Feds Edging Ever Closer To Blunt Family Money Operation

News reports over the long weekend that describe the trajectory of the federal investigation into uberlobbyist Jack Abramoff make clear that its only a matter of time before their efforts lead them straight to the door of Majority Leader Roy Blunt (R-K Street.).

The Washington Post reports that federal investigators are particularly interested in the relationship between Abramoff, DeLay and Alexander Strategies Group (ASG), a firm run by former DeLay staffers that employed DeLay's wife, Christine.

Investigators are also gathering information about Abramoff's
hiring of several congressional wives, sources said, as well as his
referral of clients to Alexander Strategy Group, a lobbying and
consulting firm run by former senior aides to DeLay. Financial
disclosure forms show that the firm employed DeLay's wife, Christine,
from 1998 to 2002.

Former Abramoff lobbying
associates have said that Abramoff shared some of his high-paying
clients with the group, including Malaysian interests, the Mississippi
Choctaw Indian tribe and online gambling firms. Federal investigators
have questioned some former Abramoff associates about whether those
referrals were related to Christine DeLay's employment there, sources
said.

Blunt accepted direct contributions from Abramoff's Marianas Island-based clients, and the Mississippi Band of Choctaw's were major funders of DeLay's ARMPAC-Convention, the source of the $150,000 contribution to Blunt's ROYB Fund in 2000. all of which has been previously reported by Fired Up!.

Majority Leader Roy Blunt (R-K Street) was the beneficiary of
thousands in contributions from Abramoff's Marianas Island based
clients. Abramoff's work for the Islands appears to be of particular
interest to prosecutors.

And Blunt's work on behalf of Abramoff's tribal clients has been well documented. Though the contributions were never formally disclosed, according to news reports at the time,
the Mississippi Band of Choctaw, an Abramoff tribal client, was a major
benefactor of the activities of the Blunt-DeLay team at the 2000
Convention.

Fired Up! readers will also recall that Blunt used his PAC, the ROYB Fund, to funnel payments from DeLay's ARMPAC to ASG. It appears that the scheme the feds are now investigating between Abramoff and DeLay was refined by Blunt and DeLay several month earlier using their two PACs.

Here's how I described the scheme back in early September:

In 1999 and 2000, when Ellis ran both DeLay's ARMPAC and Blunt's ROYB Fund, ARMPAC made contributions to Blunt's committee totalling $150,000.
In return, Blunt made a series of payments to the Alexander Strategy
Group (ASG), a firm controlled by former DeLay staffers, that also
happened to employ DeLay's wife at the time. Over the course of a
two-year period, Blunt's payments to ASG totalled $150,000. For a
detailed schedule of the payments, click here.

And here's The New Republic's take on the payments:

PACs sometimes transfer funds to one another, but they do so
most often in order to spread the credit around for political
contributions. (A gives to B to give to C, who is then grateful to B.)
RoyB made its own share of political contributions in 2000--almost all
of them to Missouri Republican organizations that could pass the money
on to Blunt's son Matt, who was running for secretary of state. But
RoyB didn't spend all its money in this way. In fact, over the course
of the year, it recorded expenditures of just over $150,000 to ASG and
other DeLay operations. That amount looks suspiciously similar to the
$150,000 RoyB took in from DeLay's armpac during this same period.

In 2000, RoyB ran up a $145,000 bill with ASG for what it described
as either "consulting" or "strategy and fundraising," and it paid out
another $5,281 to ASG's usfn and Ellis for rent and utilities. In addition, right after the first $50,000 arrived from
armpac, RoyB donated $10,000 to DeLay's Foundation for
Kids, a Texas-based charity that DeLay uses for p.r. and to justify
golfing events. Could ASG have been worth $145,000 in "strategy and
fundraising" to RoyB's PAC? Well, RoyB actually raised only $99,837 in
2000. Spending $145,000 to raise less than $100,000 doesn't make a lot
of sense. And Blunt did not need strategic advice from Ellis and other
Washingtonians to know how to spend his money in Missouri. In other
words, the $145,000, along with the $10,000, looks like a subsidy to
ASG and to DeLay himself that the Houston representative was trying to
hide by transferring the money from one nonfederal PAC to another.

Texas prosecutors have already subpoenaed the records related to the Blunt-DeLay transactions from 2000. Let's hope the feds don't mess around too long and miss the statute of limitations for prosecuting Blunt.