http://www.wweek.com/print.php?story=6692Excerpt from Nick Budnick's
Willamette Week story:
Smith and Abramoff aren't strangers. The senator has held fundraisers at a D.C. restaurant that Abramoff owned until recently, and he has taken thousands of dollars in campaign donations from Abramoff and his tribal clients.
For years, Abramoff, at first with Seattle-based law firm Preston Gates and later with a smaller firm, was a top D.C. lobbyist, whose clients included several Indian tribes. Evidence has come out in the past year that Abramoff privately referred to his Indian clients as "monkeys" and may have defrauded them.
The U.S. Department of Justice last month charged Abramoff with fraud in an unrelated Florida real-estate deal. But for political buffs, the more interesting part of the continuing federal probe is revelations that "Team Abramoff" used favors-such as trips funded by nonprofit front groups-to, as one Abramoff email puts it, "reward" congressmen and their staff for special treatment. In addition to sitting on the committee looking at tribal shenanigans, Smith also sits on the Finance Committee, now looking at bogus nonprofits, another piece of the Abramoff scandal.
Asked to point to any public statement by Smith about the Abramoff affair, Smith spokesman Chris Matthews cannot. But Matthews does say his boss voted last year to grant subpoena power to the investigation.
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