Call me late to the party, but it looks like when Abramoff decided to flip he went whole hog. Read the details here and here at Josh Marshall’s new spinoff site, TPM Muckraker.
Via Aravosis, AP covers the Bush angle:
Convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff says President Bush knew him well enough to joke with him about weightlifting. “What are you benching, buff guy?” Abramoff said Bush asked him. The president has said he doesn’t know Abramoff.
Abramoff said he finds it hard to believe Bush doesn’t remember the 10 or so photos he and members of his family had snapped with the president and first lady.
“He (Bush) has one of the best memories of any politician I have ever met,” Abramoff wrote in an e-mail, according to Vanity Fair’s April issue being released this week. “Perhaps he has forgotten everything. Who knows?”
As I said before this we’ve basically entered the musical-chairs stage of a scandal, a fun time where spokesmen run around trying every gambit they can think of to publicly unstick their clients from the tar baby. The real fun will start when the feds get around to deciding whom to indict, about which news has come sparingly these days. You almost pine for an investigation that leaks as badly as our old friend Ken Starr.
Al Maviva
Interesting you are so certain that all the leaks came from Ken Starr… as if high powered defense attorneys don’t leak dribs and drabs to leverage spin doctors and the media on behalf of their clients…
Steve
As long as we’re exaggerating points to ridiculous extremes, Al, interesting that you are so certain Ken Starr’s office never leaked anything.
Jill
If you have nothing you leak like Starr. If you have everything you don’t leak.
chopper
he’s an orthodox jew. more like “whole gefilte fish.”
Jorge
Wow – in the very first post Al manages to pick out one throw away sentence in Tim’s post and to use it deflect attention from the thread and slam the Clinton defense team.
Bravo Al. You have a black belt in Tae Kwon Rove.
DougJ
This is all part of the media’s efforts to make us lose in Iraq. By smearing the White House with Jack Abramoff’s ridiculous stories, they’re helping to fuel the insurgency.
When will the Dean/Sheehan/Clarke/Wilkerson/Abramoff jihad against this administration stop?
DougJ
Jack Abramoff is nothing more than Aaron Broussard in a yarmulke.
Pb
DougJ,
You forgot to mention the real leader of the Democratic insurgency–Ward Churchill!
Sherard
I love it. A guy that has no more evidence of having met the President than a few photos, somehow “knows” him well enough to “know” his memory is so great he could never have forgotten the guy.
This qualifies as scandal (involving the President) ? Give me a break.
Marcus Wellby
Why is this in Vanity Fair? Why didn’t Time or Newsweek bid on this story? Are they afraid of losing “access”? Don’t even tell me that VF has more money to bid. This is a money making article for any publication — something very odd that it is picked up by a mainly culture/entertainment mag.
Pb
Sherard,
I bet you’d say the same about Kenny-boy too…
Nikki
I think it was because the author of the piece is a friend of Abramhoff’s.
Marcus Wellby
Damn, the simplest explanation strikes again! Way to burst my conspiracy balloon…
The Other Steve
No. The scandal is the President claimed to have never met him or talked to him.
It’s always the cover up…
Otto Man
Don’t know. They’ve definitely declared war on the administration they used to feature in lavish photo spreads. The head guy there, Grayson Carter (?), recently said on Bill Maher that the reason Bush explains national security issues to Americans as if they’re idiots is that that’s exactly how they were explained to him.
DougJ
Great snark.
Par R
The White House has said all along that Bush’s contacts with Abramoff were of the grip-and-grin variety, mostly at fundraisers. The description of the pictures suggests the kind of grip-and-grin photo opportunities that the White House has described. The “buff guy” quote suggests Bush’s grip-and-grin photo-opportunity patter. And the invitation to the ranch, not included here in this excerpt, we know, was one in which Abramoff was invited, along with 350 other Bush donors, to a fundraiser — not exactly an intimate get-together.
Tim F.
There isn’t any scandal at all about whether or not Bush ever met Abramoff. It’s all a game of musical chairs that doesn’t serve any purpose except to amuse those of us who aren’t at risk of indictment.
The scandal, if there is a scandal, is whether Abramoff took any business trips to 1600 PA Ave. and what sort of business he conducted on those trips. Scott McLellan promised a full accounting of those visits and then went completely mum on the subject, which is hughly suspicious if not probative of anything specific. Eventually the music will stop and we’ll see who’s left chairless.
DougJ
Something tells me you do a lot of gripping and grinning, Par R. Let’s just hope that aren’t any photos.
Brainster
“Lobbyist Claims Close Ties to Poltician”? Not quite “Dog Bits Man”, but close enough for government work.
And I’m a little suspicious of Abramoff’s claim of being offered in the low seven figures for his photos with Bush. I could understand how a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Democratic Party might offer that, but the mainstream media? Errr.
HH
“Convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff says President Bush knew him well enough to joke with him about weightlifting. ‘What are you benching, buff guy?'”
Wow, case closed, I guess. As we all know, casual asides about weightlifting are only shared among close friends. At this point, I expect to hear that they had slumber parties next.
DougJ
HH, have you checked out scrutator.net? I think you’d like it over there.
And if you left here and started commenting over there, it would raise the average IQ of both groups of commenters.
anonymous
Buff guy? I guess that is why ‘one gets’ the Rice affair. They are quite modern, ya’ know.
Plame came out there too, anyone losing operations officers?
Starr? He is dead.