Abramoff Photos

RW:

"The Abramoff lobbying scandal in Washington is a big deal and a very real scandal. What's either embarrassing or hilarious depending on your point of view are the attempts to pin this on Bush. The New York Times has been ferretting around for photos of Bush and Abramoff for months now, with almost no success. This week, they finally found one, which they triumphantly published [...] When you have to highlight the guy in a red circle, it's getting pretty lame. Being in the same room as someone is about as incriminating as sharing the same neighbourhood would be. Sure even I've been closer to Bush than that."

Scrubbing of Abramoff/Bush pics (via Talking Points Memo, who have more):

"(January 26, 2006 -- 11:59 AM EDT // link)

In his press conference today, President Bush suggested that the existence of photographs of himself and Jack Abramoff are no big deal and generally pooh-poohed the press's focus on the story. But our reporting suggests that the White House is actively involved in covering up and possibly destroying photographic evidence of the two men together.

Earlier this month, we were alerted to the existence of a series Abramoff photos at the website of Reflections Photography, a studio that does photo shoots for many Republican political events and sells copies to the individuals who attended the events and other members of the public through an online photo database. Reflections was an official photographer for Bush-Cheney 2004 campaign events and for the 2005 inauguration.

One of those photos was of Abramoff and Ralph Reed at a party for the launch of Reed's Century Strategies DC office in 2003. We contacted Reflections Photography and purchased the rights to publish that photograph and did so on January 11th.

Things weren't so simple with the late 2003 photograph of Jack Abramoff and President Bush.

[...]

After a few minutes, she returned and proceeded to pull up the photo in question on the CD. Then, to her audible surprise, she told me the "photo was deleted" from the CD.

That, as you'd imagine, caught my attention. So I asked what that meant. The woman from Reflections told me that that this sometimes happened when the White House wanted to prevent the public from accessing certain photographs of the president.

When I asked her when this had happened she told she didn't know and wouldn't be at liberty to tell me even if she did.

[...]

But early this afternoon, I decided to take one more go at Reflections. I talked to company president Joanne Amos. We went back and forth over various questions about whether photographs at the site were available to the public and why some had been removed. When she, at length, asked me who it was in the picture with the president. I told her we believed it was Jack Abramoff.

Amos very straightforwardly told me that the photographs had been removed and that they had been removed because they showed Abramoff and the president in the same picture. The photos were, she told me, "not relevant."

When I asked her who had instructed her to remove the photos, she told me she was the president of the company. She did it. It was "her business decision" to remove the photographs. She told me she had done so within the last month.

So, here we have it that the president of Reflections admits that she removed photos of Abramoff and the president from their online database. If what her employee told me on the 11th is accurate the photos were also deleted from the CDs they keep on file in their own archives. So the scrub seems to have been pretty thorough.

Did the White House send out the word to deep-six those Bush-Abramoff pics?"

Riddle us this: if the photographs of Bush with Abramoff are indeed as innocuous as Dickie claims, just why is the White House so obsessed with scrubbing them?