×
THE REPORT. Keep scrolling through TPM Muckraker for some choice excerpts from and analysis of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee's final report (PDF) on Jack Abramoff's Indian tribe shenanigans. As has been noted, committee chair John McCain had been quite careful in steering this investigation away from intensive looks into the actions of sitting members of Congress; discussion of Bob Ney, however, was unavoidable in a final, comprehensive report. Go to pages 162-180 for the goods. The report's authors are very careful in how they structure the account of the Tigua tribe's work with Ney, documenting Ney's contradictions of other witnesses' claims without explicitly rendering a judgment on the he said, she said disputes. Plenty of the material is damning, though:
During his interview with Committee staff, Congressman Ney said he was not familiar with the Tigua.272 He could not recall ever meeting with any member of the Tigua.273 When asked about a possible two-hour meeting, Congressman Ney said he �wouldn�t even meet with the President for two hours.�274 After the interview, counsel to Congressman Ney, who was present during the interview, indicated that, according to an internal email describing Congressman Ney�s calendar for the relevant period, a meeting was scheduled in Congressman Ney�s office with the �Taqua,� from 11:00 - 11:30 a.m.Hmm�.Meanwhile, I'm still working through the report, but one tiny tidbit I wasn't aware of before was Michael Scanlon's claim to have hired Harold Ickes in 2002 to lobby Dems in the Senate on the Tigua legislation. The only problem: "The Committee has seen no evidence suggesting, much less establishing, that Scanlon had hired Ickes." With Scanlon especially, the b.s. just never seemed to end.
--Sam Rosenfeld
