He received $40,000 from Abramoff, an associate and the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe from Massachusetts, an Abramoff client. Pombo became a leading champion of the tribe's effort to get official recognition -- a precondition of becoming eligible for a raft of federal benefits.
Many lawmakers were benefiting from Abramoff and helping his clients, but said they were not aware of his influence -- which could be important in determining whether they had the specific corrupt intent that the law requires to establish a crime.
Sen. Byron L. Dorgan (D-N.D.) backed a 2003 measure urging the Interior Department to act on the Mashpees' recognition request. A spokesman said Dorgan had no idea that the Mashpees were represented by Abramoff. Likewise, he did not know that Abramoff represented the Indian tribes who had given him roughly $67,000.
Another factor that complicates the assessment of whether Abramoff was wielding legitimate or undue influence is that, in the clubby backslapping world of congressional lobbying, the lines between friendship and professional association are often blurred.
Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Huntington Beach) frequently dined at Abramoff's expense at the lobbyist's Washington restaurant. But he said those were gifts of a friend, not a lobbyist, because he had known Abramoff since their college years, according to the congressman's office. Rohrabacher turned up as a personal reference on Abramoff's application for a $60-million loan.
Attacks on public corruption have had mixed success in the courts. Over the years, there have been frequent efforts to construct laws that would make it easier to prosecute influence-peddling that falls short of outright bribery. But the courts have sometimes rebuffed those efforts as overly vague or limiting the rights of the public to participate in the political process. In other cases, juries have not been persuaded that lawmakers were truly guilty.
The Supreme Court put limits on the use of the "honest services" law in the late 1980s, and on the idea that citizens could be defrauded of "intangible rights" of honest services and impartial government. Congress later amended the law, but its growing use is controversial.
The statute has now become "the law of choice for corruption prosecutors," said Joshua Berman, a former attorney in the Justice Department's Public Integrity Section, which is overseeing the Abramoff case.
