Records detail DeLay's ties to lobbyist

By Sharon Theimer

updated 8:04 p.m. ET April 27, 2005

WASHINGTON - Over two years, House Majority leader Tom DeLay had at least two dozen discussions with a lobbyist working to keep a U.S. territory’s factories free from new labor laws. The lobbyist contributed to the House leader’s campaigns and arranged travel for him.

Records show that DeLay’s staff spoke with the lobbyist, Jack Abramoff, or his team almost daily during this period.

DeLay’s office kept Abramoff, now under criminal investigation, routinely apprised of congressional efforts to block new regulations on his client, the Northern Mariana Islands.

Questions have been raised about whether Abramoff himself paid for some of DeLay’s foreign trips in violation of House rules. DeLay maintains they were properly financed by trip sponsors.

Abramoff’s firm reported it drafted legislative materials for DeLay, and Abramoff boasted to island leaders he could use his close ties to Republican leaders to block legislation from receiving a House vote.

“Getting the bill off the schedule for next week, however, should enable us to use our connections within the Leadership to ensure that ... it will not come to the floor,” Abramoff wrote the islands in September 1996.

The Northern Marianas billing and correspondence records of Abramoff’s former lobbying firm, Preston Gates, were obtained by The Associated Press under an open records request approved by the island government.

'Sweatshop' rules blocked
They provide a day-by-day account of the lobbyist’s campaign of fundraising, trip-providing and schmoozing with lawmakers in both parties aimed at, among other things, getting Congress to block Clinton administration efforts to regulate alleged “sweatshop” garment factories in the Northern Marianas. Those rules were never enacted.

Carlos Javier Sanchez / AP House Majority Leader Tom DeLay

DeLay, R-Texas, is now the House majority leader, but back then he was the No. 3 official in the House. His job as majority whip involved counting the way lawmakers intended to vote, which often influenced when legislation would come to a vote in the GOP-led Congress. Though Abramoff billed the island for contacts with dozens of lawmakers, DeLay’s office was among the most frequently listed in the billing records.

An Abramoff spokesman said Tuesday the records confirm the lobbyist earned his pay. “Mr. Abramoff and his team worked tirelessly on behalf of the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas Islands and achieved tremendous results,” Andrew Blum said.

DeLay's response
DeLay’s office said Tuesday he made decisions on the merits, not because of Abramoff’s largesse or lobbying. “People know that Majority Leader DeLay stands on principles and bases his voting decisions on the merits,” spokesman Dan Allen said.

The documents show that Abramoff’s firm and the House Ethics Committee began having concerns as early as 1996 about Abramoff’s arrangement of numerous trips for congressional members to the Pacific islands and how they were being paid for.

Abramoff billed numerous trips to his personal credit card or the firm, the records state, and then he later pressed the islands to reimburse him to avoid violating the new ban on lobbyists giving gifts to House members.

“I am under pressure here since the firm, under the gift ban rules, is not allowed to be out of pocket too long on the costs of congressional member and staff travel,” Abramoff wrote in November 1996.

Though a tiny set of U.S. territorial islands in the Pacific Ocean with a population of about 80,000, Abramoff’s client received constant attention — often numerous contacts in a week — from DeLay’s staff in the mid- to late 1990s, the records show.

DeLay himself met or talked with Abramoff at least two dozen times in 1996 and 1997, when Abramoff’s work for the islands got under way, the records show.

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