Congressional Report Finds Convicted Lobbyist
Had Contact With Karl Rove, Ken Mehlman

From ABC News courtesy of AlterNet:

The report from the Republican-led House Government Affairs Committee stated that Abramoff had as many as 485 contacts with the White House, and prime among his lobbying targets was former White House political director Ken Mehlman, and Bush's adviser Karl Rove.

Of those 485 contacts, 345 were described as meetings or other in-person contacts; 71 were described as phone conversations and 69 were e-mail exchanges.

The records detailed in the recent report span from Jan. 2001 to Mar. 2004.

And

After Abramoff pled guilty to illegal lobbying, officials at the White House said they barely new him and all they knew was what they read in the papers.

Click here for the rest.

What with the release of the NIE data showing that the Iraq war actually causes more terrorism, the release of the damning Woodward book about the Bush administration, and the Foley gay lust scandal, it's been a big week in terms of GOP wildfires, and I fear that the above linked story is going to end up being lost in all the smoke. But this is big. It definitively links the White House to the Abramoff lobbying scandal, which has already put several Republicans behind bars. Even bigger, we've now caught the White House red handed in a big fucking lie, nothing blurry about this, no way to blame it on "bad intelligence" or liberals or whatever the scapegoat of the day is.

I mean, I was already pretty sure that Abramoff's tentacles reached the Oval Office, given his clout among Republicans, but this proves it. How much more of this will it take to convince the die-hards that the Conservative Movement is kaput?

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