“Casino Jack” Abramoff says Trump unlikely to change much if president, reflects on tribal gaming

Few people understand the entangled world of Washington politics more than former Republican “super-lobbyist” and tribal gaming advocate Jack Abramoff.

After making a name for himself as arguably the most effective, respected and feared lobbyists ever to stroll the halls of Congress and state capitols, he was sentenced to prison in 2006 on charges of mail fraud, bribery and tax evasion.

He took an unusual step upon release in 2010, joining the movement to reform and clean up Washington by calling for mandatory term limits and a crackdown on the ability of special interests and donors to influence policy – especially through the use of lobbying tactics that, he says, amount to legalized bribery.

In the final days of the 2016 presidential election, the man once known as “Casino Jack” sat down with CDC Gaming to discuss the current state of the country’s politics and to reflect on his efforts lobbying on behalf of gaming tribes and the viral scandal in the mid 2000s that ultimately led to his downfall.

Abramoff’s new reformist agenda echoes, to a certain extent, the call to “drain the swamp” currently put forth by Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump. However, from his perspective the problems that plague the political system are far too entrenched for one man to solve.

“The odds are that Trump is not going to be as big a wrecking ball as he says he’s going to be because there are just too many obstacles to change in Washington,” Abramoff said at his home in suburban Maryland.

“It would be interesting to watch his frustration if he attempts to actually do half the things he’s talked about,” he said, saying that Trump would run into trouble with the heavily-unionized government workforce. “It’s not like Trump resorts or whatever where he can fire the gardener if he doesn’t like the way he cut the hedges.”

“It’s not merely the Congress, it’s not merely the courts. Every aspect of bureaucracy is kind of an entrenched, inertia-filled bag of delay,” he continued. “The problem is there’s a question of ‘Will he actually do anything? Does he even know what he is talking about on these issues?’”

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A decade removed from his lobbying career, Abramoff is quick to admit that many of the tactics he employed in his practice crossed legal and ethical boundaries. However, he emphatically argues that the official narrative that he fleeced his tribal clients out of $85 million overlooked the fact that their casino properties would have been destroyed by competition were it not for his efforts to protect them.

“Gaming is virtually entirely about politics – getting political permission to put a gaming operation into a jurisdiction is political,” he said. “So we were brought in to help tribes maintain the integrity of their market position by stopping competitors around them.”

Through a variety of mini-political campaigns, his team fought off expansion efforts in Alabama, Louisiana, Michigan and elsewhere, protecting local markets from saturation and his tribal clients’ properties from competition.

“We didn’t lose any of those efforts and we stopped some very aggressive casino efforts that were coming against them,” he said.

He says that his effectiveness in fighting on the tribes’ behalf was demonstrable by the fact that the very expansions they had feared actually occurred as soon as he was in prison and out of the picture.

“The Mississippi Choctaws paid us for years to keep gaming out of Alabama. Quickly after my demise, the Indian tribe there – called Porch Creek – got gaming, and now they have some magnificent and tremendous casinos and they’re very successful.”

“And the Choctaws – who then kicked out their magnificent chief who’d led them from poverty to prosperity – quickly went into a tailspin. And the same thing happened in Michigan, same thing happened in Louisiana,” he reflected. “Unfortunately, in some of these cases the tribes not only didn’t benefit, but they were destroyed at the end because this competition that we had kept out got in there.”

He says that despite this ample evidence showing he was benefiting the tribes, such considerations were effectively ignored by investigators as they did not fit the narrative that he was scamming the tribes out of millions of dollars.

“Why drive three hours to Philadelphia, Mississippi if you can gamble right near your home in Birmingham or Tuscaloosa? It’s simple geography. You don’t need a Ph.D to know this, but for whatever reason nobody seemed to point to that,” he continued. “These are checkable things. It’s not like you can’t go and see a casino in Alabama. There a bunch of them there – just go there!”

Abramoff’s efforts in Washington also saved tribal gaming from near certain destruction in 1995 when Republicans in Congress sought to impose a 30 percent tax on Indian casino revenue, which he argued would have had a highly punitive effect on tribal gaming and would have been yet another broken promise by the U.S. government to Native Americans.

“We were credited by the other lobbyists as the ones who defeated that,” he said, flustered that this was largely expunged from the public record. “None of this seemed to apply in my situation. The media continually would say in the same articles that I did absolutely nothing for my clients on one hand, and on the other hand I bribed everybody in Congress and got my clients everything they wanted. So which is it?”

Abramoff, while lobbying on behalf of lottery interests, also derailed separate efforts in 2000 and 2003 to pass bills cracking down on online gambling. Predictably, once he was out of the picture, the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act was passed during the middle of the night in 2006.

“I get put in prison, so Bob Goodlatte (current House Judiciary chairman) gets up in front of the Congress and says ‘Well finally now that we got rid of Abramoff can we please pass this damn law?’ Which they then did.”

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The Abramoff scandal and the accompanying negative publicity left the lobbying business and Congress with plenty of egg on their faces, and an outcry to clean up Washington ensued. The Honest Leadership and Open Government Act was passed in 2007 to strengthen lobbying disclosure requirements, and the Obama Administration would impose a ban on hiring lobbyists for government positions.

Despite the appearance of progress, Abramoff was quickly disheartened upon actually reading the HLOGA, thus sparking his desire to go public with his proposals for change.

“I saw within moments that I could continue to do virtually everything I did, if not more. I thought ‘Man what am I doing in prison? If they don’t care about this then why am I here?’” he said. “They don’t really change things in Washington, they make it look like they are changing things. Change is optics for these people.”

When discussing his suggestions for how to effectively reform Congress, make it less corrupt and more responsive to voters, he points to mandatory term limits as a necessity, He explains that the longer a politician stays in Congress, the higher the likelihood of corruption – a phenomenon he experienced and manipulated firsthand while on the front lines as a lobbyist.

He insists that voluntarily-imposed term limits are not sufficient, as they are akin to a unilateral disarmament. Instead, he says that the constitution must be amended to include term limits for legislators, although he concedes this is probably the most difficult thing in politics to do.

“In 1994 there were many Republicans who ran on term limits saying they would term limit themselves,” he reflected. “Many of that group, when the time came they ignored it and just kept running. Some of them are still there.”

Though he continues to work with reform movement groups across the political spectrum, Abramoff is largely trying to maintain a low profile – working on producing a television series and doing some behind-the-scenes political advising. “I don’t like this publicity. I wish I could be completely unknown.”

While there are critics who doubt the sincerity of Abramoff’s change of heart and reformist agenda, he has no problem quickly dismissing them as just blowing smoke.

“If I was going to cash in I’d go back into lobbying,” he laughs. “There’s no money in reform or speaking on these things, and if anything I do it at my peril because the political forces don’t want me doing it.”

Yet despite all he’s been through, he still holds lobbyists in higher esteem than much of the general public, emphasizing that 95 percent of them – the ones that don’t exchange money for access or favors – are good people that are trying to just trying to persuade using the merits of their arguments.

The real problem, he concludes, is not with lobbyists – but with Congress.

“The lobbying profession unfortunately is viewed as it is not because of what the lobbyists are doing but because of the way Washington is, and they are the easiest targets,” he said. “People don’t want to target the venerable old senator or congressman – who happens to be the problem.”