Turtle Talk

Burns said Wednesday he was pleased and never doubted that “the baseless and politically motivated charges” leveled against him would be found to be without merit.

At the very least, depending on your political views, Burns was badly wounded by the ethical questions swirling around him because of his ties to Abramoff. Burns received nearly $150,000 in campaign donations from Abramoff’s lobbying team and his Indian clients – more than any other member of Congress. Under political pressure, he gave the money away.

The Washington Post reported Friday that federal prosecutors had been “investigating the pressure that Burns brought on the Interior Department to give a $3 million school-construction grant intended for poor Indian tribes to the wealthy Saginaw Chippewa tribe of Michigan, an Abramoff client.” Burns has insisted he did nothing wrong.

Through TV ads, the Montana Democratic Party repeatedly hammered home the Burns-Abramoff ethics issue for months. Tester made it the central theme of his campaign against Burns.

The cloud of a federal criminal investigation has hung over Burns since at least late November 2005. That’s when one major news organization after another, from the Wall Street Journal to the Washington Post to the Los Angeles Times, all citing anonymous sources, reported that Burns was under investigation. The Justice Department, following its policy, never confirmed or denied the reports, but based on the statement last week, obviously Burns was under investigation.

Montana reporters quoted the national news accounts, along with Burns’ comments that he’d done nothing wrong and that he had never been contacted by the agency.

Top Republicans are certain the Abramoff-related allegations against Burns and the federal investigation cost Burns the Senate seat.

“I believe it had an enormous impact on the election,” said state Republican Chairman Erik Iverson, who ran Burns’ campaign the final two months. “It was the seminal issue. In our polling, no other issue even reached double digits. It was front and center in television ads every night for two years.

“Without that issue, Jon Tester wouldn’t be a U.S. senator right now, there’s no question about it.”

Iverson, who works as U.S. Rep. Denny Rehberg’s chief of staff in Missoula, said he has no doubt that if the Justice Department had issued this statement before the election, Burns would have been re-elected.

“There wasn’t any issue that Jon Tester or the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee talked about that resonated with voters other than this,” Iverson said. “They put a lot of time and money into this, and it worked. Unfortunately, it wasn’t true.”

Iverson said it was frustrating “for those of us who knew all along there was nothing to any of the charges.” Not only did it influence the Montana Senate race, he said, but it helped give Democrats control of the U.S. Senate and affected state legislative races.

State Democratic Chairman Dennis McDonald couldn’t have disagreed more with his Republican counterpart.

“Regardless of whether the Justice Department found criminal wrongdoing on the part of Conrad, we all know that the relationship (with Abramoff) was improper, and we all know that the voters of Montana agreed,” said McDonald, a Melville rancher.

“It may or may not have risen to criminal conduct, but it was wrong, and it offended most Montanans, and it was reflected in the last election.”

Craig Wilson, a Montana State University-Billings political scientist, said: “There’s no doubt that a major issue in the campaign was that Burns had been there too long, and as a result he had developed close ties with lobbyists like Abramoff, and there were improprieties going on. Then there was this investigation.”

With Burns losing by a paper-thin margin, if the Justice Department had announced before the election that it had concluded its investigation, it “could have switched the results,” Wilson said.

“When you lose by 3,000 votes, absolutely it could have turned it the other way,” Wilson said. “It absolutely could have, but I don’t know that it would have.”

Even without the Abramoff issue, Burns’ controversial cursing at some firefighters in the Billings airport in the summer of 2006 “might have been enough to do him in,” Wilson said.

The professor noted one irony in the case. The Democratic-controlled Congress has been highly critical of the Bush administration’s Justice Department. Democrats have accused former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales of heavily politicizing the department, including firing U.S. attorneys for political reasons.

“If they’d been pushed politically, they could have reached the same conclusion (and dropped the Burns investigation) before the election,” Wilson said. “This suggests that didn’t happen and it was a very, very methodical investigation. In the end, we’ll never know exactly what they had or what they looked at. Certainly in fairness to Burns, they didn’t feel what he did was illegal.”

Chuck Johnson is chief of the Missoulian State Bureau in Helena. He can be reached at (800) 525-4920 or (406) 443-4920. His e-mail address is chuck.johnson@lee.net