Another Abramoff casualty
By Kirstin Ellison
Posted on Tue Feb 27, 2007 at 04:26:28 PM EST
Well, the Abramoff circus isn't quite over; in fact, it appears to have a lot of life left in it. The latest name to surface is Will Heaton, Bob Ney's former chief of staff, who just agreed to plead guilty to conspiracy to commit fraud.
Heaton was involved in the scandal, according to The Hill, from August 2002 through August 2004.
Over those two years, Heaton accepted numerous favors from Abramoff and other members of his lobbying firm, including a now-infamous all-expense-paid golf trip to Scotland. Heaton was also was one of several recipients of a number of other trips abroad, concert and sporting-event tickets, meals and gambling chips, all taken with full knowledge the gifts were in exchange for official favors from Ney.
During one of those trips, Heaton and another staffer helped Ney conceal $5,000 brought into the country through customs and stored the money in a safe inside Ney's congressional office. Court documents said Heaton "open[ed] the safe as requested so that Ney could make repeated withdrawals."
Heaton knowingly falsified his 2002 and 2003 financial disclosure forms and assisted Ney in misrepresenting his travel disclosure form about the receipt of gifts from Abramoff and others.
Follow me inside for what this may mean for other members of Congress and their staffers...
Mary Ann Akers of the Washington Post has her own take on it:
One of the revelations made in the plea agreement documents is that Ney, who's now serving 30 months in prison on corruption charges, kept a safe in his office filled with "thousands of dollars" won from gambling chips Ney accepted from a foreign businessman.
What, the freezer wasn't good enough?
HA! Thanks for drawing the parallel, Mary Ann.
But back to the Hill reporters, who tie Heaton's plea in nicely to the big picture: the big names like Abrmaoff, DeLay, and Ney get all the headlines, but we're now up to four former congressional staffers who've pled guilty. Michael Scanlon, Tony Rudy, and Neil Volz have all cooperated with investigators, and as their sentencing dates keep getting pushed back, the whispering is starting that it's because of all the information they're providing about colleagues' involvement with Abramoff.
With each former staffer that cuts a deal in return for a lighter sentence, there are more and more public officials quaking in their Abramoff-funded golf shoes. Let's hope each and every one of them gets caught!
Tags: Will Heaton, Abramoff, Jack Abramoff, Bob Ney, Neil Volz, Tony Rudy, Michael Scanlon, corruption, Ethics in Government (all tags)
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