Press Releases

WASHINGTON-NCRP Executive Director Rick Cohen declared Jack Abramoff's plea agreement announced yesterday as revealing the debilitated condition of government oversight of nonprofits and foundations. The indictments and resulting plea agreement acknowledge the dubious if not illegal grantmaking of Abramoff's Capital Athletic Foundation (CAF) in more than one instance, but fail to penalize Abramoff on his abuse of the CAF as a personal cash reserve.

"Abramoff may have copped a plea that acknowledges his personal tax evasion, but the biggest element of his tax evasion, the clearly phony Capital Athletic Foundation, has escaped scot free," Cohen said. "The Department of Justice caught some of Abramoff's bribery and corruption concerning the Sun Cruz deal and various campaign finance and lobbying violations, but the Internal Revenue Service should have been leading the investigation of Abramoff's years-long history of hiding illicit dealings behind the CAF.

For the past two years, alone among national philanthropic nonprofits, NCRP has detailed and denounced a variety of Abramoff's misuses of philanthropy and called for IRS investigations, to no avail. Other than an investigation initiated by the Senate Finance Committee, Abramoff's CAF remains an icon of blatant philanthropic abuse that has escaped the IRS's attention or concern, and has been ignored by the even weaker self-regulatory capacities of foundation and nonprofit trade associations, such as the Independent Sector and Council on Foundations.

According to NCRP, the CAF used only a pittance of its nearly $4 million in philanthropic grants and expenses for legitimate charities, essentially buying its philanthropic bona fides with tiny $500 grants to the likes of the Boy Scouts in Irving, TX, the Jewish Community Center in Rockville, MD, and the Washington Tennis Education Foundation in Washington, D.C., to camouflage dubious grants to Abramoff-controlled charities such as the Eshkol Academy ($1.87 million in 2002 alone), grants to dubious charities for even more questionable activities such as the purchase of sniper equipment and sniper training for a school in Israel, and clearly inappropriate expenditures such as international golfing trips for members of Congress such as Ohio's Bob Ney. Ney's committee jurisdiction happened to include oversight of Capitol Hill contracts of interest to Abramoff's lobbying clients, who also happened to be persuaded to contribute to the CAF by Abramoff and his associates.