Tuesday, August 23, 2005

Jack Abramoff: Email Demon?

Michael Crowley has a post about evil GOPer Jack Abramoff based on this U.S. News story:
I've followed the Abramoff story closely, and this installment is a pretty familiar rehash of the basic narrative. But a couple of things in it struck me. One is that the Justice Department has been poring through fully 500,000 of Abramoff's emails. That's a reminder of just how much of the conservative lobbyist's enthralling secret world remains unrevealed, despite all the national coverage to date.

500,000 emails? Does that figure sound right to you?

If we assume that DoJ is interested in the period beginning with the 1994 Republican take-over of the house, that means that Abramoff sent out and/or received 500,000 emails in 10 years, or 137 emails a day, every day for an entire decade, including the mid-'90s, when email was hardly a household convenience.

None of this is meant as a defense of Abramoff or the enthralling secret world of conservatism, of course, but that number does seem awful fishy.

Bonus: Funniest J.A. joke yet, courtesy of Uncle Grambo, "Jack Abramoff? But I hardly even know him!"

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

You neve know, he could have fallen for those email-chain letters.

Anonymous said...

If you count spam and other unsolicited e-mail, it doesn't sound that improbable. For a while there, everybody in Washington probably wanted to be his buddy ...