Wal-Mart has fired James Hirni, the former Team Abramoff lobbyist who prosecutors on Friday charged with giving illegal gifts to two congressional staffers.

In a statement emailed to The Hill, a company spokesman wrote:

"Based on Mr. Hirni's [expected] guilty plea which relates to conduct occurring prior to and unrelated to his employment by the company, we terminated his employment."

Todd Boulanger, another former Abramoff team member implicated in the scheme resigned on Friday from the lobbying firm Cassidy and Associates. Boulanger has not been formally charged at this point.

Hirni had worked as Wal-Mart's "director of Republican outreach". He first represented the retail giant in 2004 while working with Abramoff at the law and lobbying firm Greenberg Traurig.

So what did James Hirni and Todd Boulanger -- the former Team Abramoff lobbyists now in hot water for plying congressional staffers with undisclosed gifts -- want in return?

Both men were working for Abramoff at the law and lobbying firm Greenberg Traurig, on behalf of United Rentals, an equipment rental company. Court documents filed by prosecutors allege that in 2003, they wanted action on an amendment to a federal highway reauthorization bill that would have encouraged state public works agencies to rent, rather than buy, construction equipment. That would clearly have benefited United Rentals.

The documents further allege that immediately after they had paid for Blackann and another staffer (identified as Staffer D) to attend the World Series (and a "Gentleman's Club" in New York), Boulanger and Hinri sent drafts of the specific measure they wanted to Trevor Blackann, the staffer who just pleaded in connection with the scheme, and Staffer D.

Staffer D at the time worked for the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, which was then chaired by Rep. Don Young (R-AK). That committee was overseeing the larger highway reauthorization bill to which Boulanger and Hirni were seeking to attach their measure.

In November of that year, say the documents, Boulanger and Hirni prevailed on a Senate staffer to offer the amendment they wanted to the Senate version of the bill.

United Rentals hardly has a squeaky clean reputation. This September, it agreed to pay the SEC $14 million, ending a four-year probe into claims that the company fraudulently inflated its earnings and made fraudulent leasing transactions with suppliers, between 1997 and 2002. It did not admit or deny the charges.

More developments in the ongoing Jack Abramoff probe...

Last week Trevor Blackann, a former staffer for Missouri Republicans Roy Blunt and Kit Bond, pleaded guilty to concealing thousands of dollars in illegal gifts he received from lobbyists who were part of Team Abramoff.

Those lobbyists were quickly identified as James Hirni, until recently a lobbyist for Wal-Mart, and Todd Boulanger, who until last week worked for Cassidy and Associates, a top DC lobby shop.

And late Friday, ABCNews.com reported that prosecutors had filed charges against Hirni, and that he's expected to plead guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Hirni's lawyer told the site that Hirni is cooperating with prosecutors, suggesting that DOJ is working to build cases against bigger fish.

As for Boulanger, he could be next to be charged: also Friday, Cassidy and Associates announced that it had "accepted the departure" of the lobbyist that afternoon.

The wide-ranging probe into the activities of disgraced GOP lobbyist Jack Abramoff has netted another conviction.

Trevor Blackann, a former aide to two Missouri Republicans, Rep. Roy Blunt and Sen. Kit Bond, pleaded guilty today to making false statements on his tax returns, concealing thousands of dollars in illegal gifts he received from Team Abramoff, reports The Hill.

What were those gifts? Only a free trip to Game 1 of the 2003 World Series in New York, a junket that included:

- airline travel to and from New York City.
- a ticket to the game.
- admission to, and entertainment at, a "gentleman's club" for the married aide.
- one-night accommodations in an "upscale" hotel.
- transportation in a chauffeured SUV.
- a souvenir baseball jersey.
- free meals and drinks.

All in all, not a bad haul.

In return, court filings allege, Blackann got Bond to write a letter of support for someone who wanted a political appointment to the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

According to the Associated Press, Blackann said in court documents Blackann that he knew "the lobbyists gave these things of value for or because of official actions they were seeking from him or had obtained from him."

Abramoff has been cooperating with prosecutors as they build cases against others in his circle.

Looks like The Washington Post got spun just a bit on a story about a new group said to be advocating for increased online privacy.

Under the milquetoast headline, "A New Voice in Online Privacy: Group Wants Tighter Rules for Collecting, Using Consumer Data", the paper reports:

A group of privacy scholars, lawyers and corporate officials are launching an advocacy group today designed to help shape standards around how companies collect, store and use consumer data for business and advertising.

Privacy scholars pushing for more online privacy makes sense. And "lawyers" could mean a lot of things. But exactly which "corporate officials" have an interest in tighter rules governing online consumer privacy?

Read on and things become clearer: The group, says the Post, is sponsored by AT&T, and will be led in part by Jules Polonetsky, "who until this month was in charge of AOL's privacy policy."

The paper adds:

Internet companies have come under fire for tracking consumers' online habits in order to tailor ads relevant to their interests. Lawmakers have held several hearings this year to examine online privacy protections.

President-elect Barack Obama has cited privacy as one of the technology issues his administration would address, setting the stage for a debate over standards for online publishers and advertisers. Obama also said he would appoint the first chief technology officer, who may be charged with making government data more transparent while protecting citizens' privacy. The Future of Privacy Forum will seek to work with the government on these issues.

So, reading between the lines, it's not hard to figure out what's going on here. Corporations understand that stricter privacy regulations are coming, no matter what they do. So they're trying to get out in front, by funding an advocacy group that appears to put them on the right side of the issue, but will almost certainly work to ensure that whatever reforms are put in place won't be too onerous for internet companies.

Not that that's unusual in Washington. But why should Post readers have to read between the lines to understand what's really going on?

Since the Post appears not to have bothered to look into the Future of Privacy Forum (FPF) much beyond reading and transcribing its press release, we asked the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a leading advocacy organization for the public interest in the online sphere, what they knew about the group.

In response, we hardly received a ringing endorsement of FPF's bona fides as an advocate for stricter privacy standards. "This is the first we've heard of this group, so we'll have to wait and see," an EFF spokesperson told us.

We should note, by the way, the San Francisco Chronicle did better in giving its readers an accurate picture of what's going on, reporting in the lede of its story:

AT&T is funding a group run by some of the nation's top privacy experts that aims to influence policy in the Obama administration and develop best practices on privacy for businesses.

Change we can believe in?

Last week, the Obama transition team announced that it had tapped veteran Beltway Democrat Thomas Donilon to help lead its review of operations at the State Department. As multiple news outlets quickly pointed out, until 2005 Donilon helped oversee the aggressive lobbying operation of troubled mortgage giant Fannie Mae.

Now, ABCNews.com has fleshed out the picture a bit, reporting that Donilon oversaw what it describes as a "backdoor lobbying campaign ... to undermine the credibility of a probe into the firm's accounting irregularities."

The details, which center on a campaign to discredit an agency charged with overseeing the company:

The effort -- which reportedly included attacks on the funding for the oversight agency, the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, and an attempt to launch a separate investigation into OFHEO itself -- was ultimately unsuccessful, and regulators eventually discovered top Fannie Mae executives had been manipulating the company's financial reporting to maximize their bonuses.

Donilon was not found to be involved in the financial manipulations, but he did help give Fannie's board the misimpression that the company was in good financial health, according to the OFHEO investigation.

Donilon did not comment to ABCNews.com.

As we just noted, Murray Waas is reporting that William Timmons, the head of John McCain's transition team, was involved in a lobbying effort on behalf of Saddam Hussein's government in the early 1990s.

At TPMmuckraker, we've acquired a copy of the court documents from the 2006 trial of Tongsun Park, one of the lobbyists involved, on which Waas' report was in part based.

And they shed some crucial light on a key point about Timmons' involvement in the scheme.

As Waas notes:

Timmons previously told investigators that he did not know that either Vincent or Park were acting as unregistered agents of Iraq. He also insisted that he did not fully understand just how closely the two men were tied to Saddam's regime while they collaborated.

But testimony and records made public during Park's criminal trial, as well as other information uncovered during a United Nations investigation, suggest just the opposite.

For instance, court records examined by TPMmuckraker show that Samir Vincent, the other lobbyist involved in the scheme, testified at Park's trial about a trip he took to Iraq during which he met with Saddam personally, and listened as the Iraqi dictator expressed his desire to have sanctions lifted and normal relations with the U.S. restored.

The prosecutor then asked Vincent: "When you returned to the U.S., did you tell anyone about your visit with Saddam Hussein?"

Vincent replied: "I told Bill Timmons and Tongsun Park."

Prosecutor: "Why did you tell Bill Timmons about your visit with Saddam?"

Vincent: "To let him know that we were talking to the leader of Iraq, and in essence we have access, and assure him that any messages we were relaying between Iraqi (sic) and Tariq Aziz [a top Saddam aide] and anyone else, it was being transmitted to the president, Saddam Hussein, in Iraq."

Late Update: As we should have noted, this exchange appears in Waas' report.

Wiliam Timmons, the veteran Washington lobbyist tapped to lead John McCain's transition team was involved in an effort on behalf of Saddam Hussein's government to ease international sanctions against Iraq, according to a report by Murray Waas in The Huffington Post.

The two lobbyists with whom Timmons teamed in the early 90s, Samir Vincent and Tongsun Park, both either pleaded guilty to, or were convicted of, charges that they had acted as unregistered agents of Saddam's government.

Park has a long history of involvement with covert schemes to influence international events. In 1976, he was charged with attempting to bribe members of Congress to win their support for keeping U.S. troops in Vietnam.

This isn't the first time that Timmons has had his name in the news for the wrong reasons since being announced as McCain's transition chief. Last month, Bloomberg reported that he had lobbied on behalf of Freddie Mac, a company that McCain has blamed for helping to cause the current financial crisis.

Timmons' Washington lobby firm, Timmons and Co., founded in the 1970's, helped develop the model on which today's lobbying culture is based.

Looks like Rick Davis isn't the only lobbyist problem the McCain camp is dealing with these days.

Mother Jones reports that two actively-registered lobbyists are currently working on John McCain's campaign for president.

Wayne Berman, co-chairs McCain's national finance committee. James Jay Baker co-steers McCain's National Steering Committee of Sportsmen for McCain. Both work for the lobbying firm, Ogilvy Government Relations as managing directors.

This month, the NRA -- a client of Baker and Berman's -- launched attack ads against Barack Obama. MoJo points out that besides conflicting with McCain's claims for running a straight-shooting, non-lobbyist campaign, Berman and Baker's presence also could come into conflict with the actual campaign rules that banned active lobbyists from working full time for the campaign, or participating in 527s or groups that "oppose any presidential candidate."

From Mother Jones:

Asked whether he might be in violation of the campaign's conflict rules, Berman told Mother Jones, "Hmmm, I hadn't thought of that." He said he was currently lobbying for the NRA but not involved in the group's campaign activities. "I'm in full compliance with campaign policy," he maintained. "I will check over there....I will continue to be in compliance. If that requires me to make changes, I'll make them." He added, "You've done me a favor" by raising this issue.

A quick followup to yesterday's post on the PR firm Ketchum's work shilling for Vladimir Putin. We reported that, according to disclosure forms, Integrated Solutions Group is paid for its lobbying on behalf of Russia "through an arrangement with the Washington Group," Ketchum's lobbying arm. But the ties between ISG and Ketchum run even deeper.

ISG appears to share a K Street address with the Washington Group. And three of the seven "government relations consultants" listed on its website are also listed as part of the Washington Group team. One of those is John O'Hanlon, who, as we wrote yesterday, is the ISG lobbyist listed on disclosure forms as working for Russia, and is The Washington Group's managing director. So it looks like Ketchum is responsible not just for doing PR, but also for organizing a congressional lobbying effort, on behalf of Russia.

And an additional note on Ketchum's operation. Yesterday we wrote that Ketchum was leading an international consortium of agencies, including Brussels-based GPlus, to do PR on Russia's behalf. But Ketchum and GPlus are both subsidiaries of the same company, Omnicom -- they're "sister companies," as a GPlus spokesman put it.

It's worth noting again that this is all completely above board. But it's an interesting look at the various forms of "assistance" a company like Ketchum can offer its clients. We've put in a call to the Washington Group, and will let you know what we hear.

Harriet Miers, former White House counsel, one-time Supreme Court nominee and current partner at Locke Lord Bissell & Liddell, can now add lobbyist for the Pakistan People's Party and the Embassy of Pakistan to her resume, according to documents filed with the DOJ earlier this month.

In May of this year, Locke Lord Strategies signed a one-year $900,000 agreement to lobby for the Embassy of Pakistan. On her foreign agent registration short form, Miers listed the "Embassy of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, Pakistan People's Party (PPP) and Asif Ali Zardari, Co-Chairperson of PPP and his children" as clients. The group's ongoing work lobbying for the PPP continues on a pro bono basis.

In case you're wondering if this has anything to do with the current events in Pakistan, The Blog of Legal Times has your answer:

What does President Pervez Musharraf's resignation mean for Locke Lord? Probably not much. The firm has represented Asif Ali Zardari, the leader of the Pakistan Peoples Party and an opponent of Musharraf, since March, when the firm was retained to promote democracy and pressure Pakistan's government to investigate former PPP head Benazir Bhutto's assassination.

We already know that in the years just before the invasion of Iraq, Randy Scheunemann, now John McCain's top foreign policy aide, was part of the circle of advisors and operatives around Ahmad Chalabi, the Iraqi exile who used bogus intelligence to sell the war. Over the last few days we've spoken to associates of Chalabi's and Scheunemann's from those years to fill out the picture of the working relationship between the two men.

Entifadh Qanbar, who worked for Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress (INC) in Washington in 2001 and 2002, described Scheunemann to TPM as a "close friend....We exchanged thoughts, exchanged ideas. We would often meet, go for lunch." Qanbar said Scheuenemann was also very close with both Chalabi and Francis Brooke, a longtime Chalabi aide and spokesman. Qanbar said he believes it was Brooke who first connected Scheunemann to Chalabi and the INC.

In fact, said Qanbar, Scheunemann was so friendly with the INC crowd that when the INC moved out of the shabby office space that Qanbar had found at 918 Pennsylvania Avenue SE on Capitol Hill, Qanbar suggested to Scheunemann -- who at the time was looking for a cheap spot to house his new lobbying shop, Orion Strategies -- that Scheunemann take the place over. To this day, Orion HQ is at 918 Penn (though the McCain campaign has said Scheunemann suspended his activities there earlier this year). And that was also the address Scheunemann later used for the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq (CLI), the group he founded in late 2002 to gin up public support for the war.

But the links between Chalabi's INC and Scheunemann's CLI may go even further. Here's a photo of a webpage from the INC site. But notice the web address at the bottom: http://liberationiraq.org. That's the address for the CLI. The picture was taken by the Washington journalist Jim Lobe, who blogged about it in May, and confirmed its authenticity to TPM. According to Lobe, in April 2003, he typed in the address for Scheunemann's group, and got the INC homepage. When he called CLI to ask why, Scheunemann "mumbled something about how both the CLI and the INC used the same server in London."

Scheunemann seems to have set out from the start to make himself useful to Chalabi. Scott Ritter, the former UN weapons inspector, got a firsthand look at just how. Ritter told TPM that back in 1998, he came to Washington for a meeting with Scheunemann. Instead, Scheunemann sent him over to Chalabi's Georgetown townhouse, where Chalabi, Brooke, and a who's-who of Washington neoconservatives explained their half-baked plan to topple Saddam. The next day, Ritter did meet with Scheunemann, and shared with him a lab report that, Ritter believed, suggested Saddam was making chemical weapons (the intelligence proved to be flawed). Ritter asked Scheunemann to leak the report to the press, in order to put pressure on the Clinton administration and the UN to toughen their inspections. Scheunemann was more than happy to do so, says Ritter. But when, a short time later, The Washington Post ran a story on the lab report, the story was sourced to Chalabi's INC. Scheunemann, it seemed, had, without Ritter's permission, passed the intel on to Chalabi to leak, as a way of enhancing Chalabi's status, and currying favor with the INC leader. Ritter wrote about the incident in March.

There's been a lot of talk in the last few weeks and months about John McCain's ties to lobbyists. So here at TPMmuckraker, we decided to do a little digging to officially catalog the possibilities. What we came up with, we fondly call "John McCain's Lobbyist Universe," a working guide to the presidential hopeful's connections. Click on each of the familiar faces to get a synopsis of their role in the campaign and their lobbyist ties. We expect to be growing and expanding this chart as more facts come in, and as always we welcome any tips or knowledge that you, our readers, have to offer.

The "Swift Boaters" from 2004 are back at it.

A group of top Republican contributors who financially fueled the famous "Swift Boat" campaign ads that helped sink Sen. John Kerry's presidential campaign back in 2004 are starting to regroup.

A story in today's Wall Street Journal reports on new Republican efforts to circumvent the landmark campaign finance laws named after their top candidate -- the McCain-Feingold Act of 2002.

The GOP is raising tons of cash for the Republican Governors Association, which is a so-called 527 group and permits donors to exceed the $2,300 individual cap that applies to presidential campaigns. Although these groups are barred from soliciting money for presidential candidates, the association is telling prospective contributors that money for the association will ultimately help out McCain at the top of the ticket.

Of course the association's fund is getting cash from big corporations like Pfizer, Bank of America Corp. and Travelers, which have given $150,000 or more. But that's not the main target of this fundraising effort.

Rather, the pitch is aimed at individuals, including many top contributors to the controversial Swift Boat group that targeted Sen. Kerry. Texas developer Bob Perry, the largest financial backer of the Swift Boat group, also is the largest individual donor to the governors group, at $250,000. Carl Lindner, a retired insurance executive in Ohio and another top Swift Boat financier, has contributed $100,000 to the governors' fund. The campaign-finance lawyer for the Swift Boat group in 2004 now serves the same role for the governors association. The McCain campaign and the individual contributors all declined to comment on their involvement.

Yet the whole situation is dubiously legal. In 2005 the Federal Election Commission banned such groups from soliciting donations by pledging help to a federal candidate. Even the McCain camp questions the pitch tactics.

"If it is in fact telling its donors their money will help elect McCain they are being inaccurate," said McCain spokesman Brian Rogers, told the Journal, noting the group cannot legally attempt to sway a federal race. But he said that because he had not yet seen evidence the group is campaigning on Sen. McCain's behalf, "It's not an issue."

We'll have to wait and see what kind of ads the association actually runs. But so far, they've seen a big uptick in donations, raking in $14 million during the first half of this year, compared to $3 million for the Democratic governors' group.

The governor's association is unique among the so-called 527 groups. Like its Democratic counterpart, it is the only 527 set up by the national party.

The McCain camp is also trying out some other tactics to get around McCain's 2002 law and rake in more money to match Sen. Barack Obama's massive money machine, according to the Journal.

They're leveraging a technique that establishes a joint fund-raising account allowing donors write checks for up to $70,100. The campaign pulled in $3 million for the fund in a matter of days in June.