CONGRESS

When Tom Met Jack

Inside the cozy relationship between Tom DeLay and D.C.'s most notorious lobbyist

By Karen Tumulty

It was Congress's holiday for Memorial Day 2000, and majority whip Tom DeLay's staff wanted the boss and two top aides to have the finest of everything on their weeklong trip to Britain. So DeLay's congressional office turned to someone they trusted far more than any travel agent or concierge: lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

Previous trips had taken DeLay and members of his staff all over the world. Two sources who worked with Abramoff at the time say the idea for the expensive London jaunt originated with DeLay aides as an additional stop on a golf outing to Scotland that Abramoff had proposed.

"Jack didn't need this to go awry," recalls a lobbyist who then worked with Abramoff and who notes that the trip came at a critical moment. Congress was considering legislation (which died a month after the trip) that might have shut down Internet gambling—and jeopardized the livelihoods of some of Abramoff's biggest clients. Two of them—a Choctaw Indian tribe and the Internet gambling company eLottery Inc.—each wrote a check for $25,000 on May 25, 2000, the day DeLay departed, to the sponsor of the trip, the National Center for Public Policy Research, a conservative nonprofit foundation on whose board Abramoff sat. Those checks would cover most of the cost of the $70,000 junket. Sponsorship by the center made the trip allowable under House ethics rules, which prohibit lobbyists from paying for congressional travel.

Yet the flurry of demands by DeLay's staff to Abramoff's lobbying operation call into question whether DeLay's office really believed the trip was, in fact, "sponsored, organized and paid for by the National Center for Public Policy Research," as DeLay spokesman Dan Allen maintained when the Washington Post first reported the indirect financing arrangement in March. What's more, if the idea for and details of the London leg originated with DeLay's office, that raises questions about possible violations of a House rule governing gifts and travel.

The center insists the trip would have gone forward even without the contributions from Abramoff's lobbying clients and that there was nothing untoward about a board member—Abramoff, in this case—helping to arrange a center-sponsored trip. "The center believed then and the center believes now the trip was entirely appropriate, as I'm sure does Tom DeLay," says a source close to the center, which would not comment on the record.

Perhaps, but DeLay's travel arrangements may be drawing the interest of the Justice Department. A source tells Time that at least one former Abramoff assistant who was involved in setting up the trip to England and Scotland is scheduled to be deposed by the FBI.

All this attention on Abramoff—whom DeLay once called "one of my closest and dearest friends"—is just about the last thing the Texas Congressman, who is now the House majority leader, needs at this moment. DeLay's trip to Britain is one of three overseas jaunts that questions have been raised about. At a moment when House Republicans thought they would be celebrating the 10-year anniversary of their triumphant return to power on vows to clean up the place, they find themselves instead nearly immobilized by the ethics controversy surrounding DeLay. —from TIME, April 25, 2005

Questions

1. Who paid for DeLay's 2000 trip to Great Britain, and why have questions been raised about it?

2. What does the writer mean when she states that DeLay's 2000 trip to Great Britain came at a "critical moment"?