Here are the simple facts:
Abramoff contributed a grand total of $2,250 dollars to my political efforts. ($250 in 1996, $1,000 in 1998, and $1,000 to our leadership political action committee, TEAMPAC, in 1999.)
I never met with Abramoff concerning any legislation.
He never came to my office.
He never lobbied me directly on any issue.
Once Abramoff’s troubling activities were revealed, we donated that money to charity (Hurricane Katrina relief). Simply put, we didn’t want it.
Please understand, the Indian tribes were the true targets of Abramoff, I was simply collateral damage. The tribes were his clients and they were defrauded of tens of millions of dollars. Our office offered to return their contributions to them, but tribal officials stepped up to the plate and stated for the record that they themselves had made their own determinations about who they would support with political donations.
In the meantime, we cooperated fully with the Department of Justice, and hopefully our efforts helped in the indictment and conviction of Abramoff. Of course, we will never know that for certain. What we do know is that he is currently incarcerated for defrauding the Indian tribes, conspiracy, and corruption of public officials.
These days, ‘cooperation’ is expensive. Very expensive. In our case, it involved retaining a K Street Law Firm to pore over twelve years worth of my congressional records and correspondance. Twelve years of household records is bad enough, but Congress runs on paper and e-mails, and it was literally thousands of pages and hundreds of computer records that had to be examined, evaluated, and sometimes redacted for security reasons. Then you can add the administrative costs, phone calls, and ‘face time’ the attorneys spent with the DOJ. When all was said and done, the legal bill was over a half a million dollars. And that was to ‘cooperate’ with the DOJ!
In the end, we were completely vindicated. In a letter from our attorneys, they informed us that the Department of Justice had advised us that we “are not now the target, subject or focus [of] any DOJ investigation, case or other proceeding.” Essentially, it was a complete and total vindication that we had done nothing wrong at all - which is exactly what we had been saying all along.
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Interviewer: “What about that $100,000 you supposedly paid to your wife?”
JD: “My wife Mary was an employee of TEAMPAC, and she received a monthly paycheck. Simple math takes the “oomph” out of this charge. Think of it this way: if someone is paid $20,000 annually for five years, that totals $100,000! Pretty cheap for office help. Also, these were not taxpayer funds!”
It's amazing that the system requires a person falsely accused to spent 1/2 a million $’s to prove it.
You would think they would have covered that for him as he helped the Dept of Justice with the case against the real bad guy
And McCain is a fool to excoriate (I like that word and hope this is a good place for it) JD for the above.
He got busted for what he did, but because of his political clout he only got his wrist slapped.