Convicted felon Jack Abramoff took his recommendations for lobbying reform to 60 Minutes on Sunday night, arguing that Capitol Hill staffers shouldn’t be allowed to become lobbyists.
“I would say or my staff would say to him or her at some point, ‘you know, when you’re done working on the hill, we’d very much like to consider coming to work for us.’ Now the moment I said that to him, or any of our staff said that to him, that was it. We owned them,” Abramoff told CBS’s Lesley Stahl.
“At the end of the day most of the people that I encountered on Capitol Hill wanted to come work on K Street, wanted to be lobbyists,” Abramoff said. “Evil. Terrible. Shamefully. It’s the worst thing that could happen.”
CBS also interviewed former Rep. Bob Ney and his chief-of-staff Neil Volz, who now works as a janitor, about their relationship with Abramoff and Ney’s experience in prison.
“The first day I was in, I remember a guy looked at me and said… you did the Sudafed law that put me in here,” Ney said. “With a lot of the drug dealers, I was more comfortable with, they weren’t as whiny as the white collar guys.”
Ryan J. Reilly
Ryan J. Reilly is a D.C.-based reporter for TPM. Prior to joining TPM, he worked for a news website covering the Justice Department and was a researcher for Bloomberg News. His email address is ryan(at)talkingpointsmemo.com.
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