When Tom Met Jack

By KAREN TUMULTY

It was Congress's holiday for Memorial Day 2000, and majority whip Tom DeLay's staff thought the boss and two top aides deserved a respite from the arduous hours they had been putting in doing the people's business. They wanted to make sure DeLay's little delegation had the finest of everything on its weeklong trip to Britain--from lodgings at the Four Seasons Hotel in London to dinners at the poshest restaurants with the most interesting people, right down to the best tickets for The Lion King--at the time, one of the hottest shows playing on the West End and one for which good seats usually meant a six-month wait. So DeLay's congressional office turned to someone they trusted far more than any travel agent or concierge: lobbyist Jack Abramoff. "He ran all the trips," recalls a former top DeLay aide. "You ask where the itineraries came from, who made all the travel arrangements--it all came out of Jack's shop."

Previous trips had taken DeLay and members of his staff all over the world, but none had been planned quite as meticulously as this one. Three sources who worked with Abramoff at the time say the majority whip's office ran one of Abramoff's assistants ragged with its constantly changing requests. Indeed, say two of those sources, the whole idea for the expensive London jaunt originated with DeLay aides as an additional stop on a golf outing that Abramoff had proposed to Scotland's famous St. Andrews course.

Abramoff delivered on virtually everything DeLay's staff requested. "Jack didn't need this to go awry," recalls a lobbyist who then worked with Abramoff at the Preston Gates Ellis & Rouvelas Meeds law firm 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 last month. 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 rule allows members to accept gifts, under limited circumstances, but not to solicit them. Allen told TIME he would not comment on any dealings between DeLay's staff and Abramoff unless TIME revealed its sources or provided documentary evidence.

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. DeLay's office maintains the Congressman did important work on the trip, the highlight of which was a meeting with conservative icon Margaret Thatcher. The long-retired British Prime Minister regaled DeLay with an account of her efforts to end the cold war more than a decade earlier. As for Abramoff, a spokesman contends he is "being singled out for actions that are commonplace in Washington and are totally proper."

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 this week by the FBI, whose Washington field office has assigned half a dozen agents to an investigation into the dealings of Abramoff and his business associate, former DeLay spokesman Michael Scanlon. The focus of the probe, says a senior FBI official supervising the investigation, is "allegations of any wrongdoing involving moneys that went into or left the Indian tribes." Also joining the task force are agents from the Interior Department and the Internal Revenue Service. In addition, two Senate committees are looking into various aspects of Abramoff's operation, including allegedly improper use of charities he established and persuaded his clients to fund.

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. Other reports have disclosed that his wife and daughter have been paid roughly $500,000 since 2001 by DeLay's political organization. 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. Though they have a full and ambitious legislative agenda, starting with President Bush's call for Social Security reform, "every meeting we have is now a meeting about Tom DeLay," complains a Republican aide. Many congressional offices have quietly shut down all travel.

It was easy for DeLay's allies to dismiss signs of erosion in his support early last week when they were largely confined to criticism by moderate Republican Congressman Chris Shays, often a voice of dissent within the ranks. But it was more difficult after 10 former Congressmen, all Republicans, signed a letter to House Speaker Dennis Hastert imploring him to reverse recent revisions in the House rules that were apparently designed to shield DeLay from being investigated by the ethics committee. What's more, conservative Tom Tancredo of Colorado, while professing his confidence in DeLay's innocence, told his hometown paper that it's "probably not the worst idea" for DeLay to step down as leader until he resolves the ethical controversies that are springing up around him.

The White House is publicly standing behind a leader whose legislative abilities Bush respects and needs for the fights ahead. Bush still calls DeLay a friend, although spokesman Scott McClellan pointedly noted last week that "there are different levels of friendship." The President's team is increasingly frustrated by the majority leader's inability to mount a defense more persuasive than blaming his problems on a liberal conspiracy. DeLay, says a senior Administration official, "is handling this like an idiot."

Having seen how a succession of Democratic leaders fell a decade ago, DeLay should know better than anyone how it tends to happen. Again and again, it was not big violations of the law or congressional rules that landed Washington power brokers in trouble as much as smaller lapses in judgment: House Speaker Jim Wright over how his book was being sold, Ways and Means chairman Dan Rostenkowski over his exchange of stamps for cash at the House post office, Democratic whip Tony Coelho over a questionable junk-bond investment, and eight lawmakers who lost their seats in 1992 in part over checks they bounced at the House bank.

For DeLay, it is hard to imagine that any lapse was greater than the cozy relationship he allowed to grow between his office and Abramoff. The lobbyist's activities might have stayed under the radar had a newspaper in Alexandria, La., not reported the startling fact that a local Indian tribe was paying Abramoff's associate Scanlon $13.7 million for public relations work. Subsequent investigations uncovered a flood of e-mail between Abramoff and Scanlon, in which they referred to their Indian clients as, among other epithets, "monkeys" and "losers," even as they charged these clients fees that totaled upward of $66 million. It's far from clear what, precisely, the tribes were getting for their investment. In one instance, Abramoff and Scanlon secretly maneuvered to shut down a Texas casino operated by the Tiguas--only to turn around and offer their services to get it reopened for a fee of more than $125,000 a month.

But then, associates say, they had never seen a salesman quite like Abramoff, whose favorite saying, one recalls, was, "If it's worth doing, it's worth overdoing." On the one hand, he was a father of five and an Orthodox Jew pious enough to refuse to drive or use electricity on the Sabbath. On the other, he was a lavish entertainer who used his clients' money to buy skyboxes at every professional-sports venue in the Washington area, and who, his former co-workers recall, indulged a love of gadgets by buying a golf simulator that cost more than $30,000 and insisting that his BMW come equipped with a flat-screen TV.

Abramoff was constantly coming up with new business propositions--wanting to buy an indoor lacrosse team one week and start a newspaper the next--but almost never staying interested long enough to follow through. He rarely took on a client who couldn't pay at least $100,000 a month but nonetheless annoyed his associates by delegating to them the actual lobbying--or "asks"--of most Congress members. When it came to DeLay's office, however, Abramoff did the work himself. Sources say he developed a particularly close relationship with Tony Rudy, who in his five years of working for DeLay was at various times press secretary, policy director, general counsel and deputy chief of staff. Abramoff and Rudy shared passions for sushi, racquetball and golf, and the lobbyist lavished sports tickets on the congressional aide. Two former DeLay staff members recall that Rudy would frequently e-mail Abramoff from inside Republican leadership meetings on a Motorola pager that Hill staff members carried as a precursor to their now ubiquitous BlackBerrys.

Ultimately, Rudy joined Abramoff at Greenberg Traurig, the lobbying firm that hired Abramoff in December 2000. But he soon left, having discovered, former associates of both men say, that it was not as much fun to work for Abramoff as to be courted by him. Rudy, now at Alexander Strategy Group, a firm founded by former DeLay chief of staff Ed Buckham, did not respond to phone and e-mail requests for an interview.

Both Abramoff and Scanlon have declined to answer questions from congressional investigators. But sources tell TIME that Abramoff's work habits could be making the investigators' job much easier. He did nearly all his communication by e-mail--even with the assistants who sat right outside his office, associates say. And having farmed out so much work among his colleagues, Abramoff insisted on a daily accounting--known as the wrap-up--to make sure it had all got done. In those records, which sources say have been turned over to congressional investigators and the FBI, are notations of nearly every phone call and appointment, every payment that was collected and every check that was sent out. From this information, say some who were involved with collecting it, investigators will try to piece together what is being called a timeline linking favors asked of lawmakers with contributions and favors they asked of Abramoff.

But there is one place, at least for now, where no such scrutiny is taking place: the House ethics committee. DeLay has said he would welcome a chance to explain everything to the panel, which last year admonished him three times. But Democrats have shut down the committee, saying they object to rule changes that make it impossible to open an investigation without the support of at least one member of each party. DeLay says he sees little more than a Democratic plot at work. "The only way I can be cleared is through the ethics committee, so they don't want one," DeLay told the Washington Times last week. But when the journalists asked DeLay whether he had ever crossed the line of ethical behavior, he gave an answer that could come back to haunt him. "Ever," he said, "is a very strong word." --With reporting by Perry Bacon Jr., Brian Bennett, Massimo Calabresi and John F. Dickerson/Washington

With reporting by Perry Bacon Jr., Brian Bennett, Massimo Calabresi, John F. Dickerson/Washington