Last night I watched “Casino Jack and the United States of Money,” a documentary all about the shady dealings of Jack Abramoff and his cronies. One of those cronies was Ralph Reed, who just so happened to be on Alan Colmes’ radio program last night pitching his new novel “The Confirmation.”
First, Colmes asked Reed about his infamous “I do guerrilla warfare … You don’t know it’s over until you’re in a body bag” quote, which Reed claimed was simply a poor choice of words for his method of taking on the boring, ground-level grunt work like knocking on doors and turning out voters – it is not sexy or flashy, but it wins elections.
Colmes then turned to Reed’s work with Jack Abramoff exploiting his clout within the Religious Right to protect Abramoff’s client’s gambling interests, which Reed defended on the grounds that he made it clear that he would not accept any money that was derived from gambling and never was.
Of course, as I explained several years ago when I wrote a report of Reed and his ties to Abramoff, this explanation is entirely self-serving and frankly rather pointless, as Reed was fully aware of why Abramoff was working on there and where the funding for the effort was coming from, which is why it had to be routed through Grover Norquist in order to hide its origin:
In 1999, Abramoff subcontracted Reed’s firm to generate opposition to attempts to legalize a state-sponsored lottery and video poker in Alabama, an effort that was bankrolled by the Choctaw Tribe in order to eliminate competition to its own casino in neighboring Mississippi. Reed promised that Century Strategies was “opening the bomb bays and holding nothing back” and his firm ultimately received $1.3 million from the Choctaws for this effort, which included engaging the Alabama chapter of the Christian Coalition, as well as influential right-wing figures such as James Dobson, to work to defeat the proposals.
The strategy had one small problem: the Alabama Christian Coalition had an explicit policy that it “will not be the recipient of any funds direct or in-direct or any in-kind direct or indirect from gambling interests.” (Emphasis in original.) Knowing this, Reed and Abramoff worked to hide the source of the $850,000 paid to the Christian Coalition for its anti-gambling efforts by funneling money from the Choctaws through Americans for Tax Reform, a Washington, DC anti-tax organization headed by their old College Republican friend Grover Norquist. When asked why the tribe’s money had to be funneled through conduits such as ATR, a Choctaw representative stated it was because Reed did not want it known that casino money was funding his operation: “It was our understanding that the structure was recommended by Jack Abramoff to accommodate Mr. Reed’s political concerns.”
Nonetheless, Reed repeatedly assured the Christian Coalition that the funding for its work was not coming from gambling interests. This was technically true as the Choctaws were paying for it out of their non-gambling revenue, though their objective was obviously to protect their own gambling interests and revenue. According to emails obtained during a Senate investigation into Abramoff’s activities and reported in the media, Reed was well aware of who was paying for this anti-gambling effort. When the information began to surface in the press and the Christian Coalition learned of the source of the $850,000 it had received, it demanded an explanation from Reed who apologized in a letter saying he should have “explained that the contributions came from the Choctaws,” thus admitting that he had been fully aware of the source of the funding. But by the time Reed offered his “after-the-fact apology,” the gambling initiative had been defeated and the Christian Coalition had been duped.
When word of Reed’s work for Abramoff first broke, Reed claimed that he had “no direct knowledge of [Abramoff’s lobbying firm’s] clients or their interests.” But according to the report recently released by the Senate Indian Affairs Committee on Abramoff’s bilking of the tribes, Reed was informed by Abramoff as early as 1999 that the money that was funding his anti-gambling operations was coming from the casino-owning Choctaw tribe.
The report published an email Abramoff sent to Reed instructing him to “page me with a page of no more than 90 words … informing me of your completion of the budget and giving me a total budget figure with category breakdowns. Once I get this, I will call Nell [Rodgers] at Choctaw and get it approved.” A subsequent email to Reed asked him to send “invoices as soon as possible so I can get Choctaw to get us checks asap.”
Thus, Reed was clearly aware that the funding for his anti-gambling work was coming from the Choctaw and that he was indirectly working to protect the tribe’s multi-million dollar gambling interests. Despite the repeated references to the Choctaw in Abramoff’s emails, Reed continued to publicly insist that he did not know the source of the funding.
Reed told Colmes that he would not accept this sort of work today, which is not surprising given that it was this very work which caused him to lose his race to be the GOP nominee Lt. Governor of Georgia, but insists that he did nothing wrong and that the work he did for Abramoff “was outstanding, I’m proud of it, and it advanced sound public policy”:
