Writing in Slate, the FT's James Harding has at the relationship Tom DeLay can't shake:

Where to begin examining the extraordinary career of Jack Abramoff? His work trying to secure a visa for the great Zairean kleptocrat Mobutu Sese Seko, perhaps, or the bilking of an estimated $66 million out of Native American tribes, clients he described as "monkeys," "troglodytes," and "idiots"? Or his leadership of a 1980s think tank financed, unbeknownst to him apparently, by the intelligence arm of South Africa's apartheid regime?

No, the chapter of our man's story that matters most at the moment begins with a toast given by House Majority Leader Tom DeLay during a New Year's trip they both took to Saipan in the Northern Mariana Islands in 1997. "When one of my closest and dearest friends, Jack Abramoff, your most able representative in Washington, D.C., invited me to the islands, I wanted to see firsthand the free-market success and the progress and reform you have made," DeLay said before an audience of Abramoff's clients in the islands' garment industry—whom, upon his return to Washington, he helped win an extended exemption from federal immigration and labor laws.

The most salient fact about Abramoff these days is that he may prove DeLay's undoing...

Since Abramoff's troubles began, he and DeLay have sought to distance themselves from the other. But DeLay can't shake Abramoff loose so easily—not after their trips abroad, the major role Abramoff played in DeLay's well-financed and successful run for whip, the public praise DeLay heaped on Abramoff for helping to bring Native Americans into the Republican fold. Abramoff has hired a number of ex-DeLay staffers, worked closely with the congressman on trade issues, and was partly responsible for DeLay's trips to Britain and Russia. And he has contributed tens of thousands of dollars to DeLay's various political organizations. Given the unfolding details of Abramoff's extraordinary three-ring circus of lobbying, political fund-raising, and supposed nonprofit work, the danger for the House majority leader is that the Abramoff story has only just begun to come out.

Abramoff's relationship with figures from South Africa's apartheid regime is ugly reading, and there's more on this sure to come out. More on Abramoff's lobbying links to the Russian security services and Yugoslavia's Milosevic-era government here and here from The American Prospect's Garance Franke-Ruta.

Posted by Laura at April 8, 2005 03:06 PM