Abramoff had been one of the financiers of evangelical leader Ralph Reed’s brass-knuckled efforts to defeat McCain in the 2000 South Carolina Republican primary. Book attacks McCain's Abramoff inquiry

A new book released the day after Sen. John McCain accepted the Republican presidential nomination attacks one of his trademark political successes: his investigation of now-jailed lobbyist Jack Abramoff in 2004 and 2005.

“The Perfect Villain: John McCain and the Demonization of Lobbyist Jack Abramoff,” by former Boston Globe freelancer Gary S. Chafetz and put out by small independent publisher Martin and Lawrence press, aggressively puts forth the case that McCain’s investigation into Abramoff wasn’t the high-minded reform crusade he has made it out to be on the campaign trail, but rather was pure political payback.


Abramoff had been one of the financiers of evangelical leader Ralph Reed’s brass-knuckled efforts to defeat McCain in the 2000 South Carolina Republican primary. Shorly after McCain lost that campaign to Bush, he quit the race.

Chafetz argues that McCain nursed the wounds of that defeat for years, and in 2004 jumped on the chance to investigate Abramoff after the Washington Post published a damning expose of the millions of dollars in lobbying fees Abramoff had collected from his casino-rich Indian tribal clients.

Peppered with new quotes from Abramoff—who met with Chafetz while in federal prison in Cumberland, MD—the book alleges that McCain withheld the vast majority of emails he confiscated during the inquiry, many of which could be exculpatory to the former lobbyist or damaging to McCain allies.

But Chafetz goes further than almost all of the few remaining Abramoff defenders, arguing that McCain deliberately twisted the results of his investigation to paint Abramoff in the worse possible light—and that McCain’s own actions to benefit his political contributors are similar to the very misdeeds he accused Abramoff of committing.

The McCain campaign did not respond to a request for comment by press time. On September 4th, just as McCain was getting ready for his GOP acceptance speech, Abramoff appeared in court to receive a four-year jail sentence stemming from his guilty plea in the public-corruption case. He has already been in federal prison for nearly two years on unrelated fraud charges in a Florida case.

As for Abramoff himself, Chafetz says he appears to have “battered woman’s syndrome” and now believes the accusations against him.

One section of the book relies heavily on documents he found on a Web site that purports to have transcripts of interviews McCain gave while in captivity. In them, the prisoner of war gave his jailers details about the circumstances of his capture, his missions over Vietnam, and quotes they could use for propaganda purposes.

This article tagged under: 2010

Politics