Notorious former lobbyist Jack Abramoff is a free man again, after serving three and a half years in prison for corruption and fraud. In an interview aired by CBS on Sunday, he told correspondent Leslie Stahl about the tricks of his former trade.
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“When we would become friendly with an office,” he explained, “and they were important to us, and the chief of staff was a competent person, I would say or my staff would say to him or her at some point, ‘You know, when you’re done working on the Hill, we’d very much like you to consider coming to work for us.’ Now the moment I said that to them or any of our staff said that to ‘em, that was it. We owned them.”
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It's not like we (the politically informed) didn't know this. There's a reason my dad had a box at Shea Stadium. He was a subcontractor to a lot of defense firms (Grumman, Republic Aircraft, Boeing) and he was always handing out tickets to potential customers (corporate execs and elected reps). He even was responsible for introducing a lot of Brits (Hawker-Siddeley) to baseball. Brought him a lot of business.
Hopefully, a lot of the politcally uninformed watched 60 Minutes (especially this week thanks to Andy Rooney's passing and their tribute to him) and got some inkling about what actually goes on in D.C.
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