Speaking of Mehlman, "Abramoff's rock star"

This article appeared today in Salon. You have to register to read the full story, but here's the excerpt:

Ken Mehlman, head of the Republican Party, insists he doesn't have a Jack Abramoff problem. "Everything I did was above board and consistent with the rules," Mehlman told reporters this month about his work in the White House during President Bush's first term, when the now-disgraced super-lobbyist was hustling Washington. In fact, the Republican National Committee chairman likes to insinuate that Jack Abramoff never made much of an impression on him at all. He might have met with Abramoff or his lieutenants, Mehlman conceded to Fox News recently, but "I don't recall the specifics or the meetings."
But maybe Ken Mehlman does have an Abramoff problem. On Sept. 29, the very day the Foleygate scandal broke and sucked up most of the media oxygen, the House Committee on Government Reform released a bipartisan report on the contacts between the White House and Abramoff. The 91-page report lists 17 different Abramoff lobbying efforts directed at the White House Office of Political Affairs when Mehlman was that office's director from 2001 to 2003. But the most revealing story about Mehlman is told by the hundreds of pages of e-mails in the appendices of the report.

NBC News also covered Mehlman's Abramoff ties, including the Mariana Islands connection. That appeared in the week leading up to Rove assistant Susan Ralston's resignation on October 6, which I admit I kind of tuned out at the time, because the sheer breadth and depth, the seemingly infinite variety of the corruption was starting to give me a headache (or maybe I only kept silent because it was my Week of Golden Silence on such matters, or I was coming down with a cold.)