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WALLACE: Let's talk about lobbying reform. Why do you think it is that the White House is refusing to release all of its contacts with lobbyist Jack Abramoff?

DEAN: I think they're embarrassed. I think, again, the president shaded the truth. He claimed that he didn't hardly know Jack Abramoff, and now we've got pictures, apparently, with the president and Jack Abramoff smiling and laughing and so forth and so on.

WALLACE: But you know, Governor, you know that people take pictures. I'm sure that you've taken pictures with tens of thousands of people you didn't know who they were.

DEAN: Yeah, you can — that's true, and if there's one picture or two pictures, maybe it doesn't make much of a difference in a rope line with a ton of people. But if it's a repeated series of pictures, 10 or 12 of them at different events, you can tell if there's a close relationship or not.

Look, I think the president should release the information about when Jack Abramoff was at the White House. We know that he met now — I think we believe — I believe it's been confirmed that he's met with Karl Rove in the past in the White House.

We need to know who Jack Abramoff met with in the White House and did he meet with the president in the White House. That's public information, and we're putting in a FOIA request to make sure that the American people know the extent of this lobbying scandal. Does it reach into the White House in addition just to the Republicans in Congress?

WALLACE: You and other top Democrats are going after what you call a Republican culture of corruption, but you deny any Democrats are involved. And let me take a look at an exchange of that.

Question, "In the last couple of weeks, but through various Abramoff-related organizations and outfits, a bunch of Democrats did take money that presumably originated with Jack Abramoff." Dean, "That's not true either. There's no evidence for that either."

Governor, it is certainly true that Republicans got twice as much money from Abramoff-related contributions than Democrats did, but Democrats aren't clean in this area either, are they?

DEAN: Yeah, they are pretty clean, Chris, and I'll tell you why. First of all, every dime of Jack Abramoff's money went to Republicans. Not one dime went to any Democrat or any Democratic organization — his personal money.

Secondly, he did direct contributions to mostly Republicans, but a few Democrats. But the Democrats, A, didn't know that he directed that — his clients to give them money and, B, they never produced anything for Abramoff.

The problem the Republicans have with this is that they actually did things. Senator Burns did a number of things for Jack Abramoff in exchange for a contribution. And the proximity of those contributions to the actual act of doing something for the lobbyist — that's what's illegal, and that's what's going to get them in trouble.

There's not one shred of evidence that any Democrat, A, knew that he was getting a contribution from Jack Abramoff and, B, did anything in exchange for it. And that's why this is a Republican finance scandal and not some sort of bipartisan scandal.

Look, historically, we know that both Democrats and Republicans have done things they ought not to do. What we're saying in the Democratic Party is let's put a final stop to that. We're going to get rid of all corporate jet travel, get rid of all lobbying expenses, and golf trips and lunches.

One thing we're going to do that the Republicans haven't even talked about is we're going to stop people putting things in conference committee reports in the dead of night when nobody knows about it.

Here's the cost of this. It's not just dishonesty in government. The real cost is a couple weeks ago the Republicans stuck in a $22 billion tax money giveaway to HMOs. Nobody knew anything about it. That's the problem with corruption. It's not just dishonesty. It costs the American taxpayers billions and billions of dollars. And that is the shame of this scandal.

WALLACE: Governor, we're running out of money. But I just want to press this issue of...

DEAN: Yes, we are, rapidly. So we need a new party controlling Washington.

WALLACE: I just want to ask you about this question of the Democratic involvement. I want to put up something from the non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics. This comes directly from their Web page, and it says, "Here is a detailed look at Abramoff's lobbying and political contributions from Abramoff, the tribes that hired him, and SunCruz Casinos, which is a company that Abramoff owned since 1999."

It lists recipients by the amount of money they received. Well, the top two are the Republican campaign committees. The third and fourth biggest recipients were Democratic campaign committees. And if you go down the list, Democrats received more than $1 million from Abramoff-related interests.

DEAN: There's two points to this. First of all, actually, we — the DNC actually got $100,000-some odd. Now, I can assure you Jack Abramoff never directed that money. It is possible that some of Jack Abramoff's clients may have decided on their own to give Democrats money. The key is...

WALLACE: I'm sorry, did you say, I'm sorry. Did you say that you're sure that Abramoff didn't direct them to give that money?

DEAN: No, what I said was that it is possible that some Democrats got money from some of the — yeah. No, what I'm saying is that Abramoff may not have directed some of this money toward the Democrats.

WALLACE: In fact, he did, sir. We've got evidence of that.

DEAN: But the point is that not one Democrat either knew it or acted on it. Nobody got anything out of the Democrats from Jack Abramoff. No Democrat delivered anything, and there's no accusation and no investigation that any Democrat ever delivered anything to Jack Abramoff. And that's not true of the Republicans.

WALLACE: So if we find — and I just want to — we have to wrap this up. But if we find that there were some Democrats who wrote letters on behalf of some of the Indian tribes that Abramoff represented, then what do you say, sir?

DEAN: That's a big problem, and those Democrats are in trouble, and they should be in trouble. And our party, if the American people will put us back in power in '06, we will have on the president's desk things that outlaw all those kinds of behaviors. Right now it's a Republican scandal. Maybe they'll find that some Democrats did something wrong, too. That hasn't been the case yet.

But our reforms in the Democratic Party are going to be aimed at both Democrats and Republicans. We want to clean up Congress, and we will within 100 days of the new Congress in 2007.

WALLACE: Chairman Dean, we're going to follow up on that. Thank you. Thanks so much for joining us. And don't be a stranger. You're always welcome here.

DEAN: We'll see you soon. Thanks, Chris.