The ongoing scandal involving corrupt GOP lobbyist Jack Abramoff and numerous members of the Republican Party seems to be just that: ongoing. This weekend, The National Journal reported on the allegedly illegal interactions between the lobbyist and House Majority Leader Tom DeLay. Today, The Hill's Josephine Hearn reports that a shadow GOP organization with ties to the administration is being investigated by the Department of Justice.

An interagency criminal task force investigating former lobbyist Jack Abramoff has subpoenaed a Republican group founded by Interior Secretary Gale Norton and now run by her former aides, sources with knowledge of the investigation say.

The subpoena was issued to the Council of Republicans for Environmental Advocacy (CREA), a nonprofit group created in 1997 by Norton and Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, and long denounced by environmental organizations as a front group for industry interests.

[...]

CREA was one of several groups that received contributions from tribes represented by Abramoff. The Coushatta tribe of Louisiana gave $50,000 in 2001 and $100,000 in 2002, according to published reports. The Texas Tigua gave $25,000 in 2002.

Lobbyists with knowledge of Abramoff’s dealings with CREA said that the tribes did not give to CREA in an effort to support its environmental mission. Rather, they said Abramoff directed donations to CREA in return for the help of Federici, CREA’s president and formerly an aide to Norton during her 1996 Senate bid, in the tribes’ lobbying of the Interior Department.

Federici contacted top officials in the Interior Department, including former Deputy Secretary Steve Griles, on behalf of several of Abramoff’s tribes, at times drawing on one-page talking-points memos provided by Abramoff, the lobbyists said.

“It was a you-scratch-my-back, I’ll-scratch-yours situation,” one source with knowledge of the arrangement said. “CREA was seen as being close to Interior.” According to IRS filings, the manager of Norton’s Senate race, former Colorado state representative Jeanne Adkins, is CREA’s treasurer.

The complicity of DeLay and perhaps the White House in Abramoff's shady dealings is unconscionable. Clinton's small misdemeanors and even Nixon's poor cover-up of a botched robbery can't even compare with the systematic flaunting of rules by the current administration.