The Plot Thickens

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It was already known that investigators had been inquiring into Abramoff's dealings with DeLay, who has had to give up his House majority leader post as he fights unrelated conspiracy and money-laundering charges in Texas. They have looked into an expensive 2000 junket that Abramoff arranged for DeLay that included a golf outing at Scotland's famed St. Andrews course. But over the past decade, Abramoff and Scanlon spread money and favors across Capitol Hill. The list of lawmakers who weighed in on the partners' side on one project--blocking the planned casino of a tribal client's rival--totaled at least 33, and together the 33 received $830,000 in contributions from Abramoff clients, according to a recent Associated Press study. One of those lawmakers was Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid, who received more than $66,000 in donations from Abramoff clients from 2001 to 2004. Reid spokesman Jim Manley says Reid's March 5, 2002, letter to Interior Secretary Gale Norton opposing the casino was "consistent with his opposition to attempts to expand Indian gaming" and had "absolutely nothing" to do with a $5,000 donation the following day from the Louisiana Coushattas, the Abramoff client that had opposed the rival casino.

Lawmakers and their staffs took golfing trips that Abramoff arranged--and sometimes paid for--to Scotland and the Northern Mariana Islands. Abramoff's now defunct restaurant Signatures was host to more than 60 fund raisers for members of Congress and often neglected to send a bill. At the lobbyist's delicatessen Stacks, Abramoff even named a sandwich after Congressman Eric Cantor at a $500-a-plate fund raiser in January 2003. (Cantor later asked the deli to switch his namesake sandwich from tuna to roast beef on challah, "a deli special that exudes Jewish power," wrote the Jewish newspaper the Forward.)

Does all that amount to influence peddling, or is it merely the way Washington works? Bribery is a difficult charge to prove. But the investigators' job of determining whether they have a case has been helped by the fact that Abramoff did almost all his most important communicating by e-mail--even with the assistants who sat outside his office, associates say. Also, authorities have collected the daily "wrap-ups" that Abramoff required his assistants to provide, including notations of nearly every phone call and appointment, every favor asked and every payment delivered. Scanlon's testimony, however, could be crucial to making any quid pro quo link that may exist between what he and Abramoff gave lawmakers and what the two got from them.