Mission to Moscow

The ad appeared the day after both the New York Times and the Washington Post recycled moldy charges against DeLay in front-page stories. It was all part of an ongoing effort to discredit the Texas Republican, who has been admonished by the House Ethics committee more times than any other member of Congress but whose main offense seems to have been success: boosting the power of his party, passing legislation Democrats don’t like, and raising large amounts of money.

Some of that money goes to his family. The New York Times story–“Political Groups Paid Two Relatives of House Leader”–reported that DeLay’s wife and daughter have been paid more than $500,000 as employees of his political action committees since 2001. But, as DeLay’s staff was quick to observe, employing your husband, wife, son, or daughter and paying them with campaign funds violates no law or congressional ethics rule–and, according to the Los Angeles Times, at least 39 members of Congress do it, from both parties.

Meanwhile the April 6 Washington Post story highlighted an August 1997 “fact-finding” mission DeLay, his wife, and top staff took to Moscow. According to forms DeLay’s staff filed with the House travel office, the trip was paid for by the National Center for Public Policy Research, a conservative nonprofit on Capitol Hill. The trip lasted six days and cost about $60,000. The Post story distilled and strengthened reporting from the March 18 edition of National Journal‘s CongressDaily. CongressDaily‘s article cited “two sources familiar with travel planning,” and began: “An August 1997 trip to Moscow by then-House Majority Whip DeLay and four congressional staffers was funded largely by a Russian energy firm or a key affiliate which was a client of former lobbyist Jack Abramoff.”

Abramoff, as all Washington insiders know, is under investigation by the Justice Department, the Interior Department, the IRS, the FBI, a special interagency task force, and the Senate Finance and Indian Affairs committees, among others, for allegedly defrauding Indian gaming interests of somewhere between $66 and $88 million (see Andrew Ferguson’s “A Lobbyist’s Progress,” The Weekly Standard, Dec. 20, 2004). Until recently Abramoff sat on the board of the National Center for Public Policy Research. In 1997, when the Center bankrolled Delay’s trip to Russia, he was employed as a lobbyist at the firm Preston Gates Ellis & Rouvelas Meeds LLP. House rules forbid members from having travel bills paid for by lobbyists.

Sometime in early 1997 Abramoff registered as a lobbyist for Chelsea Commercial Enterprises Ltd. Chelsea was incorporated–here the documentary record is contradictory–either in the Bahamas or in Jersey, an island in the English Channel that is known for its lax financial disclosure laws. In his registration, Abramoff specified that Chelsea was paying him to build “support for policies of the Russian government for progressive market reforms and trade with the United States.” To that end he was paid $260,000 in 1997 and, according to the Post, “less than $10,000 in 1998.” Chelsea also paid a New York law firm, Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft LLP, $180,000 in ’97 and about $30,000 between ’98 and 2001 to work on its behalf.

“Another source” handed the Post reporters a memo taken from Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, dated May 6, 1997. In the memo, Ellen S. Levinson, then a lobbyist for Chelsea at Cadwalader, outlines a year-long schedule of junkets to Russia. The six junkets mentioned in Levinson’s memo, the Post reported, included a trip for an “advance team” in May 1997, a visit by journalists and foreign policy wonks in June, and a trip by DeLay in August. Abramoff was cc’d on the memo.

DeLay’s chief of staff at the time, Ed Buckham, may have been part of that “advance team.” In a January 21, 1998, AP story (headline: “You Won’t Find Congressional Travelers in Coach”), Buckham, who now runs his own lobbying firm, said he had taken the Concorde from Paris to Washington in July 1997 after visiting Russia in advance of his boss. Buckham said his Concorde ticket, like the August 1997 junket, was paid for by the National Center for Public Policy Research. “We told the travel agent to just find the best flight,” Amy Ridenour, the president of the National Center, told AP at the time. “Ed took the Concorde. I didn’t realize that’s what the travel agent picked.”

But where did the National Center get the money? The Wall Street Journal‘s David Rogers provided an answer on April 13. “The Russia trip was covered from an estimated $165,000 payment [to the center] from an international law firm seeking to promote exchanges with Russian businessmen,” Rogers wrote–which would suggest the firm in question was the New York-based Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft. But it could also have been another firm, of course–Abramoff’s, perhaps, or one friendly to Abramoff, who was friendly with Ridenour. Both were friends of DeLay’s.

Wherever the money ultimately came from, the trip was a success. DeLay, his wife, and his top staff were joined in Moscow first by Ridenour, then Abramoff, then Julius Kaplan, a lawyer on the Chelsea account at Cadwalader. They golfed, met with Russian religious leaders, visited tourist attractions, and spoke with Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin. One night the group attended a sumptuous dinner party hosted by the heads of NaftaSib, a Russian energy company. DeLay met NaftaSib’s president, Alexander Koulakovsky, and its executive vice president, Marina Nevskaya. NaftaSib was another client of Abramoff’s at Preston Gates.

Little is known about NaftaSib’s executives. Alexander Koulakovsky “graduated from Odessa Technological Institute in 1975,” according to his company’s literature, and left the Russian oil giant SibNeft in 1993 to start NaftaSib. Other than that I could find only an October 26, 1994, dispatch from Tass, the Russian news agency, which reported that an Alexander Koulakovsky was “arrested by authorities of Hatichohe, Northern Honshu, Japan, . . . for illegal storage of a handgun and 150 rounds of ammunition.”

Even less is known about Marina Nevskaya. The NaftaSib promotional material says she “taught at the Military Diplomatic Academy and lectured at Moscow State University” until 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed. Apparently she is “the author of several publications on the economy of Southeast Asia, economic cooperation between the USSR and Asian countries and textbooks on oriental languages.” She is fluent, we are told, “in English, Vietnamese and French.” There is no record of her in the Nexis news database prior to 2005.

Except this. The August 23, 2004, issue of the Russian Oil and Gas Report had an article on NaftaSib’s bid to buy the remnants of YUKOS, the giant Russian oil firm run by Mikhail Khodorkovsky until he became a prisoner of the Russian government. The article–published six months before the latest controversy over DeLay–contains this aside:

If NaftaSib paid for DeLay’s trip, however, it did so indirectly. And thus we–and DeLay’s critics–reach an impasse. Looking back, lobbyists were involved in the planning and execution of DeLay’s trip to Russia; Russian energy interests took credit for the trip; the only question is who paid for it.

And that question has already been answered, more or less: the National Center for Public Policy Research. And according to the House rules, as long as lobbyists don’t pay a congressman’s expenses directly, everything is peachy. Were all such congressional trips to receive the level of scrutiny applied to DeLay’s Russia boondoggle, it’s safe to say, few of his colleagues would escape censure.

As Amy Ridenour said in a statement last week: “The National Center for Public Policy Research was careful to pay all the expenses associated with Congressman DeLay’s trip.” If that’s so, DeLay may still be a symbol of the unappealing intersection of money and politics in Washington. But symbolism has never been a firing offense.

Matthew Continetti is a staff writer at The Weekly Standard.