Newt Gingrich has a Jack Abramoff problem. Or to be more precise, the former House Speaker and Presidential candidate has an Italia Federici problem.
We reported last week that Federici was helping organize Colorado for Gingrich, yet no mainstream press picked up on our report. We received only a single email from someone digging further into the story.
So we'll go ahead and break the story wide open.
Federici, who worked on Gale Norton's 1996 US Senate campaign in Colorado, pled guilty in 2007 to tax evasion and obstruction of a Senate investigation into the Abramoff lobbying scandal. She was sentenced to two months in a halfway house, four years of probation and ordered to pay more than $74,000 in restitution.
She was sentenced on December 14, 2007, meaning her four-year probation ended only weeks before the 2012 Iowa caucus.
Since our original report we've had a second source confirm Federici's involvement with the Gingrich campaign.
We reported on Federici’s involvement with the Gingrich campaign in a post about the former House Speaker’s campaign operation in Colorado, which was ramping up in anticipation of Tuesday’s Republican precinct caucuses.
Even with Federici's assistance, Gingrich fared poorly in Colorado, coming in third with 12.79% of the vote.
Ms. Federici has had a relationship with Speaker Gingrich going back many years. A March 1, 2000 story from The Hill newspaper noted that Gingrich was the keynote speaker at the inaugural fundraiser for the Council of Republicans for Environmental Advocacy (CREA), the group co-founded by Federici and later tied to the Abramoff investigation.
Federici co-founded CREA with former Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton in 1997, here in Colorado. The group then incorporated in Washington, DC in 2000, operating primarily on donations.
Court documents reveal that Federici introduced Jack Abramoff to Steven Griles, who she was dating at the time, one week before Griles was nominated to be the deputy secretary of the Department of Interior (DOI). Soon after that introductory meeting, Abramoff and his clients became contributors of CREA, donating approximately $500,000 between March 2001 and May 2003.
Many of Abramoff’s clients were subject to DOI oversight, including Native American tribes either operating, or interested in operating, gaming operations on designated Federal land.
Federici served as a conduit between Abramoff and Griles, including communicating with Griles and Abramoff about how to stop Indian tribe casinos from opening in areas that would compete with other Indian tribe clients of Abramoff.
Griles was sentenced to ten months in prison and fined $30,000 in 2007.
Federici pled guilty on tax evasion and obstructing a Senate investigation into the matter. She admitted that she made “materially false and misleading statements” to the US Senate Committee on Indian Affairs that likely limited the Committee’s ability to understand the full scope of Abramoff’s contact with Griles.
In her testimony before the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs in 2005 Federici received a now infamous grilling from Senators John McCain and Byron Dorgan.
McCain’s statement at the beginning of the hearing read: “In fact, documents obtained in the course of the investigation suggest that Mr. Abramoff might have had his tribal clients pay so much because he perceived that CREA’s president, Italia Federici, would help him get inside information about, and possibly influence, tribal issues pending at the Department of the Interior.”
You can see highlights from her testimony after the jump.
Hey, how about an article on Rick Santorum’s far more substantial ties to Ambramoff, K Street, and lobbyists? But of course you wouldn’t do that after the state just voted for him .
Links, sources please.
Don’t forget your assertion that Romney is behind Santorum. Yeah, THAT was smart.
So….
What’s your point? It’s a small world and we’re going to be making friends and associates that we had no idea were tied to a particular scandal.
It happens all over, I suppose. I doubt that you can get any sort of campaign going without having somebody from some scandal from way back trying to attach themselves to it. After all, politics is money and that’s what drives these people.
Not making any excuses – just pointing out reality.
Of course, the test of character in the candidates are where they have this pointed out to them, what do they do?
exCU — Really? Let’s be honest. You are known by the company you keep. You can’t tell me that the Gingrich campaign just happened upon Italia Federici and that there’s nobody out there to help with campaigns that is clean. Lame argument. This is no coincidence. They now who she is, they know what she’s done, they know her associations and there is more to this story. The question is, who owes whom?
that I had no idea who she was (didn’t know by the name what gender they were).
Not that I’m in any way a political junkie – just an outside looking in observation.
If anyone, the campaign manager should know more about that person having ties to whoever than the politician running for office. It’s their job to manage the campaign and be watchful of ethics and legal issues, etc. If they aren’t qualified, then they get someone who is.
It’s totally different if you’re sitting in a church pew listening to a preacher speak of hating whitey and the US. Here is a direct line to an association that the politician has chosen specifically.
Anything that has to do with the campaign of course comes from the top, but the details, etc., are left to the campaign manager. All the politician has to do is politic (speeches, debates, appearances, etc.).
Just my two (or one) cents.