Abramoff - White House Ties Emerge as Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton Resigns 
Proclaimed reasons notwithstanding, Norton leaves as the Abramoff scandal is progressively enveloping the White House - a scandal that has firmly ensnared the interior secretary.
Investigators have unearthed e-mails showing Rep. Tom DeLay's office tried to help lobbyist Jack Abramoff get a high-level Bush administration meeting for Indian clients, an effort that succeeded after the tribes began making $250,000 in donations.Tribal money went both to a group founded by Interior Secretary Gale Norton, the Cabinet secretary Abramoff was trying to meet, as well as to DeLay's personal charity.
"Do you think you could call that friend and set up a meeting?" then-DeLay staffer Tony Rudy asked fellow House aide Thomas Pyle in a Dec. 29, 2000, e-mail titled "Gale Norton-Interior Secretary." President Bush had nominated Norton to the post the day before.
Rudy wrote Abramoff that same day promising he had "good news" about securing a meeting with Norton, forwarding information about the environmental group Norton had founded, according to e-mails obtained by investigators and reviewed by The Associated Press. Rudy's message to Abramoff was sent from Congress' official e-mail system.
Within months, Abramoff clients donated heavily to the Norton-founded group and to DeLay's personal charity. The Coushatta Indian tribe, for instance, wrote checks in March 2001 for $50,000 to the Norton group and $10,000 to the DeLay Foundation, tribal records show.
The lobbyist and the Coushattas eventually won face-to-face time with the secretary during a Sept. 24, 2001, dinner sponsored by the group she had founded.
Convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff says President Bush knew him well enough to joke with him about weightlifting. "What are you benching, buff guy?" Abramoff said Bush asked him.The president has said he doesn't know Abramoff.
Abramoff said he found it hard to believe Bush didn't remember the 10 or so photos that he and members of his family had snapped with the president and first lady.
"He [Bush] has one of the best memories of any politician I have ever met," Abramoff wrote in an e-mail, according to Vanity Fair's April issue, to be released this week. "Perhaps he has forgotten everything. Who knows?"
[...]
Abramoff wrote to Washingtonian magazine that he had met briefly with the president almost a dozen times and that Bush knew him well enough to make joking references to Abramoff's family.
Abramoff told Vanity Fair that he once was invited to Bush's Texas ranch, where he would have joined with other big Bush fundraisers. Abramoff, an Orthodox Jew, said he didn't go because the event fell on the Sabbath.
And this falls squarely in line with other recently uncovered Bush/Abramoff ties.
The New York Times reported that "documents and interviews" show that the "chief of an Indian tribe represented by the lobbyist Jack Abramoff was admitted to a meeting with President Bush in 2001 days after the tribe paid a prominent conservative lobbying group $25,000 at Mr. Abramoff's direction." The payment "was made to Americans for Tax Reform, a group run by Grover G. Norquist." The Bush meeting "took place on May 9, 2001, at a reception organized by Mr. Norquist to marshal support for the president's 2001 tax cuts, which were pending before Congress."
And let's not forget the LA Times article that Abramoff charged the Malaysian government for a meeting with Bush.
Anyway, Norton leaves the administration with only one regret... that she failed to achieve her "highest-profile political goal, opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to drilling."
KEYWORDS: Gale Norton, Bush Administration, ANWR, Jack Abramoff, Tom Delay
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