Abramoff Visits in White House Logs Are Linked to Rove and a Budget Aide

By PHILIP SHENON
Published: May 11, 2006
WASHINGTON, May 10 — Newly disclosed White House visitor logs involving the lobbyist Jack Abramoff refer to a 2001 visit in which Mr. Abramoff talked with Karl Rove, President Bush's top political adviser, about hiring two people for jobs at the Interior Department, a Bush administration official said Wednesday night.

The official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the Justice Department's continuing investigation of Mr. Abramoff's illegal lobbying, said that neither person got a job at the Interior Department, an agency of special interest to Mr. Abramoff because of his multimillion lobbying work on behalf of Indian tribe gambling operations.

The administration official said there was nothing improper about the March 2001 meeting with Mr. Rove, whose ties to Mr. Abramoff have come under review by federal investigators in recent months.

The official said the visitor logs also referred to a 2004 meeting in which Mr. Abramoff talked with an official at the Office of Management and Budget to discuss his hopes of buying the Old Post Office building in Washington from the federal government.

The proposed purchase, which never occurred, is a focus of criminal charges brought against another former White House budget official, David F. Safavian. Mr. Safavian faces trial this month on charges of lying about his relationship to Mr. Abramoff, who pleaded guilty in January to charges of seeking to corrupt public officials.

The administration official's comments came several hours after the Secret Service made the visitor logs public in a settlement of a freedom-of-information lawsuit filed by a private legal group.

The release of the two pages of visitor logs appeared to raise as many questions as it answered, since White House spokesmen declined to explain why the logs did not refer to a number of other White House visits by Mr. Abramoff that they had previously acknowledged.

The two logs referred only to meetings in March 2001 and January 2004 but did not identify the White House officials that Mr. Abramoff met, nor the purpose of the visits.

A White House spokeswoman, Erin Healy, said she could offer no explanation of why the records released Wednesday did not reflect all of the visits by Mr. Abramoff that the White House had previously acknowledged. Asked if officials might have approved Mr. Abramoff's entry without requiring him to register at White House security posts, Ms. Healy declined comment. "I have nothing for you on that," she said.

Two other administration officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of rules that generally bar them from speaking to reporters, said the White House had decided that the settlement of the lawsuit did not require other, more complete visitor logs to be made public.

They said the more complete logs, known within the White House as Waves records, an acronym for the Workers Appointments and Visitors Entry System, would have identified the other visits by Mr. Abramoff.

The conservative group that sought the logs in the lawsuit, Judicial Watch, which has often championed open-government causes, suggested that it might return to court. The group's president, Tom Fitton, said the White House had decided to "cherry-pick the information."

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