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Page 2 of 2 JEFFREY SMITH: We were not supposed to be able to catch on. We were not supposed to be able to figure out that this money came from this client and was used to influence this vote. That's the objective.  SEN. JOHN McCAIN: Even in this town, where huge sums are routinely paid as the price of political access, what sets this tale apart, what makes it truly extraordinary, is the extent and degree of the apparent exploitation and deceit. AMY GOODMAN: An excerpt from the new Bill Moyers documentary Capitol Crimes, the first of a three-part investigative documentary series called “Moyers on America,” that's airing on PBS over the next three weeks. Bill Moyers joins us now in the firehouse studio. Welcome to Democracy Now! BILL MOYERS: Good to see you again. AMY GOODMAN: It's great to be with you, Bill. Why did you choose to start the series with Abramoff? BILL MOYERS: A year ago, I saw the dots adding up, and very few people at that time in broadcasting were connecting them. And I’ve spent a lot of time in Washington, and I’ve followed the money for 25 years now as a journalist, and I saw this was something different, of a magnitude larger than I had seen before, bigger than Abscam, bigger than the money laundering of the 1980s. And I realized that we needed to put this together for the American people so that they could see that these isolated stories out of Washington represented a larger pattern of corruption that defies the imagination. AMY GOODMAN: Washington's report on Friday, the report of Abramoff and his colleagues’ 400 contacts with the White House. BILL MOYERS: We knew there were more than we report in our documentary, but we couldn't -- the Freedom of Information Act request had not been issued yet. So we put together on the record what we had, and we knew that there were about a hundred or more, but now this official report from the bipartisan report says there were over 400. You know, the men who came to Washington in the 1980s to lead the Republican conservative revolution wound up running a racket. And Abramoff was their outside man, outside the White House, outside the infrastructure, but he was very welcome inside the government. He had very good ties with Karl Rove, Ralph Reed, Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform. It was all part of an apparatus that was designed to launder money. AMY GOODMAN: Talk about that beginning, how Jack Abramoff made his way in, his college years, and his cohorts and how they came together. BILL MOYERS: In 1982, he was elected president of the College Republicans. This is the organization that had catapulted Lee Atwater to power and Karl Rove to begin his ascent in the Republican Party. And they were all -- they came together, Abramoff and Norquist and Ralph Reed. There's a wonderful shot in the documentary of Ralph Reed leading a demonstration against the government of Nicaragua on the Capitol streets and Capitol Mall in 1983 or ’84. They were all virulent anti-communist, virulent anti-liberals. I mean, in a car ride after his first visit to the White House, Jack Abramoff told someone, “Our job is to get rid of the liberals in power permanently.” I mean, these were ideologically driven obsessed young men, who were buying into the, quote, “Reagan revolution,” out of a strong desire to quash dissent and opposition. He was tied up -- they were all -- many of them were tied up with the apartheid regime in South Africa. Abramoff ran a think tank that had money coming in part from the apartheid regime. He went out to Hollywood and made movies designed to make the apartheid regime look good. I mean, these were -- there's no other term for it. They were obsessed with ideology. They were obsessed with crushing all opposition to them. And that was the beginning.
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