Daily Sentinel again omitted key facts in reporting further Schaffer reaction to scrutiny of his Abramoff-linked Marianas trip

Summary: The Daily Sentinel of Grand Junction on April 14 reported that Republican U.S. Senate candidate Bob Schaffer "stood by" his account of his 1999 trip to the Northern Mariana Islands that was arranged in part by now-jailed lobbyist Jack Abramoff, as reported in a series of Denver Post articles. But, as in an article three days earlier, the Daily Sentinel failed to include critical details regarding Schaffer's trip and the controversy surrounding it, and did not address key questions raised in some of the Post's articles.

Repeating omissions made in an online April 11 article, The Daily Sentinel of Grand Junction reported online April 14 that Republican U.S. Senate candidate Bob Schaffer said that "he stood by his 1999 trip to the Northern Marianas Islands that was arranged in part by lobbyist Jack Abramoff, now serving a six-year prison term" and that he claimed to have "set his own agenda" for the trip. But while Schaffer's remarks were reactions to a recent series of articles in The Denver Post, the Daily Sentinel again failed to note, as the Post had reported on April 10, that according to archived meeting agendas, during the trip Schaffer "met with clients of Preston-Gates, Abramoff's firm," and notes indicate Schaffer attended a lunch meeting "with several current or former clients of the firm, including the Saipan Garment Manufacturers Association and the Western Pacific Economic Council."

Controversy over Schaffer's trip to the Northern Mariana Islands, made when he was a U.S. Congressman, arose after an April 7 Post profile in which Schaffer "pointed" to the islands "as a successful model for a guest-worker program that could be adapted nationally" -- a point the Daily Sentinel articles by Gary Harmon did not address. Follow-up Post articles on April 10, April 11, and April 13 have raised questions about Schaffer's trip and its purported connections to Abramoff.

As Colorado Media Matters noted, the Daily Sentinel's April 11 article reported that Schaffer "dismissed recent reports linking a trip he took to the North Marianas Islands in 1999 as 'character assassination' (sic) by The Denver Post," but similarly failed to report anything about questions the Post raised in its reporting on Schaffer's trip following the April 7 profile.

From Gary Harmon's article "Schaffer lays out tax-cut agenda," published online April 14 by The Daily Sentinel of Grand Junction:

U.S. Senate candidate Bob Schaffer called for tax cutting by the next Congress as he campaigned before a crowd of likely supporters, the Mesa County Republican Women, on Monday.

Schaffer, a three-term GOP congressman from Fort Collins, was back after a visit on Friday in Grand Junction with Vice President Dick Cheney at a fundraiser that collected more than $100,000 for Schaffer's Senate campaign.

[...]

Schaffer said afterward that he stood by his 1999 trip to the Northern Marianas Islands that was arranged in part by lobbyist Jack Abramoff, now serving a six-year prison term.

"I went there to investigate" reports of abuse of workers there, he said, adding that he set his own agenda.

He was aware of reports of abuse and discussed them with local pastors and a Catholic bishop.

He would do so in any case of "allegations of abuse under the American flag," he said.

The April 14 Daily Sentinel article, published on the newspaper's website after an April 14 Schaffer campaign event, did not note the Post's April 13 reporting that "Schaffer was one of the key players" in a hearing of the House Resources Committee that "provides a key context for a trip to the islands that Schaffer had taken a month before, partly arranged by Abramoff's lobbying firm and now an issue in Schaffer's campaign for the U.S. Senate." The Post reported that in a "secret memo" to a "textile tycoon on the Northern Mariana Islands," Abramoff had "mapped out" a strategy for congressional oversight hearings on labor issues in the Northern Marianas:

In early 1998, now-jailed lobbyist Jack Abramoff sent a secret memo to a textile tycoon on the Northern Mariana Islands, an American protectorate whose garment factories had been heavily criticized for squalid working conditions and abusive labor practices.

The lobbying plan focused on using congressional oversight hearings to change the subject from factory conditions to political shenanigans by the Clinton administration. Abramoff's lobbying team would prepare questions and "factual backup" for friendly lawmakers. Trips to the island for congressmen and staff would be a key tool to "build permanent friends," the memo said.

The linchpin would be an attack on the Interior Department's Office of Insular Affairs (OIA), which was the lead agency pushing for reform.

Twenty months later, Republicans on the House Resources Committee, including Rep. Bob Schaffer, R-Colo., turned what was supposed to be an oversight hearing into an attack on OIA officials, suggesting that federal employees were paying workers to protest and providing them signs, cars and other resources.

Schaffer was one of the key players in the hearing, grilling a young worker who had been called before the committee to talk about the desperate conditions faced by some laborers, suggesting instead that he was agitating in exchange for money and came to Washington to seek political asylum.

Schaffer "comes into this hearing with a stack of papers and then just sort of unloads on this worker," said Ben Miller, legislative director for California Rep. George Miller, the ranking Democrat on the House Resources Committee at the time.

"The Democratic staff at the hearing just started sort of looking at each other like, 'Where is this coming from?' " Ben Miller said, based on notes and conversations he'd had with staffers there at the time.

"I wasn't a part of anybody's strategy. I was interested in the allegations of the U.S. government breaking laws," Schaffer said in an interview Saturday.

First-hand look

The hearing provides a key context for a trip to the islands that Schaffer had taken a month before, partly arranged by Abramoff's lobbying firm and now an issue in Schaffer's campaign for the U.S. Senate.

Described at the time and in two recent interviews as a fact-finding mission on alleged textile industry labor abuses, the trip also provided Schaffer time to gather ammunition for the hearing that Democrats on the committee say was part of a GOP counter-strategy to discredit the system's critics, including the Clinton administration and human-rights groups.

[...]

Preston-Gates, Abramoff's firm, made the travel arrangements for Schaffer's August 1999 trip, according to a memo to Schaffer from his staff. The $13,000 trip was paid for by the Orange County-based Traditional Values Coalition, which later investigations showed was often used by Abramoff in his lobbying operations.

Schaffer was a relative back bencher, and Democrats said that at the time they were taken by surprise by his prominent role in the September hearing.

He referred repeatedly to a memo from David North, an OIA staffer, which offered editing comments on a report of labor abuse by the group Global Survival Network.

And he quizzed the head of the OIA, Danny Aranza, about the alleged payments from his office to protesters.

It was a strategy that had been literally mapped out by Abramoff a year and a half earlier in the memo addressed to Willie Tan, who is one of the islands' biggest textile manufacturers and had input on the lobbying contract between the islands and Abramoff's firm. [emphases added]

The Daily Sentinel's April 14 article also failed to address the Post's April 11 report that after the trip Schaffer supported a Northern Mariana Islands politician whom the Post identified as "a powerful former ally" of Abramoff, Benigno Fitial. As Colorado Media Matters noted, the Post claimed that "Schaffer was part of a concerted and public campaign by Republicans on the House Committee on Natural Resources to boost Fitial's public career when he became key to extending a multimillion-dollar lobbying contract for Abramoff from the island's government":

At two key moments in the political life of Benigno Fitial -- governor of the Northern Mariana Islands and a powerful former ally of now-jailed lobbyist Jack Abramoff -- then-Congressman Bob Schaffer was among several Republican U.S lawmakers who stepped in to lend their support, according to a copy of advertisements posted on a national blog and another obtained by The Denver Post.

The first was in 1999, when Fitial, who supported the islands' garment industry, was preparing an underdog run for House speaker of the Commonwealth Legislature. The second came two years later, when Fitial was running for governor of the islands.

The two instances, in which Schaffer endorsed Fitial in ads in island newspapers, show that Schaffer has had close and enduring ties with key politicians on the American protectorate, extending relationships he developed while on a fact-finding mission there in August 1999. They also show that Schaffer was part of a concerted and public campaign by Republicans on the House Committee on Natural Resources to boost Fitial's public career when he became key to extending a multimillion-dollar lobbying contract for Abramoff from the island's government.

Schaffer's ties to the Northern Mariana Islands and Abramoff have been the subject of new scrutiny as he campaigns for Colorado's open U.S. Senate seat. [emphases added]

—E.B.