Jack Abramoff, goat to many Guamanians, Tom DeLay, goat to most Americans who believe their public officials should adhere to ethical norms, and David Safavian should all be forced to live in a tent city outside of New Orleans.
Chicago Tribune | Ex-White House official arrested
A senior White House budget official who resigned abruptly last week was arrested Monday on charges of lying to investigators and obstructing a federal inquiry involving Jack Abramoff, the Republican lobbyist who has been under scrutiny by the Justice Department for more than a year. The arrest of David Safavian, who was head of procurement policy at the Office of Management and Budget, was the first to result from the wide-ranging corruption investigation of Abramoff, once among the most powerful and best-paid lobbyists in Washington and a close friend of Tom DeLay, the House majority leader.According to court papers, Safavian, 38, is accused of lying about assistance he provided to Abramoff in his earlier work at the General Services Administration, where he was chief of staff from 2002 to 2004, and about an expensive golf trip he took with the lobbyist to Scotland in August 2002. Abramoff, a former lobbying partner of Safavian, was indicted last month in Florida on unrelated federal fraud charges. He is not identified by name in the court papers involving Safavian's arrest. But “Lobbyist A,” as he is called in an FBI affidavit, could only be Abramoff based on descriptive details in the documents filed in the federal district court in Washington.
The Justice Department said Safavian is charged with making false statements to investigators about his efforts at the GSA in 2002 to help Abramoff acquire two large pieces of government-owned property in the Washington area, including the historic Old Post Office building on Pennsylvania Avenue. The department said Safavian also lied to ethics officials at the GSA, the agency that manages federal property, when he sought approval to accept free transportation from Abramoff for the golf trip to Scotland that summer. According to court documents, Safavian told the ethics office that Abramoff had no business with the GSA at the time, an assertion that was repeated in a separate interview last May with the FBI.
Tags: corruption, /Politics
