Jack Abramoff, the powerhouse Washington lobbyist who admitted running a wide-ranging corruption scheme that ensnared lawmakers, Capitol Hill aides and government officials, yesterday received a reduced sentence of four years in prison because of his cooperation with federal investigators.
The cooperation has been fairly substantive too:
The Justice Department said it has garnered 13 guilty pleas from public officials and lobbyists in the Abramoff case. The conviction of David H. Safavian, a former top official at the General Services Administration, was overturned in June by an appeals court; a retrial is scheduled for December.
13 guilty pleas so far, and the investigation is still going on. I think that the cooperation should indeed result in a reduced sentence. Reduced from 15 to 12 maybe. This is a man who actively worked to corrupt and subvert the political process, and succeeded to an astonishing extent. It's amazing that people can get longer sentences for selling drugs than someone who does this much damage to the democratic process. It just goes to show that white-collar crime just isn't taken seriously.
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