WASHINGTON — A longtime former aide to Mississippi Sen. Thad Cochran has been charged in the Jack Abramoff corruption scandal, accused of accepting gifts and granting favors for the imprisoned former lobbyist. Court documents filed Thursday say Ann Copland took thousands of dollars worth of event tickets and meals out in Washington from Abramoff and associates at his firm. Prosecutors say the gifts were in exchange for her favors benefiting one of their top clients, the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians.

Charges against Copland were outlined in a legal document called a criminal information, which only can be filed with the defendant’s consent and typically signals a plea deal. The document says Copland understood that Senate rules prohibit staffers from soliciting gifts from lobbyists, but still secretly did so.
“It was a purpose of the conspiracy for defendant Copland to be unjustly enriched by her receipt of things of value, and to conceal these gifts from the U.S. Senate and the people of the United States,” the document said. Copland worked for Cochran for 29 years, then abruptly left his office last spring after Abramoff prosecutors had netted a dozen convictions in the scandal.Cochran’s office refused to comment on the case Friday.

Campaign finance records show that Abramoff, his associates and his clients gave Cochran at least $82,500 in campaign donations during the years in question, from 2001 to 2004. But there is no indication from the documents that Cochran, a Republican, knew of Copland’s behavior or is being investigated.
E-mails revealed in court documents show Abramoff’s firm went out of its way to keep Copland happy because, as lobbyist Todd Boulanger once wrote to his boss, “she’s more valuable to us than a rank-and-file house member.” The e-mail was revealed in a plea agreement Boulanger struck recently .
Prosecutors included a copy of an e-mail that Copland sent to one of Abramoff’s deputies, Kevin Ring, in March 2002, detailing a list of tickets she wanted and how many for each event. She asked to see Paul McCartney, an ice skating event, ‘NSync, Green Day and a hockey game. She also asked for two to six tickets to see the circus, but only if they were floor seats.

Ring, currently awaiting trial on charges of conspiring to corrupt government officials, forwarded the note to Abramoff saying, “Wow … We already told her she was fine on McCartney, ice skating, and Green Day _ although we need to let her know how many tix she can have for each. Also, please review the other requests and let me know what we can do there.” Abramoff wrote, “She’ll get everything she wants.”
Other court documents show that Copland was not shy to complain when she didn’t like her accommodations, like when she got the lobbyists’ luxury suite for a Baltimore Orioles game. “Ackkk. Only beer and no Hebrew National hot dogs,” she complained in an e-mail to Boulanger.
Copland sounded angry in another e-mail from the firm’s box suite at a the ice-skating event after no food had arrived for her party of 14 people. “I’m freaking out here,” she wrote, and Boulanger replied that she would be reimbursed for any food she had to buy. The documents say Copland “on repeated occasions” provided official actions benefiting Abramoff’s firm, particularly the Mississippi Choctaws.

For example, when Copland asked a lobbyist for the suite at the Orioles game in 2003, he responded in part by asking whether a Choctaw provision the firm no longer wanted had been removed from an appropriations bill. Copland assured him it had, and the final version of the bill contained an explicit statement that the provision “is no longer necessary.”

By Susan Crabtree
Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), the most vocal critic of pork barrel spending in the House, is trying to shake the House ethics committee into action on the link between earmarks and campaign contributors.

Flake has seized on the public corruption investigation of PMA Group, a once-powerful lobbying force that has disintegrated in the wake of an FBI investigation into fraudulent campaign donations to numerous members of Congress.

In the past 24 hours, Flake has highlighted earmarks in the omnibus appropriations bill for PMA clients, written a scathing op-ed to The New York Times about Congress’s pay-to-play practices and offered a privileged resolution on the House floor that would force the House ethics panel to scrutinize the connection between earmarks and campaign cash and report back to the full body in two months.

“The appearance does not reflect well on the dignity of the House,” Flake said. “These earmarks are essentially for no-bid contracts directed to for-profit entities.”

The privileged resolution, which must be voted on within 48 hours of its introduction, is Flake’s boldest anti-earmark move yet. Despite several reforms to the earmarking process in the last few years, most members on both sides of the aisle have been reluctant to crack down on the general practice of securing specific appropriations for pet projects, so Flake’s resolution has little chance of passing. Most likely, the House will overwhelmingly vote to table it.

Still, the resolution could jog a new ethics entity created last year into reviewing the donations from PMA, a firm with close ties to Reps. John Murtha (D-Pa.) and Pete Visclosky (D-Ind.), two senior members of the appropriations panel. Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) pushed controversial legislation through the House last year creating the Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE) to provide an extra layer of scrutiny of lawmakers’ activities.

The OCE’s board is made up of several former House members, the first time the House has relinquished some of its power to police itself to a more independent-minded body. The new office is supposed to respond to questionable activities raised in complaints, the media and by members of Congress and staff and provide recommendations for further action to the ethics committee.

The FBI raided PMA’s offices in November as part of a Justice Department investigation into fraudulent donations from “strawmen,” contributions from people who either do not exist or whose names were being used to make the donation without their permission. PMA has distributed millions to several lawmakers over the past 10 years.

By: Dick Morris & Eileen McGann
 News broke last week that Rahm Emanuel, now White House chief of staff, lived rent-free for years in the home of Rep. Rosa De Lauro, D-Conn. — and failed to disclose the gift, as congressional ethics rules mandate. But this is only the tip of Emanuel’s previously undisclosed ethics problems.  One issue is the work Emanuel tossed the way of De Lauro’s husband. But the bigger one goes back to Emanuel’s days on the board of now-bankrupt mortgage giant Freddie Mac.  Emanuel is a multimillionaire, but lived for the last five years for free in the tony Capitol Hill townhouse owned by De Lauro and her husband, Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg. During that time, he also served as chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee — which gave Greenberg huge polling contracts. It paid Greenberg’s firm $239,996 in 2006 and $317,775 in 2008. (Emanuel’s own campaign committee has also paid Greenberg more than $50,000 since 2004.)

To be fair, Greenberg had polling contracts with the DCCC before — but each new election cycle brings its own set of consultants. And Emanuel was certainly generous with his roommate. Emanuel never declared the substantial gift of free rent on any of his financial-disclosure forms. He and De Lauro claim that it was just allowable “hospitality” between colleagues. Hospitality — for five years?  Some experts suggest that it was also taxable income: Over five years, the free rent could easily add up to more than $100,000. Nor is this all that seems to have been missed in the Obama team’s vetting process. Consider: Emanuel served on the Freddie Mac board of directors during the time that the government-backed lender lied about its earnings, a leading contributor to the current economic meltdown. The Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight Agency later singled out the Freddie Mac board as contributing to the fraud in 2000 and 2001 for “failing in its duty to follow up on matters brought to its attention.” In other words, board members ignored the red flags waving in their faces.

The SEC later fined Freddie $50 million for its deliberate fraud in 2000, 2001 and 2002.  Meanwhile, Emanuel was paid more than $260,000 for his Freddie “service.” Plus, after he resigned from the board to run for Congress in 2002, the troubled agency’s PAC gave his campaign $25,000 — its largest single gift to a House candidate.  That’s what friends are for, isn’t it? Now Rahm Emanuel is in the White House helping President Obama dig out of the mess that Freddie Mac helped start. The president’s chief of staff isn’t subject to Senate confirmation, but his ethics still matter. Is this the change that we can depend on?

I suppose what will finally be passed will be a little of both. What I am most fearful of is the corruption that will “follow the money” through the system. Does the fed ever administrate a massive spending bill without 30-40% waste? Historically, no they do not. Hands are held out looking for favors; old cronies “call in markers”. Relatives get huge contracts, ghost businesses are quickly established to divert the money flows, etc, etc…

I also hope this works better than history indicates. This kind of stimulus by FDR didn’t get us out of the Great Depression, and more recently this same kind of program kept Japan in recession for nearly 10 years. As a family, you cannot spend yourself out of debt. A nation can’t do that either. Business growth, stimulated by a consumer or a business need creates a healthy economy. Governments do not always induce healthy economies. Private enterprise is what historically creates lasting jobs. Build a better mousetrap, show a business how to be more efficient, introduce new technologies – that is what makes businesses grow. Bridges, and roads may indeed need to be repaired – BUT that is not the solution. It is a temporary solution/fix to a longer term problem. Actually, recessions are foregone conclusions, just as economic growth is. The cycles are inevitable. We only hope our friends in DC enable a quick recovery, and do not prolong the slowing economic cycle.

The cost of Boston’s “Big Dig” has ballooned to over $15 billion. In September 1983, this 7.5 mile highway project was originally proposed with a completion date of 1995 and for a cost of $2.2 billion. In 1980, a Special Commission Concerning State and County Buildings (know as the “Ward Commission”) filed a final report on corruption in the award of state and county construction projects in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and found that: 1) Corruption was a way of life in Massachusetts; 2) Sub-standard construction was the norm; and 3) Political influence, not professional performance, was the prime criterion for doing business in the Commonwealth. While some of the Ward Commission’s recommendations were enacted into law, many important recommendations, especially the elimination of the filed sub-bid system, were not enacted. The failure of Massachusetts governmental officials to implement the recommendations of the Ward Commission and their promotion of a culture of malfeasance and political corruption has resulted in the mostly costly and sub-standard public works project in the history of the United States!

“Watergate” is a general term used to describe a complex web of political scandals between 1972 and 1974. The word refers to the Watergate Hotel in Washington D.C. In addition to the hotel, the Watergate complex houses many business offices. It was here that the office of the Democratic National Committee was burgled on June 17th, 1972. The burglary and subsequent cover-up eventually led to moves to impeach President Richard Nixon. Nixon resigned the presidency on 8 August 1974.
“Watergate” is now an all-encompassing term used to refer to:
- political burglary
- bribery
- extortion
- phonetapping
- conspiracy
- obstruction of justice
- destruction of evidence
- tax fraud
- illegal use of government agencies such as the CIA and the FBI
- illegal campaign contributions
- use of public money for private purposes.
Most of all, “Watergate” is synonymous with abuse of power.

Whiskey Ring was a group of distillers and public officials who defrauded the federal government of liquor taxes. Soon after the Civil War these taxes were raised very high, in some cases to eight times the price of the liquor. Large distillers, chiefly in St. Louis, Milwaukee, and Chicago, bribed government officials in order to retain the tax proceeds. The Whiskey Ring was a public scandal, but it was considered impregnable because of its strong political connections. U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Benjamin H. Bristow resolved to break the conspiracy. To avoid warning the suspects, he assigned secret investigators from outside the Treasury Dept. to collect evidence. Striking suddenly in May, 1875, he arrested the persons and seized the distilleries involved. Over $3 million in taxes was recovered, and of 238 persons indicted 110 were convicted. Although President Grant’s secretary, Orville E. Babcock, was acquitted through the personal intervention of the President, many persons believed that the Whiskey Ring was part of a plot to finance the Republican party by fraud.

In the early part of the 20th century large oil reserves were discovered at Elk Hills, California and Teapot Dome, Wyoming. In 1912 President William Taft decided that this government owned land and its oil reserves should be set aside for the use of the United States Navy.

On 4th June, 1920, Congress passed a bill that stated that the Secretary of the Navy would have the power “to conserve, develop, use and operate the same in his discretion, directly or by contract, lease, or otherwise, and to use, store, exchange, or sell the oil and gas products thereof, and those from all royalty oil from lands in the naval reserves, for the benefit of the United States.”

In March 1921 President Warren Harding appointed Albert Fall as Secretary of the Interior. Soon afterwards he persuaded Edwin Denby, the Secretary of the Navy, that he should take over responsibility for the Naval Reserves at Elk Hills and Teapot Dome. Later that year Fall decided that two of his friends, Harry F. Sinclair (Mammoth Oil Corporation) and Edward L. Doheny (Pan-American Petroleum and Transport Company), should be allowed to lease part of these Naval Reserves.

Attempts were made to keep this deal secret but rumours began to circulate when it became known that Albert Fall was spending large sums of money. On 14th April, 1922, the Wall Street Journal reported that Fall had leased Teapot Dome to Harry F. Sinclair. President Warren Harding defended Fall by claiming that “the policy which has been adopted by the Secretary of the Navy and the Secretary of the Interior in dealing with these matters was submitted to me prior to the adoption thereof, and the policy decided upon and the subsequent acts have at all times had my entire approval.”

Robert La Follette and John B. Kendrick called for a Senate investigation into Albert Fall and the Naval Reserves. President Warren Harding died suddenly on 2nd August, 1923 and was replaced by his vice-president, Calvin Coolidge.

Hearings on the Teapot Dome oil lease began on October 15, 1923 before the Senate Committee on Public Lands and Surveys. Senator Thomas J. Walsh, a Democrat from Montana, led the committee’s investigation. Over the next few months, dozens of witnesses testified before the committee. On January 24, 1924, Edward Doheny admitted that he had lent Fall $100,000.

Seven days later the Senate passed a resolution stating that the leases to the Mammoth Oil Company and the Pan American Petroleum Company “were executed under circumstances indicating fraud and corruption”. Albert Fall and Edwin Denby were now both forced to resign from office.

On 17th October, 1927, Harry F. Sinclair appeared on trial charged with conspiracy to defraud the United States. The trial ended prematurely two weeks later when the government presented evidence that Sinclair had hired a detective agency to shadow the jury. The judge declared a mistrial. Sinclair was tried for criminal contempt of court. Found guilty and he was sentenced to six months in prison.

Albert Fall was now charged accepting a bribe from Doheny. On October 7, 1928 the trial began in the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia. Even though the trial concerned Fall accepting money from Doheny, the judge allowed M. T. Everhart’s testimony showing the financial relationship between Sinclair and Fall. That testimony was used to show that Fall had lied to the Senate committee when he declared that he had not accepted any money from Sinclair. Fall was found guilty and sentenced to one year in prison and a $100,000 fine.

Former Gregg staffer caught in lobbying probe
The Associated Press – Wed., Feb. 4, 2009

WASHINGTON – A former congressional aide to Commerce Secretary-nominee Judd Gregg has been caught up in a long-running investigation into a Capitol Hill lobbying scandal.

A person familiar with the case confirmed Wednesday that “Staffer F” in court documents is Kevin Koonce, who worked as legislative director in Gregg’s Senate office from 2002-04. The person spoke on condition of anonymity because the case is still under investigation.

Staffer F was cited in a guilty plea last week by Todd Boulanger, a former deputy to disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff. In federal court, Boulanger admitted he plied the staffer with front-row tickets to a hockey game, meals and drinks and other tickets to a baseball game, and in exchange received favors in spending legislation.
The total value of the gifts Staffer F took from Boulanger exceeded $10,000, court papers said.
The biographical details about Staffer F contained in court documents — his job title at the time in the Senate office — correspond to Koonce’s.

Koonce has not been charged with any crime. He now works at a private firm, Sorini Samet & Associates LLP.
After several attempts by The Associated Press to reach him, Koonce replied to an e-mail Wednesday, saying only that he was on personal leave.

A spokesman for President Barack Obama, who on Tuesday appointed Sen. Gregg, R-N.H., to serve as Commerce secretary, declined to comment. Gregg’s spokeswoman, Andrea Wuebker, had no immediate comment.

Abramoff, once a top GOP lobbyist, is now in prison and has cooperated with the Justice Department to help convict more than a dozen people, including former Rep. Bob Ney, R-Ohio, former Deputy Interior Secretary J. Steven Griles, and a number of former lobbyists and Capitol Hill aides.

Boulanger was the most recent ex-lobbyist to fall, pleading guilty Friday to lavishing a number of congressional staffers with gifts similar to those he gave Staffer F, including an all-expense-paid trip to the World Series.

As part of the plea documents, prosecutors said Staffer F tried to help insert spending measures and add other amendments to legislation for Boulanger’s clients. Later, the staffer asked Boulanger if he could “score some hockey tickets,” and Boulanger got him front-row seats.

Boulanger later got the staffer box tickets to see the Baltimore Orioles, but Staffer F wanted more.

“Could you make sure there’s beer this time,” he wrote in an e-mail. I “mean, the red sox, crab cakes, and fillet mignon’s were nice but … haha.”

Later, Boulanger sent an e-mail to Abramoff expressing confidence that the senator for whom the staffer worked would give them a favor. “Easy money,” Boulanger wrote, adding that the aide “practically lives in our various suites. We are shady.”

According to his biography on the Web site of Sorini Samet & Associates, Koonce was a negotiator for the U.S. trade representative prior to working for Gregg. Koonce also worked for six years as a legislative assistant to former Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., in the 1990s. Koonce graduated from Denison University and received a law degree from Catholic University.