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Revision as of 22:03, 23 June 2005

Jack Abramoff, a long-time Washington insider, has been a Republican lobbyist and fundraiser and was a Bush Pioneer. According to the College Republican National Committee (CRNC) web site, he was Senior Director of Government Affairs for the Greenberg Traurig law and lobbying firm and was CRNC National Chairman from 1981-85. He is also a Director of the National Center for Public Policy Research.

Abramoff is a graduate of Brandeis University and the Georgetown University Law Center.

In 2004, Abramoff resigned from Greenberg Traurig amid a scandal related to spending irregularities in his work as a lobbyist for Native American tribes involved in gambling. The Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians paid $15 million dollars to Abramoff and Scanlon's organizations. The funds were diverted to the Eshkol Academy, an all boys Orthodox Jewish school setup by Abramoff in Maryland; and to a sniper school for the Israeli IDF.

An archive of Abramoff's biography from the Greenberg Traurig website describes him as follows:

Jack Abramoff's practice focuses on building legislative coalitions, grassroots organizing and Washington, DC based lobbying efforts. Jack is considered a top issues strategist. He has been consistently named as one of the nation's most powerful and effective lobbyists in rankings by publications including the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New York Times, National Journal, Roll Call and Washingtonian Magazine. Jack is directly involved in the Republican party and conservative movement leadership structures and is one of the leading fund raisers for the party and its congressional candidates. He is a former executive director of President Ronald Reagan's grassroots lobbying organization, Citizens For America, where he directed and crafted lobbying efforts on a broad range of issues. Jack also had a direct role in shaping the agenda of the second Reagan presidential term, which, in its later applications, ultimately brought the Republican Party to control of Congress in 1994.

"Before this position, Jack was twice elected Chairman of the College Republican National Committee beginning in 1981. He was oversaw the largest and most effective College Republican National Committee ever, with over 1100 chapters nationwide. He also changed the direction of the committee and made it more activist and conservative than ever before. Jack ran our most successful field programs until that time with very little funding by sending the field representatives out in vans to recruit for months at a time, making the committee more successful than ever before. Jack brought two famous future activists into his administration, Grover Norquist and Ralph Reed, as his Executive Directors. Before this time Jack ran the youth effort for Reagan in Massachusetts which produced 10,000 absentee ballot votes in Reagan's 3000 vote margin of victory. Jack designed and ran the anti nuclear freeze campaign. He is a regular lecturer at Georgetown Law Center on entertainment law topics. Jack has hands-on experience in the entertainment industry, he spent ten years as the producer of a number of feature motion pictures including Red Scorpion, an anti communist film made just after Jack's term as national chairman of the College Republicans.'

In E-mails now made public by the FBI who is investigating him, Abramoff repeatedly refers to Native Americans as (among other things) "monkeys" and "idiots."

Source: Internet archive, http://web.archive.org/web/20030612020908/http://gtlaw.com/bios/govadmin/abramoffj.htm

Jack Abramoff is also founder and former chairman of the International Freedom Foundation (IFF).

References

• The original version of this article is derived from material at Sourcewatch, and released to Misplaced Pages under the GFDL license

link http://www.jackinthehouse.org/