Cantwell gives up tribe cash

Two days after her Senate staff said Maria Cantwell wasn’t giving back money from clients tied to disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff, her campaign staff said she will.

Campaign spokesman Michael Meehan said Friday the staff had reviewed all contributions from Native American tribes who had hired Abramoff, plus other lobbyists working for the so-called “Team Abramoff,” and decided to donate $17,865 to a scholarship fund for Native Americans.

“Senator Cantwell prides herself on having a high bar” for campaign ethics, Meehan said. “Charges have been made in a political environment that this money is somehow tainted.”

Cantwell, a Democrat who serves as the state’s junior senator, was being criticized by a national Republican group for keeping money connected to Abramoff. Her about-face on the contributions goes further than some Northwest Republicans in getting rid of campaign cash with ties to the lobbyist, who pleaded guilty this week to federal corruption charges.

Rep. Doc Hastings decided this week to give $1,000 he received from Abramoff in campaign contributions during the mid-1990s to charity. The Republican from the Tri-Cities received $500 from Abramoff in 1996 and again in 1997. Campaign spokeswoman Ellen Howe said Friday the money was given to the Salvation Army.

Last month, Idaho’s two Republican House members made charitable donations equal to the campaign money they had received from Abramoff. Rep. Butch Otter donated $1,000 to an Idaho State University scholarship fund for Native American nursing students. Rep. Mike Simpson donated $1,000 to the Salvation Army.

Former Rep. George Nethercutt, who represented Eastern Washington for 10 years, said Thursday he was donating $1,000 he received from Abramoff to the National Defense University Foundation, a Washington, D.C., group that offers programs on international affairs and the military. But Nethercutt, now a Washington, D.C.-based lobbyist, was not giving up $6,000 he received from tribes – some of the same tribes that donated to Cantwell. Spokesman Rob Neal said that money wasn’t connected to Abramoff but to the former congressman’s longstanding support of tribal issues.

None of Cantwell’s money came from Abramoff. Instead, it came from Native American tribes he represented or lobbyists who worked with him at the Washington, D.C., firm of Greenberg Traurig.

On Wednesday, Cantwell spokeswoman Charla Newman said there was no reason to give the money back to the tribes because they supported her work on Native American issues. Cantwell had never met with Abramoff, she added.

“There’s nothing unusual about any of these contributions,” Newman said. “There’s no connection to Abramoff.”

Meehan said Friday that after further study, Cantwell decided to take the “extra step” of donating the $10,000 received from several tribes represented by Abramoff, plus additional money from his colleagues, to the National Congress of American Indians Education Fund.

“We can’t decide whether Abramoff defrauded these tribes,” Meehan said. “In this scandal-plagued environment, you don’t know the decisions everybody made.”

A spokeswoman for the state’s senior senator, Democrat Patty Murray, repeated Friday that Murray had no plans “as of now” to return campaign money she received from the tribes. Alex Glass said the money did not come through Abramoff.

But unlike Murray, who was re-elected by beating Nethercutt in 2004, Cantwell faces re-election this year. On Friday, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, whose job it is to find and fund GOP candidates, criticized Cantwell for refusing “to return tainted special interest cash.”

In donating the money from the tribes, however, Cantwell is going further than her Republican colleague to the east, Sen. Larry Craig. Idaho’s senior senator received a total of $3,500 from tribes represented by Abramoff for his personal campaign fund and a separate “leadership” political action committee.

Craig wasn’t refunding the money because it came from the tribes, not Abramoff, said spokesman Will Hart, adding, “We used it legally in the campaign, and they were legal contributions.”