Lobbyists' scandal has a K Street home

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Sixteen big lobbying firms have more lobbyists than the Senate's 100 members; this white-collar industry takes in more than $2 billion a year. No other country has anything of this magnitude.

But now K Street is at the center of a scandal that some of those who watch Washington for a living feel could be to the lobbying business what Watergate was to campaign finance and Enron was to corporate oversight.

"This scandal has the potential to have a huge effect on K Street for decades," said Alex Knott, who monitors lobbying for the nonpartisan Center for Public Integrity. "It will not only further shape people's opinions about lobbying, but could also lead to reform."

At the center of the scandal is Jack Abramoff, a lobbyist who pleaded guilty to federal corruption charges last week, accused of using third-party groups to pay for lavish overseas trips for Representatives Tom DeLay of Texas and Bob Ney of Ohio, as well as for senior congressional aides.

But many other lawmakers have run afoul of requirements for reporting their private travel and a score of them may be examined by federal investigators looking for possible illegal attempts to influence legislation.

Abramoff is a hustling Hollywood native whose charm, flamboyant deal-making and readiness to bend or break rules propelled him first to a K Street pinnacle and probably next will lead him to jail. The spreading scandal that now bears his name, and which primarily affects Republicans, yielded a new victim this week: a top lobbying firm, the Alexander Strategy Group.

The collapse of Alexander was reported Tuesday by The Washington Post, which said that nearly half its clients were leaving because of the unfavorable publicity linking it to the Abramoff scandal.

While Republicans note that Abramoff has Democratic entanglements, too, his far greater involvement with Republicans means that it is the majority party that sees most to fear as this drama, one of the worst congressional scandals in decades, is played out in an election year when Republicans already find themselves unexpectedly vulnerable.

The Alexander Strategy Group was one of many lobbying firms to have thrived partly through close ties to DeLay, who has stepped down as the No. 2 Republican in the House while defending himself against charges emanating from the scandal. The home page of the group's Web site identifies a partner, Ed Buckham, as former chief of staff to DeLay.

K Street has taken on a lopsidedly Republican cast in recent years - much of this DeLay's doing - and this has paralleled and been partly fueled by a dramatic overall growth in the lobbying industry.

The industry has nearly doubled in the past decade, partly a simple reflection of growth in government - notably of the military and security-related branches since 2001 - and of spreading government regulation. There are more targets of concern for the businesses and interest groups that look to K Street to get their voices heard in Washington.

Abramoff's liberal dispensation of sports and cultural tickets, his financing (often indirectly) of congressmen's campaigns and foreign travel are not entirely new to an industry once known for providing "booze, broads and beefsteaks."

And the fact is, lobbying in Washington is a constitutionally protected activity, assured by the right of citizens to petition their government for redress of grievances.

But Abramoff, according to his admissions as part of a plea agreement, has been linked to some particularly brazen efforts to influence opinion, which - thanks to their e-mail trail - have been damningly well-documented.

Now 46, Abramoff was a conservative activist even when he was a student at Brandeis University in Massachusetts. He befriended a Harvard student, Grover Norquist, who went on to become an influential Republican anti-tax campaigner.

Abramoff was national chairman of the College Republicans, a post held earlier by Karl Rove, President George W. Bush's senior adviser. After a disastrous attempt at Hollywood film-producing, Abramoff moved to Washington and met DeLay around 1994.

He befriended DeLay's top aides and staff, providing concert and sports tickets. Prosecutors say he funneled $50,000 to the wife of a top staff member. Meanwhile, he wove a farflung network of deals and connections, including a casino boat deal in Florida that led to his indictment last year in Miami on fraud charges. He has pleaded not guilty.

Investigators are looking at an expensive trip DeLay took to England and Scotland in 2000 and whether Abramoff arranged for two clients indirectly to donate $25,000 each to pay the expenses.

Abramoff's clients, presumably at his behest, donated more than $1 million to a little-known advocacy group, the U.S. Family Network, which had a single full-time employee and performed scant advocacy of family values but did run campaign ads against Democrats. It also paid hundreds of thousands to the Alexander Strategy Group, The Post reported.

In September 2004, Senate investigators concluded that Abramoff and his partner, Michael Scanlon, a former DeLay aide, had charged six Indian tribes at least $66 million for lobbying services and may have manipulated tribal elections.

Scanlon later pleaded guilty to conspiring to bribe public officials.

DeLay, once so powerful and feared he was known as "the Hammer," now faces his own legal problems in Texas.

Abramoff has pleaded guilty to fraud, tax evasion and conspiracy to bribe public officials. He is said to be penniless, having gone through millions. His expensive Washington restaurant, Signatures, where he treated lawmakers and their staffs lavishly, now gathers dust.

Perhaps 20 lawmakers may be investigated, along with staff members and possibly some executive-branch officials.

In the scurry for political cover, the prospect for new legal limits on lobbying appears larger than in years.

Michael McCarthy, a Vassar College philosophy professor who co-wrote "The Ethics of Lobbying," considers Abramoff "the tip of the iceberg" - merely an exaggerated example of "the systemic inequity built into the system."

Lawmakers have to raise thousands of dollars a day for re-election campaigns. Lobbyists in recent years have taken a growing role in fund-raising, so their original role - as necessary intermediaries between citizens and their lawmakers - can yield to abuses. The system has long engendered public cynicism, a sense that may be swelling.

Nearly 6 in 10 Americans see the Abramoff scandal as evidence of widespread corruption in Congress, a Washington Post-ABC News poll showed.

Today "people in many important ways feel the government is for sale," McCarthy said. Whether this translates to real change is less clear. "It's very hard to sustain public outrage about something that's as far off most people's radar screens as the Abramoff scandal," he added.

DeLay was a force in changing K Street. Until the last decade, lobbying firms tended to hire roughly equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats.

But with the arrival of Republican control of the White House and Congress, DeLay began pressuring lobbying firms to hire or promote more Republicans in what Democrats saw as a breathtakingly aggressive takeover that became known as the K Street Project. An estimated two in three corporate dollars now go to Republican-dominated lobbying firms.

DeLay's distractions already appear to have cost Republicans some effectiveness in the House, where the party's cohesiveness has suffered.

The K Street Project, too, is likely to lose some effectiveness, said Dennis Thompson, a government professor at Harvard University. "People will try to distance themselves," he said. Lobbyists' fund-raising role may slip, too, he thought: "I think they'll be more careful about that, or should be."

Thompson expects a toughening of the requirements on congressmen and their staffs to disclose gifts from lobbyists and, perhaps less likely, a slowing of the "revolving door" that brings former lawmakers and staff members into lobbying roles - "one of the deepest problems in this whole practice." Law now requires them to wait just a year before changing hats.

In all, Knott said, 273 former members of Congress or federal agency heads are lobbyists. This, Thompson said, "makes it all too cozy and too easy, even if you think, as I do, that lobbying is an important and respectable part of the process."


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