Jack Abramoff, 2012 - BBC HARDtalk

[Music] in the lead up to November's presidential election in the United States groups on the right and left are sounding the alarm at the influence of money of US politics my guest today knows a lot about that at the height of his career he made millions as a career lobbyist in Washington wining dining and influencing lawmakers his fall from grace was dramatic seeing him publicly disgraced and imprisoned for fraud and bribery a free man once again Jack Abramoff now says he's a reformed man lobbying to correct what he describes as a corrupt system where he says his behavior was and continues to be commonplace is he trying to make amends for his past or put the blame on others [Music] Jack Abramoff welcome to hard talk thank you thanks for having me now at time magazine famously described you as the man who bought Washington you are known as the most arguably the most powerful lobbyist in Washington a man who could get legislation introduced changed or even scrapped a man who was making millions and millions of dollars but then you went to jail now you live a modest lifestyle with your family you say you're a radio talk-show host do you miss the old life I probably miss some of the old action but it's I don't miss it enough to try it again well you you were you were born in New Jersey you were raised in California to a father who worked for a credit card company a former beauty queen mother but as a youngster you worked for the College Republicans and you made quite a name for yourself there so so why did you choose to leave active politics if you liked it and eventually choose lobbying as your career well actually I left after serving as head of the College Republicans and then moving on to head President Reagan's grass roots lobby on Capitol Hill I actually let politics to go become a movie producer I spent about eight to ten years producing films and re-entered politics as a lobbyist actually lobbying is an America part of the political scene and so I spent about a decade after I reinterred being a lobbyist why I beg your pardon why why choose no being welcome Olivia well it's interesting I wanted to get back in I missed politics when I was making films although there's certainly politics that goes on when one is making motion pictures in Hollywood but I missed the Washington scene and I didn't feel that the appropriate entry point was through a campaign or running for something and the opportunity came up through a friend of mine to join one of the lobbying firms I took on the responsibilities of helping clients in their many political battles which is what lobbying is really in Washington and so that's how I got back in well you you described in in your book about capital punishment about your life as a lobbyist and in the in the early years you you do sense a kind of a pride or excitement that said that perhaps you still feel for your former work I mean when you talk about setting up team Abramoff at the company Preston Gates lobbying firm you say our team eventually included some of the greatest minds in the policy business as well as some of the roughest toughest street smart killers who ever walked the halls of well-heeled law firms I mean that sounds like the script from one of your Hollywood movies really doesn't it I wish it were a script from one of my films they might have done better in the box office but unfortunately it was real life and you know I write in the book about it I don't necessarily laud those days but I try to describe it and describe the feelings that I had and they were feelings of exhilaration yeah for another example our idea of a successful day was obliterating our clients enemies yeah unfortunately that's the modus operandi that we had you know when we we were constantly engaged 24 hours a day in political battles on behalf of the clients and these were many wars and so when we won and we would go in to win very thoroughly we were exhilarated we were delighted obviously and when we lost we were despondent although oddly over 10 years we only lost once so ultimately well describe for us there the lifestyle really as a lobbyist I mean just to quote Time magazine again they describe is the flamboyant power broker who used to send lawmakers and their staffs on junkets around the world and detain them back in Washington with golf outings free meals at your expensive restaurant concerts and games enjoyed from luxury skyboxes that you maintained as says the magazine at nearly every arena and stadium in town you don't deny this though in your book do you no no that is indeed the lifestyle of an active lobbyist in Washington lobbying really is two things one is access and the second is persuasion but the access in Washington often comes with purveying and come bang financial benefits to the lawmakers and their staff the people who are public servants that includes playing golf and includes travel that includes me and it certainly includes political contributions and so of that activity I was probably at the razor's edge I did and over did everything I could to maintain the access that our 40 lobbyists the 40 lobbyists who work for me maintained within the Congress well I mean in your book that there's a sort of feeling of inevitability about your modus operandi you you as if you were carried away you didn't realize your actions I mean you you've also said in an essay I never contemplated that the payments made to at a congressman or their interest groups were really just bribes and but they work can we really believe that youth such as successful career man didn't realize that what you were doing was wrong well I go even further I think most people who are still engaged in the system have not come to the Epiphany that I came to people who are involved in Washington in terms of making campaign contributions to public servants or providing them meals or whatever they're giving to them don't feel as I didn't feel that they're bribing them they feel that that's just the way business is done that they're engaged in relationships with them their back their social friends and they don't really come to the conclusions that I only came to by the way unfortunately and shamefully for me only came to when it was all over in the midst of it all I didn't for a minute think that this was bribery and I'm not certain by the way had I come to that intellectual conclusion as I showed up by the way had I come to that conclusion perhaps I might not have even treated it as a serious notion that's the big problem here and that's one of the problems in terms of fixing this system that people here feel that it's a-okay that it's it's perfectly fine to do these kinds of things and they're not being amoral they're not doing things that are for the most part illegal and so therefore they continue to do them well let's have a look at at what you did do specifically eventually you admitted guilt on a number of charges including fraud bribery tax evasion you you went to jail what really grabbed the headlines though was your relationship with a number of Native American tribes you admitted to defrauding what exactly did they hire you for at the time well I was hired by the tribes to do two things one is to protect their interests in Washington which we without fail except in one case and I was also hired eventually to protect their interests in their individual states I should note by the way that what I play guilty to him what I was guilty of was in the efforts in the state's not revealing to the clients formally that indeed I was sharing in the profit at the companies that I brought in to work for them even though I was by the way working with these companies and in many cases designed those efforts well I think that my relationship of the tribe has unfortunately been blown a little bit the tribes have been blown a little bit out of proportion in the media but that was specifically what I pled to be off let's have a look at that sum of money though the Committee on Indian Affairs report in 2006 said you and your business partner in this venture Mike Scanlon collected about 66 million dollars from six Native American tribes between 2001 and 2003 I mean that deserves a headline I mean that is a huge amount of money well first of all the committee report in the Senate was extremely politicized and very inaccurate first of all that that sum itself was actually less than we were paid in fees by more than six tribes we had more than six tribes over here present represented but understand that the efforts that we engaged in were extremely active political battles many of them costing each each time several million dollars we engaged them over and over and over again to save ultimately as we added up at the end six point eight billion dollars worth of their revenue and worth of their their income and value so at the end of the day I believe the tribes felt that people I work for not that people who necessarily took over the tribes and were the political enemies are the people I did work for but the people I work for felt that we didn't do it we did indeed do a fine job for them that what I did do that was wrong and what I've served time for and pled guilty to was taking away from the right to make a decision as to whether to engage us based on the full facts and what I didn't do wasn't reform them properly that I was in fact being compensated by companies that I recommended to them okay well you you you you say you describe how you believe that the tribes felt that's a Bernese break who's been a member of the Tribal Council of the second or Chippewa and Michigan said you defrauded his tribe out of millions of dollars he said because of this man he said you left well a dark state weasely let me let me at least put some context in this Bernie Sprague was part of the very opposition of the tribe that removed the Tribal Council that I worked for he was in total opposition to them he did everything he could actually remove them from the tribe let alone from the tribal council he had his own agenda he brought his own lobbyists and who he wanted to hire and while the paying them in many cases more than we were paid so again the problem is when mixes into the tribal politics there are a lot of sides to this I'm not by the way saying and I don't ever say that I didn't do things that were wrong what I am saying is though that I tried to focus on the things I actually did that were wrong the things I pled to and the things that I was punished well well you frankly I mean you rubbish what Bernie's sprague said but let's look at another tribe at the ticker-type the Committee on Indian Affairs said the 4.2 million dollars paid to you and Mike Scanlon by the tikar tribe whose case you did not manage to win could have lasted the tribe another year they say the tribe would have dedicated much of that money to education and to health care and that they needed it very much this is a very different picture to the one you paint about the billions of dollars that they're earning in the revenue of the casinos and so on it's not about luxury it's about basics they say well you put it out correctly that that was the effort that we in fact lost and indeed we lost the effort unfortunately the effort was rife with the very bribery that I that I pled to eventually where we had a congressman who went to prison and a senator who didn't go to prison but went on to head the Motion Picture Association both of whom received considerable funds from us from the tribe to change the law so that that tribe would have a casino opportunity in Texas it didn't work unfortunately I put every effort I could into to the very last days of my being a lobbyist to reversing that we weren't successful in doing it and that in fact was our one on one failure in terms of the the lobbying efforts you saying in your book and and with regard to the tribe that you always did your best for your clients and that you were very sincere in that however the emails revealed between you and Mike Scanlon reveal not a very high opinion that you held of of those Native American to March 13 2002 for example referring to their second are chipper was you refer to them as those effing sag chips you say they're played stupid you refer to them as morons look I should say you know the guy send 850,000 emails I was a very rough player unfortunately I hope I've changed my myself over the eight years that I've been through this process but just in terms of going back to that what the committee did not pull out were the emails that I'd sent about everybody unfortunately I was a very rough player wasn't just about my clients that I spoke very roughly and very sweetly by the way out of 800,000 emails there were 50 that were embarrassing hold on let me let me let me finish my comment I'm ashamed about those emails I'm sorry I sent them I'm also sorry that I sent to my wife sometimes emails about our kids being morons unfortunately I was not careful in my emails to be as everyone should be aware the fact that ultimately you could wind up reading your emails one day on the front page of the paper I wound up reading those emails in the front pages of paper I'm terribly sorry about those emails they are a small part of the effort in terms end and should reflect in a small way in terms of my relationship of the tribe's none of the positive emails by the way that I sent in there were thousands other because we're short of time let's move on from the emails you say you're sorry about the emails are you sorry in general about how you treated the tribe's of defrauding the tribes which you admitted to are you sorry for that have you said I'm sorry I'm sorry exactly for what I did that was wrong and what I did that was wrong was that I didn't inform the tribes as I showed up that I was sharing in the profits of the companies that I recommended to them but I'm certainly not sorry for winning every effort on their behalf I'm not sorry for working day and night on their behalf I'm not sorry for the efforts that I made to improve their relationships on Capitol Hill and elsewhere I'm not sorry for any of those things I'm sorry for what I did that was wrong people who asked me to be sorry for things I didn't do I'm gonna be very disappointing to them I did plenty that was wrong by the way and plenty to be sorry for but I'm not going to as no one should take one to be sorry for things that they didn't do know you you owe the tribes money you owe the tribes and others yeah but the tribes more than 20 million dollars but Tom Rogers who's the tribal advocate who did much of the groundwork had to expose your work with the tribe says we're not asking for tens of millions of dollars we want true atonement you can't have true Redemption without true atonement and what he says you should do is to go to the poorest reservation in the country he says you should ask the work with the labor the elders and the children there without a camera crew or reporters quietly well actually ironically mr. Rogers who by the way was a rival lobbyist to us and was defeated by us but his suggestion was something that I actually asked to do at the beginning of this to go work on a reservation to sweep floors to do whatever and I was turned down but the fact is I have the the efforts that we engaged in over the over about a decade at the time that I was a lobbyist did more good than harm by far for Indian country we prevented them from losing billions and billions of dollars in federal taxation an egregious federal legislation to take over those tribes we were at I'm solely responsible for stopping that that was the job I was hired for well you people like Tom Rodgers who I did not represent and had no relationship with me or my tribes they had their opinions some of them have agendas I've certainly apologized to the people that I've offended but will you put the exact people I've offended of course I'm trying I'm trying sure how much he paid them back so far well I you know I I'm just out of prison and felons don't exactly have all the financial opportunities that that one would have but you'll pay justice before engagements I am and then portions above those money's large portions of everything I earn goes to the restitution that I owe everything that I earned every dollar that I earn and every dollar that I spend is is overseen by the Justice Department and the courts so I don't think people have to worry that I'm squirreling away money I wish I were able to but I'm not I'm dedicated to paying back the restitution amount it's a very large amount it's 44 million dollars I don't know if I'll be able to earn that much in my lifetime but I'm certainly going to try there are others though who also question the sincerity of your remorse in your in your books and in your public speaking for example our Jeffrey Smith the former Washington Post journalist he's now the managing editor for national security at the Center for Public Integrity he sites that reading his book were left with a an odd mixture of candid revelation defiant celebration and score settling all stuck to a postscript of a vowed remorse what do you make of those comments well Jeff Jeffrey Smith again unfortunately has part of an agenda here I'm sorry to keep saying that but there you have to understand there are people who've been involved in this for eight or ten years who are on one side or another of this thing he wrote a review he actually spent time writing articles about me in the Washington Post he was part of the team there that got the Pulitzer Prize they were very offended that some of the story they got was wrong and they were corrected by me in my book and Jeffrey Smith wrote a hostile review of my book it actually wound up selling more of my books than anything else I you know it's hard for me to respond to all these allegations because the fact is some of them are just absolutely baseless in terms of my poem being asked or settling I invite Jeffrey Smith and I invite anyone who who reads my book that please tell me where in my book I settle scores in fact if anything I've been criticized profusely by the Sons Sunlight Foundation and others that I haven't settled enough scorers meaning I haven't brought out enough detail about things that people did I'm not eating for this the purpose of writing my book was to be able to tell the story of what happened number one and number two to tell America what is still going on there and how I did it so that we can find a way to undo this and we will move on to that in just a moment and but first if I could ask you I mean your faith is obviously very important to you you write about it a lot in your book it's evident also from the personal choices you made you chose to become more of an observant Jew than your parents were and despite the 24/7 cutthroat business that you're in and were obviously dedicated to you observe the Jewish Sabbath you didn't write you didn't phone you didn't get into cars or send emails and how did your behavior at the time fit with your religious faith in well you know I'm somebody who strives to be more religious and like everybody who strives to attain a higher standard than maybe they have I'm also a sinner I'm not a saint I'm indeed a sinner and each of us struggle between as we say in the religious world between the in the Apes you know being pulled down into the muck and the mire and rising up into the more ethereal behavior so I as an individual had those struggles too I've had those struggles my whole life I intend probably will have them the rest of my life how does it very bad me how does it make you feel when rabbi Allahu Stern who's a leading commentator on Jewish religious issues in the United States he's an assistant professor of Religious Studies at Yale University after you pleaded guilty in 2006 he described you as a blot on the Jewish world and he said that the rabbi's and religious figures supporting you and living off what he described as your dirty money were an embarrassment to Judaism well I don't know who this man is to be honest with you but frankly that is not the statement of an Orthodox or religious Jew to say such a thing about a fellow Jew especially one who's come forward and is trying to do pen repentance and trying to trying to repent and trying to make make something better I don't know who he is and frankly I'm not sure I need to comment about him now while you were earning all of those millions of dollars and you did give a lot of money to charity you you say in your book that you were giving away upwards of 80 percent of your income for good causes and to help people um but also in your book you describe how in your first job interview to become a lobbyist you said categorically that you could never fight for something you didn't believe in you said you said I wouldn't do it for all the money in the world could you now stand there and say you stayed true to that yes I can I didn't take on one cause as I was a lobbyist that I didn't believe in and I turned down many that were quite lucrative that in fact were things I didn't believe in would you say that the lobbying business has changed since you were operating as a lobbyist not really I think there's some been some changes on the margins but the modus operandi of most lobbyists is pretty much the same they have more hurdles to get around as a consequence of my scandal but but the most part the system is still intact now I mean thereafter you resented some reform was introduced the Reform Act of 2006 various measures to clarify US lawmakers relationships with lobbyists including a couple gifts from private sources you've been pretty scared about those reforms though well I've been scathing I basically have said that they are they don't go far enough they don't do what's necessary and what's necessary really to root out this kind of corruption the crush and I was involved in the corruption that goes on is to fully sever the link financial link between lobbyists and special interests and the public service and it doesn't do that I think that the people who worked on that are very good people I'm working with them now on trying to push the ball further down the court but I believe that they tried to get what they felt they could get at the time understand that every effort that's done in Washington do you see everything that is proposed has got it through go through a Congress whose own members are probably looking many of them to the future of them becoming lobbyists so they're going to be very careful about changing rules that will benefit them later now when you were sentenced judge Alan s Whoville said you've impacted seriously the public confidence and the integrity of the government these activities corrupted the political process and deprived the public of the honest services of their own public officials both in the legislature and executive branch and yet you say you weren't alone in that well I don't think any sensible person could say that I alone did that I mean it it would be a total foolish reading of American history and American president I mean I participated I was far more egregious perhaps than others but I was part of a system I didn't make these things up and yet learned them as I won we're running at a time here so if I can just say that to former presidents of the American League of lobbyists pull Millard Miller and David when Holt wrote a letter to the daily congressional newspaper the hill in 2011 saying our message to mr. Abramoff is don't paint us all with your brush we do not all engage in this type of activity 99.9% of us represent our clients ethically and accountably and do not go to jail for it well I agreed by the way I say that in my speeches I said that in my book I've said that I say that in my columns all my radio show I say it everywhere most lobbyists are doing just fine most lobbyists don't use the kind of things I did I don't think there are numbers correct 99.9% but I would say 90% of the lobbyists are likely to be behaving properly the problem isn't that but don't forget they're 31 and lobbyists in Washington DC so let's say 90 percent are just fine you only need a few dozen to be behaving as I behaved to have a problem and we have far more than a few dozen Jack Abramoff thank you very much indeed for being on heartache [Music] [Music] you [Music]

Channel: BBC HARDtalk

Views: 4,956

Rating: 4.8518519 out of 5

Keywords: BBC Hardtalk, Stephen Sackur, politics, interview BBC, Katya Adler, Jack Abramoff, US politics, Lobbying, Lobbyist, Washington DC

Id: 4dOB1xQbLo4

Length: 24min 0sec (1440 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 13 2016