Lobbyist Helped Senator Write Tribal Pleas (Tom Harkin)

WASHINGTON - As Sen. Tom Harkin (news, bio, voting record) drafted letters to the Bush administration on behalf of an Iowa tribe, he had no shortage of ideas for wording: A tribal lobbyist who donated to the Democrat's campaign suggested language for him to use.

Harkin wrote at least three letters in 2003 pressing the government to release federal money to help the Sac & Fox tribe in his state cope with the temporary closing of its casino due to a tribal dispute, according to Interior Department documents obtained by The Associated Press and records provided by Harkin's office.

In doing so, Harkin accepted input from Sac & Fox lobbyist Michael D. Smith, a member of Jack Abramoff's tribal lobbying team at the Greenberg Traurig law firm. Smith met with the senator and also offered suggestions for the letters, Harkin spokeswoman Allison Dobson said.

"Absolutely, he did contribute to those letters," Dobson said, adding that she wasn't sure what Smith's suggestions were. Harkin also met with lobbyists on the other side of the dispute, she said.

Harkin is among dozens of members of Congress who wrote letters that benefited tribal clients of Abramoff's lobbying team while collecting political contributions from Abramoff, his clients or his lobbying associates.

The Justice Department is examining the proximity of donations to congressional action as part of its investigation of Abramoff's activities. The Senate Indian Affairs Committee, while investigating allegations that Abramoff cheated the tribes out of tens of millions of dollars, has steered clear of examining specific members of Congress.

The letters to the Interior Department and National Indian Gaming Commission between June and November 2003 came as Harkin's campaign and political action committee harvested donations from Smith and Greenberg Traurig tribal clients.

Harkin twice used Abramoff's skybox for fundraisers — once in 2002 and again in 2003 — without reimbursing. He also collected $17,000 from Smith and other Abramoff-related sources in 2003. The Sac & Fox gave $4,000 more to Harkin in 2004, about six months after the federal government allowed the tribe's casino to reopen.

Dobson said a recent audit found Harkin should have reimbursed for the skybox, and he did so this fall. As for the timing of the fundraising help and letters, "I'm telling you there is no nexus," she said.

Harkin "wrote these letters and worked on this issue because over 1,300 Meskwaki people and Iowans were out of work," Dobson said. "This was a very dire situation for the community."

She said neither the senator nor his staff knows Abramoff or ever has met with the lobbyist.

Abramoff routinely billed at least one of his clients, the Northern Mariana Islands, for time he spent drafting letters for members of Congress, invoices the islands' government provided the AP under an open records request show.

James Pendleton, a spokesman for Sen. Conrad Burns (news, bio, voting record), R-Mont., didn't see anything unusual in the Abramoff team's suggestions for congressional correspondence.

"It's not uncommon for lobbyists to provide detail points for letters in any office on the Hill," Pendleton said.

He said he didn't know whether Abramoff or his team offered phrasing for a February 2002 letter Burns and Sen. Byron Dorgan (news, bio, voting record), D-N.D., sent the Senate Appropriations Committee urging long-term funding of an Indian school construction program that tribes represented by Abramoff were seeking. They mentioned an Abramoff client, the Mississippi Choctaw tribe, in the letter.

While senators often get suggestions from lobbyists for phrasing, they try to put things in their own words, Pendleton said: "I think it ends up being a combination of both."

<snip>...President Bush has "Lied to the American People" about his National Guard service during the Vietnam War, snarled U.S. Senator Tom Harkin at a September 9, 2004 press conference. Swift Boat veterans critical of John Kerry were also liars, Harkin claimed. Vice President Dick Cheney, said Harkin, was “a coward, who would not serve during the Vietnam War.” And those who brought up Kerry’s anti-war activities in the United States that encouraged the North Vietnamese Communists to continue fighting instead of negotiating peace, said Harkin, represent the “right-wing kooky fringe.”...
...In 1970 Harkin as a staff aide to the House Select Committee on United States Involvement in Southeast Asia accompanied a fact-finding mission to South Vietnam. As part of this mission, during a 30-minute visit to Con Son Prison he snapped photographs of Communist prisoners in “tiger cages.”
When the mission returned, Harkin declared that these photographs were “too important” to be turned over to Congress and to the committee that employed him, paid for his travel and provided him official U.S. Government access to the prison. Harkin instead sold these photos, some to anti-American foreign outlets, and others to Life Magazine for $10,000. (Harkin used this money from selling what ethically was taxpayer-funded government property to pay off his own debts for his 1972 law degree from Catholic University.)
The “tiger cages” story in Life and throughout the anti-war press turned Harkin into an instant star of the left, including the establishment U.S. media. Harkin gave an interview to the Daily World, official newspaper of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), in which he made sweeping attacks on the treatment of prisoners throughout South Vietnam. His statements, based on being an underling who spent 30 minutes walking through one prison, were used in communist propaganda worldwide against the South Vietnamese government and the United States. ...
... As a newly-elected Senator, in April 1985 Harkin and fellow neophyte leftwing Senator John F. Kerry (D.-Massachusetts) flew to Nicaragua (on a trip arranged by IPS staff member Peter Kornbluh) to give propaganda support to the Sandinistas only days before a scheduled congressional vote on President Ronald Reagan’s requested aid for Nicaragua’s anti-Communist freedom fighters. After embracing Daniel Ortega in front of news cameras, Harkin and Kerry flew back to Washington with a piece of paper signed by Ortega in which he claimed to be “non-aligned” between the U.S. and Soviet Union.
The Democrat-controlled House of Representatives, lobbied by Harkin and Kerry, voted against giving aid to the anti-Communist Contras. Harkin and Kerry according to some accounts had been told privately in Nicaragua, but had kept secret from fellow Democrat lawmakers, that at the very moment the vote against President Reagan’s request was taking place Daniel Ortega would be aboard a Soviet airliner winging to Moscow to pledge his allegiance to the Soviet Union.
Kerry’s response was not to criticize the Sandinista leader but to tell the liberal Boston Globe that President Reagan had “forced Ortega to look to the Soviets for help.”
But years earlier Ortega’s brother Humberto had declared: “We [Sandinistas] are anti-Yankee, we are against the bourgeoisie…we are guided by the scientific doctrine of the revolution, by Marxism-Leninism.” Humberto Ortega also had said that the Sandinistas intended to “crush” all who dissented from their rule.
Harkin and Kerry, said critics, had violated the Constitution by negotiating a treaty directly with a foreign nation (a power exclusive to the Executive, not the Legislative branch of government), and that the two leftwing Senators were “cavorting with, and used by, the Communists.” Kerry said that he was “as mad as anyone” that the Sandinista leader he and Harkin had embraced days earlier had gone to Moscow.
“Where did my colleagues think he was going to go? Disney World?” retorted liberal Senator Christopher Dodd (D.-Connecticut), annoyed by the embarrassment they had caused for other Democrats. “The man is a Marxist.”
Harkin and Kerry had been circulating a study to fellow lawmakers that purported to show 77 instances in which the Reagan Administration had misled Congress about its Central American policies. The study, which included not a single word critical of Soviet or Cuban involvement in Central America, turned out to have been written by Institute for Policy Studies analysts, at least one of whom was an agent for the Soviet secret police, the KGB. ------ "The Bark of Tom Harkin - John Kerry's most rabid attack dog," by Lowell Ponte, FrontPageMagazine.com</snip>

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