Washington – I tried to pay a call on the Council of Republicans for Environmental Advocacy last week.
The council posts its address on its website: 2100 M St. NW, No. 303. That’s also the address that CREA gave the IRS in its most recent filing.
“You want George Washington University?” asked Nita, the security guard in the lobby, when I got to 2100 M. “That’s all who is up there.”
Nita was stumped by the name of CREA. She’s been working at 2100 M for more than a year, she said, and never heard of the group or its president, Italia Federici.
And she was right. The only occupied offices on the third floor belong to the university’s comptroller, whose staff, coming to my aid, helped me search the floor.
We found no CREA. There is no room or suite 303.
I was searching for CREA because I wanted to ask Federici how an environmental group like hers got involved in an Indian gaming scandal.
As Mike Soraghan and Anne Mulkern reported in The Post last Sunday, casino tribes represented by lobbyist Jack Abramoff say they gave at least $250,000 to CREA. In the same time period, government records show that Federici helped advance Abramoff’s cause at the Department of the Interior.
Abramoff is now under investigation by the Senate Indian Affairs Committee and a federal law enforcement task force for a whole range of questionable lobbying activities. Interior’s inspector general is probing Federici’s ties to its top officials.
Leaving the building, and thinking I may have made a mistake, I walked over to an earlier CREA address: 1429 G St. NW, No. 408.
It was a flower shop.
I returned to the office and called up CREA’s website on my computer. Perhaps the group had moved and forgotten to update its home page.
No, the website had fresh postings. CREA sent letters to U.S. senators last week, asking them to vote against a pending Senate amendment that would slow global warming. The letters listed 2100 M St. as the return address.
It’s all very curious. There is no law against running an organization or business out of your home, or using impressive titles or a fancy website or a remote mailing address. Telecommuting is a worthy practice. It helps the environment.
But I was still left wondering what casino tribes thought they were getting when they sent CREA $250,000.
Last week, the Indian Affairs Committee held a hearing at which witnesses told how Abramoff got Indian clients to contribute hundreds of thousands of dollars to various Washington advocacy groups and nonprofit organizations.
Some of the recipients of the Abramoff-directed money made for implausible power brokers. David Grosh, a lifeguard from Rehoboth Beach, Del., delighted the audience when he described how he had been asked by one of Abramoff’s associates to head the “American International Center,” a “public policy research foundation” that ran out of his beach house.
“I was, like, ‘Sure,”‘ Grosh said.
Committee chairman John McCain, R-Ariz., charged that the AIC and other nonprofit groups were fronts used by Abramoff to defraud Indian clients of money.
But other recipients of Indian money offered the promise of clout. One such group, Americans for Tax Reform, arranged for Abramoff’s Indian clients to attend a White House coffee with President Bush, according to documents released at the meeting.
Silly you, thinking that kind of thing ended when Bill Clinton left town.
To casino tribes in Mississippi or Michigan, CREA must have sounded like a good bet. The secretary of the interior herself, Gale Norton, helped found CREA, along with Grover Norquist, who heads Americans for Tax Reform and is one of Abramoff’s bosom pals.
Norton’s spokesman says the secretary has not been involved in CREA since it was reorganized, before she took office in 2001. But CREA’s treasurer, according to its IRS filings, is Norton’s campaign manager from her unsuccessful 1996 Senate race. Federici worked for Norton in that race, too.
Mike and Anne showed last Sunday how Abramoff used CREA to boost his clients’ case at Interior. Federici worked to get Abramoff’s clients in to see Norton. Abramoff and one of his tribal chairmen were on the guest list at a private CREA dinner that Federici helped stage in 2001, with Norton and other top Interior officials.
Ultimately, I e-mailed Federici, and she called me back but declined to talk on the record. She has told the Rocky Mountain News that she is a witness, not a target, in the Abramoff investigations and was only trying to assist two friends – her “mentor” Norton and Abramoff, whom she described as a CREA “supporter.”
“If somebody calls me up and asks me to arrange a cup of coffee between the secretary and one of her constituents, and I call the scheduling office … that’s entirely appropriate,” she said.
Writing about Abramoff in this space last year, I cheered McCain for putting aside partisan loyalty and working to clean up a GOP mess.
But Abramoff’s connections to Norton and other Interior officials have not yet played a central role in McCain’s hearings. Maybe the senator is waiting for Interior and Justice officials to conduct their own investigations, or perhaps he is being pressed by the Republican caucus to rein in his investigators.
But it’s time McCain knocked on CREA’s door. If he can find it.
John Aloysius Farrell’s column appears each Sunday. You can comment at the Washington and the West blog (denverpostbloghouse.com/washington) or contact him at jfarrell@denverpost.com.
