Ex-congressional staffer faces charges

A second former House Transportation Committee staffer for
Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska) was slapped with three counts of corruption charges
for taking a free trip to the 2003 World Series that included entertainment at
a strip club.

A grand jury on Friday indicted Fraser Verrusio, 39, who
worked for Young as GOP policy director on the Transportation panel in 2003. He
is accused of conspiring to accept an illegal gratuity, accepting an illegal
gratuity, and making a false statement in failing to report his receipt of
gifts from a lobbyist and the lobbyist’s client on his 2003 financial
disclosure form.

{mosads}Verrusio abruptly left his job as a lobbyist for Jacobs
Engineering Group in January, according to a Jacobs employee. He is the latest
figure to face charges in the lobbying scandal surrounding Jack Abramoff.

Prosecutors recently won guilty pleas from three others,
including Trevor Blackann, a former aide to Sen. Kit Bond (R-Mo.) and Rep. Roy
Blunt (R-Mo.), James Hirni, a former Abramoff lobbying associate, and Todd
Boulanger, another lobbyist who worked with Abramoff.

Boulanger and Hirni organized the World Series trip and
Blackann and Verrusio accepted the illegal gifts, which included a chauffeured,
seven-passenger SUV, dinner at an expensive steakhouse and admission and
entertainment at a strip club.

In return, Blackann and Verrusio helped insert three
amendments benefiting an equipment rental company into the federal highway
bill.

Mark Zachares, another former Young aide, pleaded guilty
to conspiracy nearly two years ago, admitting that he had accepted illegal
gifts and a golf trip to Scotland from Abramoff in exchange for official acts
benefiting Abramoff clients.

In the indictment filed Friday, prosecutors also refer to
unnamed “Person #1” as attending the World Series Game along with Verrusio,
Blackann and Hirni. Boulanger was not mentioned as attending the trip.

The indictment included several e-mail exchanges between
Blackann, Boulanger and Hirni. In one, Blackann told Hirni and Boulanger that
he had had a meeting with a group of equipment distributors who opposed the
amendments the lobbyist sought.  Blackann
then told Hirni and Boulanger that he had concealed the reason he had agreed to
insert them into the transportation bill from the equipment distributors.

“He has no idea that we did this for you. I told him that
[Bond] came up with it himself,” he wrote. “In fact, I may have specifically
said that I did not do it for [Equipment Rental Company.]”

Verrusio worked on the Transportation panel from 2001 to
2007 when he left to become a lobbyist. Before that time, he served as a policy
adviser to then-Rep. Rick Lazio (R-N.Y.).

Fearing bad publicity on several ethics fronts, House
Republican leaders forced Young out of the top GOP position on the Natural
Resources Committee at the beginning of this Congress.