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Bush, DeLay Open Door to casino gambling

Washington - George W. Bush gave the nation's gambling industry plenty of reason to fear his presidency.

He moved to shut down an Indian-run casino while governor of Texas. He declared in a widely circulated state report that "Casino gambling is not OK. It has ruined the lives of too many adults, and it can do the same thing to our children." He wooed religious conservatives by boasting in a presidential debate about his "strong antigambling record."

But as president, Bush has not spoken out against gambling. After promising not to take money from gambling interests, Bush's campaign fund accepted large contributions from gambling-related sources. His 2001 inaugural committee raised at least $300,000 from gambling interests, including gifts from MGM/Mirage, Sands, and a leading slot-machine maker. Bush later appeared at a Las Vegas casino for a fund-raiser for his reelection campaign.

Bush's retreat from his antigambling rhetoric came as Republican lobbyists and activist groups collected tens of millions of dollars from Indian tribes seeking to preserve their casinos. Now those payments are the focus of Senate and Justice Department investigations.

Bush is not the subject of the investigations and denied through a spokesman having anything to do with aiding Indian casino interests. But Bush's aides acknowledge that the president met with Indian gaming leaders at the White House in annual sessions over a four-year period that were arranged by antitax crusader Grover Norquist, in some cases after tribes contributed to Norquist's organization. Norquist and the White House say casinos were not discussed.

As the investigations continue, the politics of gambling are crucial to understanding how some Republican leaders and organizations have profited from the industry. When Bush was a firm opponent of gambling, his position opened the door for GOP lobbyists to court gaming tribes worried about a tough administration policy. After Bush dropped his antigambling rhetoric, lobbyists touted their access, and fund-raising from Indian tribes grew exponentially.

Among the prominent figures who have come under the scrutiny of Senate and federal investigators are Norquist, whose organization received $1.5 million from tribes and fought a tax on Indian casinos; lobbyist Jack Abramoff, a top Bush fund-raiser who earned millions of dollars in fees as a consultant to gaming tribes; and Ralph Reed, the former director of the Christian Coalition who allegedly used some money from Indian gaming tribes to fund his efforts to close down rival casinos and lotteries. House majority leader Tom DeLay, who has said he is strongly antigambling, also has drawn media scrutiny because of his ties to Abramoff and opposition to an Indian gaming tax.

"We had great hopes and expectations when Bush was elected," said Tom Grey, a Methodist minister who heads the National Coalition Against Legalized Gambling. But now "gambling has become the feeding trough" for politicians, he said.

Grey called on Bush to take the lead in returning gambling contributions and to speak out against casinos.

"To have nothing come out of his mouth is tantamount to saying, 'It's OK, you can operate business as usual vis-a-vis gambling,' " Grey said.

Dana Perino, a spokeswoman for the White House, said Bush has not spoken out against gambling because it "is primarily a state-level issue, and his record as governor reflects that."

But many Indian tribes believed they had much to fear from Washington, and much to gain from hiring lobbyists who boasted of their access to the Republican leadership - all the way up to the White House.

A candidate shows his hand to religious conservatives. As Bush prepared to run for president, he hoped to avoid a mistake that hurt the reelection bid of his father. George H. W. Bush felt uncomfortable wooing religious conservatives. The younger Bush worked closely with religious conservatives, especially Reed, who had been quoted in Business Week in 1998 as warning that "any presidential candidate who receives casino support is going to come under heavy fire."

Bush, in presenting his antigambling credentials during the 2000 presidential campaign, cited his efforts to close the Speaking Rock Casino run by a tribe called the Tigua in El Paso. The same casino would later become a focus of the investigations into whether lobbyists defrauded Indian tribes. Though Bush was consistent in his opposition to the casino, the Tiguas became an early example of how GOP lobbyists played on tribes' desperate desire for influence with Republicans to reap millions of dollars in fees and solicit contributions to conservative groups.

The Tiguas were among the poorest Indians in the United States. After Congress passed legislation in 1988 clearing the way for Indian gaming, the 1,300-member Tigua tribe opened the Speaking Rock Casino, which at one point made an estimated $60 million in annual profits. Some of the money went for healthcare, education, and jobs; the tribe's unemployment and dropout rates went from more than 50 percent to nearly zero.

But Texas officials said the casino was illegal because the Tiguas were recognized under a federal law that required state approval for gambling. The Tiguas countered that Texas had forfeited its right to oppose Indian gaming because the state already was in the gambling business. Texas was collecting hundreds of millions of dollars annually from a state lottery, with the money boosting education efforts that Bush would eventually highlight in his presidential bid.

The Tiguas even ran an ad that said: "Dear Governor: Get your own house in order before you pick on Native Americans."

Fearing that Bush would try to shut the casino down, the Tiguas poured tens of thousands of dollars into the campaign of the Democrat running against Bush in 1998, Gary Mauro.

The move may have backfired. After being reelected, Bush redoubled his earlier efforts to shut down the Tigua casino. He arranged for a special appropriation to help cover the cost for the state's attorney general, John Cornyn, now a US senator, to take legal action against the tribe.

Eventually, the effort to shut down the Tiguas would attract two figures who loom large into the current investigation into lobbying for Indian gaming tribes: Jack Abramoff and Ralph Reed.

Reed, the man who had earlier declared that no presidential contender should take gambling money, now acknowledges that payments for some of his efforts to stop the Tigua casino came from rival Indian gaming tribes.

Abramoff, who helped arrange for the rival tribes to give the money to Reed's group, turned around and offered his services to the Tiguas - for $4.2 million in fees split between himself and a partner, the Senate investigation found.

"What sets this tale apart, what makes it truly extraordinary, is the extent and degree of the apparent exploitation and deceit," Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, said in opening the Senate investigation. "Even in this town, where huge sums are routinely paid as the price of political access, the figures are astonishing."

Over the years, Abramoff and his partner in Indian gaming consulting would receive more than $60 million in fees from six different tribes seeking to advance their gambling interests, the Senate investigation found. Abramoff also told the tribes to give money to political candidates and organizations. Eventually, the tribes gave $3 million, two-thirds of it to Republicans. Now, the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, the Interior Department, and the FBI are looking into whether the tribes were defrauded and how all the money was spent.

Ties to Massachusetts for Abramoff, Norquist Abramoff and Norquist met in Massachusetts in 1980, when Abramoff was at Brandeis University and organizing college Republicans. Norquist, who grew up in Weston, was attending Harvard Business School and also organizing Republicans on campus.

The bond between Abramoff and Norquist grew deeper when the two worked in Massachusetts for the 1980 Republican presidential candidate, Ronald Reagan, who carried the Bay State by about 6,000 votes.

The following year, Abramoff and Norquist came to Washington together to lead the Republican Party's national effort to recruit college students. Reed soon joined what became a tight circle of friends; eventually, Reed would introduce Abramoff to Abramoff's future wife.

By 2000, when they worked in various capacities on behalf of Bush's campaign for the presidency, the trio were leading figures in the Republican Party. Reed, who had built the Christian Coalition into a powerful grass-roots group, helped recruit religious conservatives for Bush. Norquist, who headed the leading antitax group in Washington, rallied economic conservatives behind Bush. Abramoff, who was a GOP lobbyist, gave money to Bush's campaign.

Norquist and Abramoff had already advocated on behalf of Indian gaming. In 1997, when antigambling fever was high within the Republican Party, some GOP leaders, including the former House Ways and Means chairman, Bill Archer of Texas, had called for a tax on Indian casino profits. Abramoff, working as a consultant to the tribes, and Norquist, who saw the tax on Indian casino profits as another way for the government to raise taxes, helped persuade key members of Congress to kill the idea, which died in Archer's committee.

Lottery sparks a call for referendum in Ala. While Norquist and Abramoff were known in Republican circles as defenders of Indian gaming, Reed was not. As one of the nation's best-known religious conservatives, Reed took a staunchly antigambling position. But behind the scenes, he worked through Norquist and Abramoff to finance his antigambling campaigns with contributions from those who stood to benefit the most from seeing casinos and lotteries closed - Indian tribes running rival casinos.

In 1999, Don Siegelman, the Democratic governor of Alabama, proposed a lottery that would have pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into public schools and even provided free college education for most Alabama high school graduates.

Reed, rallying religious conservatives, set out to try to defeat it, as well as a separate proposal that could have expanded commercial gambling in Alabama. Antigambling efforts are notoriously under funded. But Reed, in a move that solidified his star power among religious conservatives, quickly raised $1.15 million for antigambling groups that was used for ads and telephone banks.

End Part 1