Forty-three months in prison had one major impact on scandalous former Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff. After helping send 20 former friends and associates to jail, he’s going to stop being a rat.
Repeatedly whining about the prison conditions he faced at the minimum security facility in Western Maryland, Abramoff told a Public Citizen audience today that he would play no role in naming any more suspects in the congressional corruption scandal he headlined in 2006.
“Having gone through what I went through, watching my family being torn to shreds and my children suffer immensely, I can’t be the agent of doing that to someone else. I can’t be the agent of causing somebody to go to prison,” he said.
Now an unlikely champion of lobbying reform, he said “prison is horrible” and “there’s some fear, there’s violence there.” But he said that it was prison guards, not inmates, who pushed him to the edge. The reason: He claimed they had been told he was like Hannibal Lecter, the horror figure in Silence of the Lambs, who couldn’t be trusted or even talked to.
“Even my worst enemy I wouldn’t send” to prison, he said.
