Abramoff's Evangelical Soldiers

Gambling might not rank as high as homosexuality or abortion on
the list of social evils monitored by Focus on the Family
founder James Dobson, but its growth has provided many occasions
for his jeremiads. The indictment of Indian casino lobbyist and
influential GOP activist Jack Abramoff was one such occasion. In
a January 6 press release issued three days after Abramoff's
indictment, Dobson declared, "If the nation's politicians don't
fix this national disaster, then the oceans of gambling money
with which Jack Abramoff tried to buy influence on Capitol Hill
will only be the beginning of the corruption we'll see." He
concluded with a denunciation of vice: "Gambling--all types of
gambling--is driven by greed and subsists on greed."

What Dobson neglected to mention--and has yet to discuss
publicly--is his own pivotal role in one of Abramoff's schemes.
In 2002 Dobson joined a coterie of Christian-right activists,
including Tony Perkins, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, to
spearhead Abramoff's campaigns against the establishment of
several Louisiana casinos that infringed on the turf of
Abramoff's tribal clients.

Dobson and his allies recorded messages for phone banking,
lobbied high-level Bush Administration officials and took to the
airwaves. Whether they knew it or not, these Christian soldiers'
crusade to protect families in the "Sportsmen's Paradise" from
he side effects of chronic slot-pulling and dice-rolling was
funded by the gambling industry and planned by the lobbyist
known even to his friends as "Casino Jack."

The only Christian-right activist confirmed to be completely
aware of Abramoff's rip-off was Ralph Reed. He and Abramoff have
a long and storied history together. When Abramoff chaired the
College Republican National Committee in the early 1980s, Reed
served as the organization's executive director. They reunited
in 1989, when Abramoff helped Reed organize the remains of Pat
Robertson's failed 1988 presidential bid into the Christian
Coalition. In 1997, with the Christian Coalition under IRS
investigation and Reed facing accusations of cronyism from the
group's chief financial officer, he left to start his own
consulting firm, Century Strategies. Reed contacted Abramoff
right away. "I need to start humping in corporate accounts,"
Reed told him in 1998. "I'm counting on you to help me with some
contacts."

Though Abramoff apparently was not fond of Reed, he viewed him
as useful. "I know you (we!) hate him [Reed], but it does give
us good cover and patter to have him doing stuff," he wrote in a
February 14, 2002, e-mail to his business partner, Michael
Scanlon. "Let's give him a list of things we want...and give him
some chump change to get it done." Reed thus became Abramoff and
Scanlon's liaison to the Christian right, enlisting his
evangelical allies into a web of shadowy casino hustles for
"chump change."

Reed's first sleight of hand was enticing Perkins, Falwell and
Robertson to try to block a 2001 bill in the Louisiana
legislature loosening restrictions on riverboat casinos, which
would have posed a competitive threat to Abramoff's clients, the
Coushattas. At the time, Perkins was a right-wing State
Representative hailed by Reed as the legislature's
"anti-gambling leader."

As Perkins lobbied his colleagues against the riverboat bill, he
pushed Reed to pour money into an aggressive phone-banking
campaign to rally conservative Christian voters.

With a steady supply of gambling industry cash, Abramoff dumped
a phone-bank budget of more than $60,000 into Reed's war chest
for PR efforts against his clients' rivals, the Jena Choctaws
(Reed had asked for $150,000)--supplementing the $10,000 in
tribal gambling money he directed to Reed's 2001 campaign for
chair of the Georgia GOP and the nearly $4 million he ultimately
funneled into Reed's personal account. Reed then recruited
Falwell to record a phone message against the bill. He also
solicited the help of his former boss at the Christian Coalition,
Pat Robertson, thanking him for his "leadership for our values."
Like the answering of a prayer, tens of thousands of Louisiana
Republicans suddenly were bombarded with the voice of God
against vice, played by Robertson and Falwell.

On March 22, 2001, the bill was resoundingly defeated in the
legislature. "You are the greatest!!!" an ecstatic Abramoff
wrote to Reed.

Miracle accomplished, Abramoff tapped Reed's services again in
January 2002, when his clients learned that then-Louisiana
Governor Mike Foster had secretly approved a casino site for the
Jena Choctaws. Following a battle plan devised by Scanlon (who
inexplicably signed a memo outlining the plan, Mike "The Sausage
King" Scanlon), Reed re-enlisted his evangelical allies to rev
up grassroots pressure on Bush Interior Secretary Gail Norton,
who had the final say on the Jena deal.

Reed first prompted Dobson to attack the Jenas' lobbyist,
Washington super-lawyer, former RNC chair and current
Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour, during a Focus on the Family
broadcast. (In his 2002 campaign for governor, Barbour described
himself as "a five-point Calvinist" on American Family Radio.)

"Let me know when Dobson hits him," Abramoff wrote to Reed on
February 6, 2002. "I want to savor it." That same day, he
e-mailed Scanlon, "He [Dobson] is going to hit Haley by name! He
is going to encourage people to call Norton and the WH [White
House]. This is going to get fun."

Abramoff transferred more cash to Reed to blast Dobson's tirade
against the Jena casino across Louisiana airwaves. Abramoff was
confident his Bush Administration contacts would make sure all
the right people heard Dobson's hit. "Dobson goes up on the
radio next week!" he told Scanlon on February 20. "We'll play it
in WH [the White House] and Interior." Abramoff's gamble paid
off when word of the ad filtered through the tension-filled
halls of the Interior Department. "[White House liaison] Doug
[Domenech] came to me and said, 'Dobson's going to shut down our
phone system,'" an unnamed former Interior official recounted to
the Washington Post. " 'He's going to go on the air and tell
everyone who listens to Focus on the Family to call Interior to
oppose the Jena compact.'"

But Abramoff's fun didn't stop there. Reed urged a Who's Who of
the Christian right to lobby Norton against the Jena compact
with a stream of breathless letters. On February 19 Perkins
warned Norton that gambling leads to "crime, divorce, child
abuse." American Family Association chair Don Wildmon sent a
lengthy missive to Norton filled with statistics on gambling's
adverse social impact. The Eagle Forum's Phyllis Schlafly sent
another. American Values president Gary Bauer declared in a
letter to Norton that the compact ran "contrary to President
Bush's pro-family vision." Focus on the Family vice president
Tom Minnery wrote Norton and White House Chief of Staff Andy
Card to demand they stop the deal. Dobson capped the mail blitz
with his own missive against gambling expansion.

Despite the best efforts of Abramoff and the Christian soldiers
Reed recruited, in December Norton approved the Jena compact.
Soon after, Louisiana's new governor, Kathleen Blanco, reversed
the deal on the basis of her opposition to casino growth.
Abramoff's goal was achieved, but all his work was for naught.
And his skulduggery was beginning to catch up with him. "I hate
all the shit I'm into," he moaned to Scanlon in a February 2003
e-mail. "I need to be on the Caribbean with you!"

However, Abramoff's campaign against the Jena compact was a
blessing for most of its Christian-right players. Perkins got to
prove his mettle in a national campaign, prompting his
appointment the following year by Dobson to president of the
Family Research Council, the Washington-based lobbying
powerhouse. Dobson, for his part, got to demonstrate his
grassroots muscle to the Bush White House, raising his
visibility to Karl Rove & Co. and helping him increase his
influence over its social agenda as the presidential election
approached.

Among Abramoff's evangelical surrogates, only Reed emerged from
their relationship with visible baggage. But this was not
apparent at the time. Now, as a result of extensive media
coverage of his involvement with Abramoff, his campaign for
lieutenant governor of Georgia, intended as a stepping stone to
higher office, is lagging. He has gone from denying early in his
campaign that he accepted gambling money to claiming most
recently that Abramoff lied to him about the source of his fees.
To generate a strong turnout for his January 21 appearance at a
Georgia Christian Coalition meeting, Reed was reduced to
enticing his dwindling band of "supporters" with cash and free
hotel rooms.

It is still unknown whether Dobson and his allies knew that Reed
was working for Abramoff during the anti-Jena campaign. Abramoff
claimed in a February 2002 e-mail to his employee Todd Boulanger
that he was "working FOR and WITH them [emphasis in original],"
referring to Christian-right activists. Dobson, Perkins,
Robertson and Falwell have remained silent. Whether or not
evidence surfaces to support the claim Abramoff made in his
e-mail, it is undeniable he was deeply embedded in the Christian
right's infrastructure.

In July 2002, at the height of the anti-Jena campaign, Bauer and
Rabbi Daniel Lapin, a fixture at Christian-right events, founded
the American Alliance of Christians and Jews. On the group's
board were Dobson, Robertson, Falwell and one Jack Abramoff.
Lapin's organization, Toward Tradition, which administered the
AACJ, received $25,000 from one of Abramoff's gambling industry
clients in 2000; took $75,000 from Abramoff and his clients; and
then, upon Abramoff's written instructions, hired the wife of
Tony Rudy to the tune of $5,000 a month. Rudy, who was Tom
DeLay's deputy chief of staff at the time, later a lobbyist, has
been named in Abramoff's guilty plea.

While Abramoff cooperates with federal prosecutors, his former
Christian-right surrogates have abstained from coming clean
about their relationship with him. Acknowledging willing
collusion with a disgraced casino lobbyist would be suicidal
among their followers. But there are also risks in casting
themselves as useful idiots in Abramoff's game. Such a tactic
would reveal the "pro-family" movement as just another gear in a
sordid Republican political operation. What did Dobson know
and when did he know it? As the wheels of justice grind on,
those who claim to speak with the authority of Scripture may
soon find themselves under oath.




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