As ashamed as I am to admit it, I haven’t actively followed the ongoing Jack Abramoff scandal. Frankly, it was too complicated and typical of Washington to interest me. Until I read this at Josh Marshall’s place:
You know that when the casino boat line SunCruz was owned by Jack Abramoff and Adam Kidan, the company paid the men who blew away SunCruz founder Gus Boulis.
Now it turns out they also had the company pay the National Republican Congressional Committee (the House GOP election committee) $10,000 on behalf of Rep. Bob Ney (R-OH). That was in exchange for Ney’s putting anti-Boulis remarks in the congressional record that helped Abramoff and Kidan pressure Boulis to sell them SunCruz.
The guy who helped arrange Ney’s anti-Boulis-trash-talking and the later pay-off was none other than Mike Scanlon, who later did public relations work for SunCruz, in addition to going into the Indian gaming bilking biz with SunCruz owner Abramoff.
Scanlon is the guy who just agreed to testify against, well … everybody in the Abramoff cases.
Unless I’m reading this wrong, which I really hope I am, Abramoff, Scanlon, and a prominent U.S. Congressman were all involved in a murder for hire. Now, bribes, payoffs, embezzlement – that I expect from politicians. But calling hits on people is positively Nixon-esque. And considering that Scanlon was an aide to DeLay, this could bring him down farther than he already is, especially considering all the speculation that the TRMPAC charges will be dropped. This has gotten a whole lot more serious.