[Jack Abramoff] "And I was going to make you thinner!" I smiled, "Don't make me fatter," based on other pictures. Anyway so, hopefully he has the same skills. [laughter] [Ethics Unwrapped Project Director Cara Biasucci] [laughter] I'm sure he does. Cool. Alright, so, are we all good? Justin?
[Justin] Yeah. Deb? [Deb] Yeah, give me one… [Cara] Good. [Film crew] Give me a chance to clear before you start. [Cara] Sure, will do. [Cara] So the title of our event tonight is "You Don't Know Jack." What don't we know about you, that you think
that we should know about you? [Jack Abramoff] Well, like everybody, I'm complex. I'm not a cartoon character. My convincing myself that I was right, is actually far worse than my going and doing the same thing and knowing it's wrong, but doing it anyway. [Professor Robert Prentice] The story of Jack Abramoff is a fellow who was approached to be a lobbyist and he told the people who interviewed him, "Well, I'd be willing to be a lobbyist. That sounds like something I might want to do." And they said, "Well, would you represent
someone whose cause you didn't believe in if it would bring a lot of money into our firm?" [Jack Abramoff] Lloyd asked me, "Would I be willing to do things I disagreed with if a client needed it?" And I said, "No, I wouldn't." And he said, "Well, what if it meant a lot of money to our firm?" And I told him, "No, I wouldn't." I figured that was the end of the interview. [Robert] And they said, "You know, that's what we want to hear. You're the kind of guy we want." And he was an extraordinarily competitive, very bright, I would say, very strategic person, who very quickly became the most prominent lobbyist in Washington, D.C. [Film crew] Put your left foot right where this… [Cara] You won't get bonked in the head, in other words with the light bulb. [Jack Abramoff] What, left foot? I wasn't watching, what's going on? [Film crew] It's just swinging. [Cara] The
light bulb is just going to swing around. [Robert] In many ways, Jack Abramoff began his life as an embodiment of the "American Dream." He was a high school football star, he went to college and became active in the College Republicans, and was extraordinarily successful there in advancing causes that he truly believed in. He began his life as an extraordinarily admirable person. And then when he got into lobbying... he was very successful, worked very hard, was very smart, and… just went off the rails. [News reporter] Jack Abramoff, the one-time super-lobbyist, and traveling companion of former House Republican Leader Tom DeLay, pleaded guilty today to charges related to
congressional bribes. And he agreed to cooperate with prosecutors. [News reporter] Jack Abramoff's guilty plea to charges of tax evasion, conspiracy, and fraud could spell trouble for some of Washington's top power brokers, including more than a dozen members of congress. [Associate Professor Lamar Pierce] If I'm
a congressman and you're a lobbyist, and you constantly take
me out to really nice dinners, or take me golfing, or, you know, give me all sorts of other benefits, then, I know that there's a little bit of a quid pro quo. [News reporter] The lobbying culture mixes money and power and that can be dangerous. But is Abramoff an exception? Or is he just a lobbyist who figured
out a way to game the system and then got caught? [Associate Professor Minette Drumwright] When you see someone who never loses as a lobbyist you know that person is likely to be abusing the system. [News reporter] Even by Washington standards, the charges against Jack Abramoff are breath-taking. [Jack Abramoff] I have no choice but to assert my various constitutional privileges... [News reporter] His business dealings are the subject of investigations by the FBI, a Federal Grand Jury, the IRS, and two congressional committees. [Lamar] People in general, particularly on the issues of ethics, tend to underestimate how much incentives matter, personal interests matter, or their own biases matter. [Congressman] A pathetic, disgusting example of greed run amuck. [News reporter] That greed involves allegations that Abramoff's business defrauded six Indian tribes of more than sixty-six million dollars. The tribe's treasurer says they had no idea
they were being ripped off. [Coushatta Treasurer William Worfel] When they're working for one of the most prestigious law firms in Washington, D.C., you think they should
be on the up and up. [News reporter] A contrite Abramoff told the
federal court that, "Words will never be able to express my sorrow and my profound regret." Yet the corruption he acknowledged was breath-taking in scope: bilking Indian tribes of more than sixty million
dollars, keeping nearly half of it in kick-backs. [Wlliam] In my opinion, they was a bunch of thieves. [Robert] I would say that the scandal he was involved in was not as big as the Watergate scandal, nonetheless, it had a real impact on people's
perception of our democracy and people's perception of how things work
in Washington, D.C. [Protestor] The system's broken and it's for sale to the highest bidder. [Protestor] Lobbying our politicians, I believe
that it's a conflict of interest. [Protestor] A bad apple spoils the bunch. It's never just one. [Minette] I think that often times people see
white-collar crimes and say nobody bled, nobody died, so what's the big deal? I think that completely misses the harm that
was done that's very difficult to measure, such as the harm to society, the harm to people who are disillusioned with
the political system, the harm to clients who didn't win because
Jack and his colleagues were cheating and gaming the system. [Jack] I didn't think anything was wrong. until I was laying in the gutter, and in the gutter, with my head cut off, I finally had the opportunity just to really think about this. And I started looking at my emails, I sent eight hundred fifty thousand emails over the decade that I was a lobbyist, and I had lawyers who were looking at them to see if
I did anything to break the law, and we started looking at them and I saw that I went over the line, I broke the law. It was there, in black and white, I did it. I wrote it. I thought it. [Cara] Dave Spence will be giving a little introduction first, and kind of setting the stage, and then we'll open it up to students. [Professor Dave Spence] Could you talk a little
bit about the kinds of lobbying activities that you were involved in that led to the
conspiracy to commit bribery charges? [Jack Abramoff] Well, all of the lobbying I
was involved in led to the problem. I mean, so... Congress is completely for sale, they're not consciously for sale, most of them, and most of them would deny that anybody is
buying anything from them. But anytime you give something to somebody, if you're a normal human being, and you get something from somebody, what are you going to feel? Gratitude. Right? At some level. Somebody does something nice for you, unless you're a jerk, you're going to be thankful. [Inaudible chatter] [Robert Prentice] Mr. Abramoff turned out to be very much like most of the other white-collar criminals that we've brought on to campus over the years. A nice man, a smart man, a reflective man, a religious man, a man who loves his family. A man who has many characteristics that I hope that I have. And yet, he really, really screwed up and made some really terrible decisions, and committed some crimes, but if a man like that can do it, under the right circumstances, I could do it. And our students could do it. And that's the lesson—part of the lesson—
we hoped our students learned. [Chair and Professor of Military Science Department Travis Habhab] I run Texas Army ROTC, We're almost getting good at it. From whatever way that you can best connect with the audience, let them realize how good people end up making decisions that are ultimately bad for themselves or
bad for the organization. [Jack] I understand. [Travis] Does that work? [Jack] Yep. [Travis] Well, let's go have some lunch and have a great discussion. [Jack] Everybody in Washington thinks they have power, and I was among them, and that power sometimes can, and frankly often does, breed an arrogance. And that arrogance, led me, as the leader of my group, to encourage that the ends ultimately justified the means. We have to win, winning was everything. Unfortunately in that world, and frankly, in virtually every world, that's not a good approach. [Minette Drumwright] I saw so many of the
concepts that we talk about in the ethics classroom, illustrated by his perspectives and his perceptions
of himself and his behavior. [Jack] The normal behavior in Washington, in the business I was in, was to do the kind of things I did. I just pushed over the lines, I did more than
other people did. People would buy tickets, say, for a congressman and their staff for the basketball games. And they'd buy four tickets to the arena
and they'd give them out. So I would have fifty tickets. People took—folks that played golf—they would go to the country club, I would put them on an airplane and fly them to Scotland. [Minette] I think he had a whole elaborate
scheme of rationalizations that blinded him from seeing the things he
was doing that was, that were wrong. [Robert] Rationalizations are excuses
that we give ourselves for not living up to our own ethical standards. [Jack] I loved my clients and fought for them, bled for them, worked day and night for them. They were up against the bullies of Washington, the powerful, elite establishment, the other lobbyists, who I disdained, who I thought lived a lifestyle that was often
one of sort of a drunken debauchery, frankly. So we were winning victories on important issues, we were saving our clients billions of dollars, we were making tens of millions of dollars. [Lamar] You know,
these people are not lying when they say "I did this, you know, for the right reasons." They actually often times will believe this. It's just the fact that
their mind has tricked them into believing this. [Jack] I viewed my lobbying and my efforts there as a way to reverse what I thought was an unfortunate
trend on the part of K Street and, as a consequence, corporate America, to not support the conservative movement. [Minette] I think it was very easy for Jack
Abramoff to see himself as an ethical person. He had defined his role as a lobbyist in terms
of two factors. One was that he picked clients whose causes
he believed in, and he did, he picked clients whose causes
were in line with his conservative ideology. And then number two, the second factor was, was he working as hard as he could to win
on behalf of his clients? And he was. What did not enter into his frame
was the means he was using to win. [Robert] He, himself, in his book writes about the fact that there were conflicts of interest that he was part of, essentially bribing legislators to get results. And he would do that during the day. At night, he would go home and he would read
the Torah and he would read about how bribery was bad and
should not be done. And he did not make that connection. [Jack] My faith certainly doesn't advocate
any of this kind of activity. The Bible is very severe about bribery. I would look at that by the way the Bible
speaks about bribing judges, doesn't talk about legislators, so even
when it came up, I would think, "Well, this isn't the same thing.
I'm not bribing a judge. These aren't judges." Well, the truth is, our
sages in the last couple hundred years, there weren't legislatures or legislators
at the time of the Bible. [Minette] I think he had what I call a compartmentalization. He had one set of values for his friends,
his family, his personal life, his religious life. He had another set for his work life. [Jack] I was passionately interested in helping people, and so when people came to me with a need,
whoever they were, I usually responded by giving them money. [Minette] He had children who had no other
place to live, living in his home. So he was helping people. That helped him to feel good about what he was doing. [Robert] It was really easy for him to say, "Oh,
look at all the good things I'm doing," and then to unconsciously give himself license
not to live up to his own standards. [Lobbyist Jason Sabo] Do you think that your
prosecution, et cetera, et cetera, actually changed how the practice of lobbying is done in D.C.? [Jack] No. [Jason] And where do lobbyists like me, who are
coming at this from the public interest perspective, who don't have access to… [Jack] [Agreeing] Money. [Jason] Who don't have access to money, in
a structure that's, increasingly, relying upon money. How do we play in a world like that? [Jack] When we were up against other lobbyists, frequently, we were up against lobbyists like us, we were not frequently up against the ethical
lobbyist whose playing on the merits and trying to educate members of Congress
based on what's good and right. So right now, the playing field is so tilted
that it's virtually impossible to win if you're up against somebody like I was. Very few people have a discussion along the lines of, "I'll do this for you, but
you have to give me some money for it." Normally, there's never a conversation like that. There's "I'm your friend, you're my friend,
what do you need?" You know, "Well, I'm trying to raise a million
dollars to make sure I get re-elected." "Okay, I'll take care of three hundred thousand
dollars, I'll throw a fundraiser, don't worry about it." "Okay great, Jack, what do you need?" "Well, I've got clients that got these interests..." "Oh, I think I can be helpful in that." That's the discussion. I thought I was great. I thought I was moral. I thought, frankly, we had an approach to our
clients that we weren't going to lose. They're paying us money, and the moral thing
to do is to give them what they paid for. I thought other lobbyists who didn't do that,
who didn't care whether their clients lost or not were the immoral lobbyists. This is quite ironic, actually. That I thought I was the moral lobbyist. [Robert] Most Americans believe that they
are more ethical, more moral, than their neighbors, than their co-workers, than their competitors in business. Ninety two percent of Americans, when asked,
will tell you they are satisfied with their moral character. Well, if you're satisfied with your moral character, and if you just know that you're more ethical than
other people out there, then you tend to not worry about ethics. You just say, "Hey, if I run into ethical issues, I'm pretty confident that I'll handle them well, because, after all, I'm more ethical than other people, and I've got good moral character." And you count on character to carry you through, You don't pay attention to the situational
factors that can affect everyone's decision making. [Jack] Unfortunately, the lines are drawn in
Washington where you can be completely legal and completely contemptible and corrupt at
the same time. You're allowed to give certain kinds of bribes,
but you're not allowed to give other kinds of bribes. And unfortunately for me, I did both. I stopped caring where the line in the sand was. From all these, quote, "little laws"
that, in my arrogance, I thought didn't apply to me or I wouldn't have get in my way as I pursued my goals. Because I wanted to win at all costs and the
ends justified the means, and other horrible things that, unfortunately, became
part of the barnacles on my ship that eventually started steering it. [Minette] His life was on hyper-speed. He was hyper-competitive, he wasn't reflecting,
he wasn't raising questions, no one else was raising questions because
he was so phenomenally successful. So I do think he was in something of a bubble that buffered him from thinking about these issues. [Jack] I became arrogant. I had so much success, I had so much—I won everything. My team and I won everything. Every one of my strategies seemed to work, every one of our opponents was vanquished and an arrogance set in. And the arrogance was manifested also in my
not listening to people if they weren't telling me what
I wanted to hear. And the one fellow I would have listened to, I didn't tell him this stuff! Because I didn't think… it was sort of the
dirty world of politics and he wasn't in that world. And I didn't think he could quite understand
all the nuances like I did, so unfortunately for me, I didn't avail myself
of that, of him as a mentor. [KUT Radio Morning Edition Host Jennifer Stayton]
"I wasn't the devil that the media were so quick to create, but neither was I the saint I always hoped
to become. I was somewhere in the middle." As you deliver this message are people believing you? [The Texas Tribune Executive Editor Ross Ramsey]
Why should we listen to you? You're, kind of, the smoker telling
us how to watch our health, right? Former smoker. [Jack] Well, yeah. Actually, one should
listen to a former smoker whose coughed and maybe had his lung removed,
and has a hole in his throat. Yeah, definitely listen to him. [Jennifer] Kind of now, it seems like you're almost your, perhaps, most important lobbying client ever. [Students and attendees greet and thank Jack Abramoff] [Student] It was good to hear your story. [Jack] Thank you. [Cara] George… [Jack] Hi, how are you? [George] Welcome to Texas… [Jess] I have a weird question. [Jack] Ok. [Guest] I just want to ask what it was like
be on "Colbert?" [Laughter] [Jack] It was very funny… [Jess] She has a Ph.D. in humor theory, so... [Jack] Really? [Robert] It's not easy for anyone who's
committed serious crimes to completely redeem themselves. And I'm not sure he ever will. All he can do is try. And if we watch him over the years, I think we'll be able to make a judgment
as to whether or not he's truly sincere in whether or not he really
wishes to redeem himself. [Jack] The material fall wasn't as important
or dramatic to me as the realization that I had caused my fall and that I had done wrong. [Robert] Mr. Abramoff did go to jail. While he was in jail, he was incarcerated with
mostly drug dealers— not a situation you want to be in. He lost most of his freedoms. He did spend at least some time in solitary confinement. [Jack] There was never a moment in my life worse,
in terms of lack of freedom, than when I was in solitary confinement, when I was in the hole. That was the point on Earth where I had the
least amount of freedom. I had no freedom to do anything. [Robert] He didn't get to spend time with his mother as she died. [Jack] My mother passed away, I'm sure her cancer, I guess, was building for years but it may have been that the stress
of this exacerbated it. And so that, obviously, was devastating. [Robert] He did not get to attend her funeral. The damage that he caused his family, the shame that he caused his wife, the disruption in the lives he caused his
children, are all things that I think weigh on him everyday. [Jack] And it's a continuing project for
all of us to get through this. This isn't over, it may never be over. [Robert] Mr. Abramoff owes the Federal Government
about forty million dollars. [Jack] I don't know that I'll ever be able to pay it of. I'm going to try, but it's in the tens of millions of dollars. And I'm not going to be a lobbyist again,
so I'm probably not going to make money like that! You know, there will always be a lack of freedom, and even after I pay the restitution,
I'm a felon. I can never vote again, I can never be in
a house where there's a fire arm. I can't serve on a jury. There are lots of things that I will never be able to do again. [Cara] How can you be certain that you won't
engage in this type of behavior? You know, do you have internal safe guards, now, or is there just been a complete remaking? [Jack] I don't know that I've changed any
of my character traits. I hope I have. I don't know. It's a constant struggle. These things that were embedded in me were
from the time of my being a child. I'm still competitive, but I'm trying to
channel that competitive nature into something good. And it was in prison that I decided that I
wouldn't merely accept this new belief system, but I would try to do something to help affect
it as a way of making some recompense. Which is what leads me to come out and speak
publicly and to write my book. Because otherwise, frankly, going away and hiding was the choice… the prime choice for me. [Clinical Professor Howard Prince] Tonight,
we bring someone to our campus to talk about moral and legal failure. Now some might wonder why we should invite someone to speak on this campus like Mr. Abramoff, who has broken the laws of our country, and has behaved unethically in ways that caused
significant harm to others. And I can assure you that each of the faculty
and staff members, who were involved in the decision-making and
planning for this event, asked that same question when the possibility
was first presented to us. Jack Abramoff is a convicted felon who served
over three years in a federal prison for his crimes. And he describes that experience
as horrible. He's also a graduate of Brandeis University…
[Voice fades out] [Jack] We believe that at the end of one's
life one goes up to heaven and you get played, basically, a video of
your whole life: everything you thought, and everything you did, in front of everybody
you love. And that can be hell, or that can be heaven, depending on who you are. I got that opportunity on Earth to see. [Minette] Jack made the mistake many of us make, and that is, he was really blind to the ethical issues, he framed his situation so ethical
issues were just not in the picture at all. And it's easy to do that. Clearly, he was in a toxic environment, but all of us live in environments that have
some degree of toxicity in them, and we've got to recognize that and have the
moral imagination that enables us to live both ethical and successful lives. [Robert] I think we've got to frame our
lives in ways that we can be proud of and we've got to measure our lives by metrics
we can be proud of. And if our only metric is: "Am I going to win?
Am I going to make more money?" You're going to make different decisions
than if one of your metrics is "Am I going to act honorably? Am I going to
act consistently with my own ethical values?" [Cara] Thank you, Jack. I really appreciate your patience. [Jack] Thanks, guys. Thanks so much. [Jack] My old environment, where I had a staff of forty people, and restaurants, and planes, and cars, and
this, and that, and boats, and whatever... that was the movie I was at last week. I'm at a different movie this week and I
have to deal with that.
