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http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0417,barrett,53013,1.html.... The dark force of Indian gaming, retained as a hidden consultant by tribes and developers across the country, was
Roger Stone, a veteran of eight Republican presidential campaigns and
star of the Miami/Dade recount shutdown. Scott Reed is often his up-front lobbyist face.
So, too, are
William Brack and Chris Changery, onetime lobbyists with Brownstein, Hyatt, the Denver-based firm that employed Norton. Changery had been a press spokesman for Senator
Ben Nighthorse Campbell, the Colorado Republican who chairs the Indian Affairs committee. Brack is counsel to the Nighthorse Foundation, a recent invention of the retiring senator.
Stone threw a fundraiser for the senator at his Miami estate. Though Brack and Changery left Brownstein in 2003, Stone still gets tribes to hire them "for the specific mission of inserting our language" in a Campbell bill, according to a Stone memo. Though the two recently orchestrated a Campbell-sponsored technical correction helpful to a Stone project, neither filed as lobbyists. The language, which deliberately omitted the tribe's name, was quietly withdrawn after Voice inquiries about it. ....
...a collision course with Stone and his usual coterie of sidekicks—Reed, Brack, and Changery. ....
The mostly
Democratic insiders around Potts
picked Stone as the Republican player who could, as Buena Vista attorney John Peebles put it, "reverse the area director's order" that dislodged Potts as tribal chair. ....
Everyone, including Stone, would eventually
agree that the third letter was a fabrication, so instantly discredited that Time never mentioned it in the April 15 story. Not only does the addressee, Coushatta vice chair William Worfel, say it's a phony, but he says
he met Stone for the first time two weeks before it was written. "We exchanged cards," Worfel recalls, adding that federal investigators who questioned him said they'd found his card in the offices of Buena Vista.
Stone says he "has no memory of ever seeing the Louisiana letter." Copperthite, who was not involved in the Smith dispute, says "
Stone handed me that package with that phony letter in it." ....
The other two letters raised damaging enough issues, as Stone points out, and within four days of Time's piece, New Jersey senator Bob Torricelli wrote Norton seeking a Smith investigation.
Stone says he "probably" got his old friend Torricelli to do it. Several fake faxes about Smith started arriving at Interior—one from Brulte's office—and
Stone allies at the Thompson tribe wrote letters deriding Smith. ....
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