate.

Obviously the book is timed to demonize McCain as he did Abramoff.  But how can the Dems do this without un-demonizing Abramoff and embracing his new-found innocence?

Can't do one without the other.  It will fun to watch how the Dems wiggle and squirm trying to figure out how to take advantage of Jack Abramoff's October Surprise.