'This photo is not one of the five photos referred to in the February Washingtonian story...'

Lobbyist Abramoff Describes Pictures of a “Bearded, Fatter Me” With President Bush


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[Editor’s note: A version of this story was posted briefly on Monday of this week. Within an hour, Jack Abramoff contacted the author, Washingtonian national editor Kim Eisler, and asked that the report be deleted from the Washingtonian.com Web site because public disclosure of his communications would damage his status as a witness and undermine his plea agreement with federal prosecutors. Abramoff has pleaded guilty to three felonies and could receive 31 years in prison for his part in the lobbying scandal. US District Court Judge Ellen Huvelle will decide the length of Abramoff’s prison term. The link was taken down while Mr. Abramoff’s concerns were investigated, but Mr. Eisler found no confirmation that publication of the item would damage any aspect of the wide-ranging probe. Thus we are posting this updated story.]

Time magazine published a photograph that showed Jack Abramoff in a scene with President Bush. This photo is not one of the five photos referred to in the February Washingtonian story that revealed the existence of pictures of the two men together. One of the photos referred to in the Washingtonian story was taken at the same event as the photo published by Time; in it the President and Abramoff are shaking hands. The Time photo showed Abramoff in the background.

In January Washingtonian national editor Kim Eisler was allowed to see the photos he reported on, but Abramoff would not release them for publication. Several of the pictures had hung prominently in Abramoff’s office and had been seen by many visitors, including Eisler, who first met Abramoff while working on a book, Revenge of the Pequots, about Native American casinos.

When newspapers reported that the White House was in a “desperate frenzy” to find photographs of Abramoff and Bush together, Eisler described in his February Washingtonian Power Players column the ones he had seen.

Before publishing the item, Eisler contacted Abramoff to get details about the circumstances in which the photos were taken. The White House has repeatedly claimed that Bush did not know Abramoff and that the pictures must have been taken at a White House holiday party, when the President shakes hands with hundreds of people he doesn’t know. None of the photographs seen by Eisler matched that description.

In various January communications with Eisler, Abramoff confirmed that he and President Bush had met in “almost a dozen settings.” Abramoff said the President had “joked with me about a bunch of things, including details of my kids. Perhaps he has forgotten everything. Who knows.”

In the photograph taken at the same event as the one published by Time, Abramoff said he and the President were discussing working out with weights.

Other photographs included a picture of Bush and Abramoff standing together with “Cheshire cat grins”; pictures of Bush and what Abramoff characterized as the “bearded fatter me”; a picture of Bush chatting with Abramoff’s twin daughters (“Oh, you are twins; I have twins,” Abramoff quoted Bush as saying); a picture of Bush, House speaker Dennis Hastert, and Abramoff’s children; and a picture of Laura Bush with Abramoff’s wife, Pam, and the twin girls, who had led the Pledge of Allegiance at the event (said Abramoff: “Laura went ga-ga over their being twins”).

A frustrated Abramoff, who feels he has been abandoned by many of his conservative friends, added, “They will come up with excuse after excuse as to how and why he did not know me. I could have spent four months alone with him in Bolivia and he would not know me.”