From Holden:
Today Little Scottie claimed that his boss doesn’t really know Jack Abramoff, although he conceded that it’s possible that the two met at the three White House Hanukkah receptions Abramoff attended.
Back in May 2005 another White House mouthpiece, Erin Healy, said “They may have met on occasion, but the president does not know him.”
That hardly seems credible to me.
In President Bush’s first 10 months, GOP fundraiser Jack Abramoff and his lobbying team logged nearly 200 contacts with the new administration as they pressed for friendly hires at federal agencies and sought to keep the Northern Mariana Islands exempt from the minimum wage and other laws, records show.
The meetings between Abramoff’s lobbying team and the administration ranged from Attorney General John Ashcroft to policy advisers in Vice President Dick Cheney’s office, according to his lobbying firm billing records.
[snip]
The records from Abramoff’s firm, obtained by The Associated Press from the Marianas under an open records request, chronicle Abramoff’s careful cultivation of relations with Bush’s political team as far back as 1997.
In that year, Abramoff charged the Marianas for getting then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush to write a letter expressing support for the Pacific territory’s school choice proposal, his billing records show.
“I hope you will keep my office informed on the progress of this initiative,” Bush wrote in a July 18, 1997, letter praising the islands’ school plan and copying in an Abramoff deputy.
White House spokeswoman Erin Healy said Thursday that Bush didn’t consider Abramoff a friend. “They may have met on occasion, but the president does not know him,” she said.
As for the number of Abramoff lobbying team contacts with Bush officials documented in the billing records, Healy said: “We do not know how he defines ‘contacts.'”
[snip]
The documents show his team also had extensive access to Bush administration officials, meeting with Cheney policy advisers Ron Christie and Stephen Ruhlen, Ashcroft at the Justice Department, White House intergovernmental affairs chief Ruben Barrales, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick, Deputy Interior Secretary Steven Griles and others.
Most of the contacts were handled by Abramoff’s subordinates, who then reported back to him on the meetings. Abramoff met several times personally with top Interior officials, whose Office of Insular Affairs oversees the Mariana Islands and other U.S. territories.
In all, the records show at least 195 contacts between Abramoff’s Marianas lobbying team and the Bush administration from February through November 2001.
At least two people who worked on Abramoff’s team at Preston Gates wound up with Bush administration jobs: Patrick Pizzella, named an assistant secretary of labor by Bush; and David Safavian, chosen by Bush to oversee federal procurement policy in the Office of Management and Budget.