As part of the OIG's investigation, we requested that the Guam USAO and the FBI produce any documents obtained in connection with the investigation into this allegation [that the Presiding Judge of the Superior Court of Guam was paying Abramoff via a 'smurfing' scheme, using multiple $9,000 checks to avoid a $10,000 reporting requirement]. However, the USAO and the FBI told the OIG that they were unable to locate any responsive documents.²⁵

But digging up footnote 25's clarification exposes the document-retention dirt:

²⁵ The Guam USAO reported that copies of the documents received in connection with this matter were not retained by the USAO-Guam.

The FBI office in Guam said it was unable to provide any documents reflecting any investigation into this matter for the period 1999 through 2004.

In a second example, documented on page 15, the OIG report paraphrases recently resigned chief of state Kyle Sampson:

However, Sampson said that he believes the normal procedures were followed in this case - that is, after the interview panel had agreed to propose Rapadas, the interview panel obtained concurrence from the Deputy Attorney General and the Attorney General.⁹

What dirt does digging into that pesky footnote 9 expose? That Abramoff's associates contacted the DOJ before the name of U.S. Attorney for Guam Fred Black's replacement was forwarded to the White House (emphasis added):

⁹ Black has also cited press reports which state that Abramoff sent an e-mail to a client in the CNMI in October 2001 in which he discussed his concerns about a federal takeover of immigration law in CNMI, and in which he claimed to have access to Attorney General Ashcroft and his Chief of Staff, David Ayres. Black speculated that Abramoff or his colleagues may have asked Ayres or Ashcroft to take action against Black.

    However, Abramoff denied taking any actions to have Black replaced until February 2002, as discussed in Section IIIF of this report, and Abramoff stated that the contacts with DOJ officials related to Black that took place at that time were undertaken by his colleagues, not by him personally.

To aid in this mining, I've extracted a timeline (if you prefer a version that does not open in a pop up, use this link - timeline ) recording all the dated events from this June 2006 report. The source report was created by the DOJ's Office of the Inspector General, Oversight and Review Division, and it is a veritable Master's thesis of selective ambiguity and misdirection.

Among the information gems buried in these dates is a background investigation that delays Rapadas's nomination by close to a year - before the Patriot Act was revised to eliminate the 120-day term limit on background-check-free interim U.S. Attorney appointments.

When addressing the issues of Black, Guam and Abramoff, however, the report's key misdirection and its major success was in how it framed the biggest question the media thought it answered. The media wanted this answered: Was Abramoff influential on the demotion of Guam's Interim United States Attorney Black?

Instead, the report answered a much less relevant question: Was the specific choice of Leonardo Rapadas for nomination as Black's replacement influenced by the direct intervention of Abramoff himself? The latter question is particularly odd for two reasons: because Abramoff's colleagues, not him, did intervene in the process before Rapadas's selection, and that Abramoff himself didn't care who replaced Black. In Abramoff's own words, on page 20 of the report:

I don't care if they appoint bozo the clown, we need to get rid of Fred Black.

The timeline I've reconstructed is as complete as I could get it from the information in the OIG report. I'm hoping other citizen journalists can use it in their own work. The numbers in parentheses are page numbers of the report; to locate them in the PDF, add 1.

Moseys with scissors