Gordon Smith, bad company

What do Gordon Smith and Tom DeLay have in common? None other than recently indicted Jack Abramoff and Indian Casino money. As Willamette Week reports:

Inside the Washington, D.C., Beltway, the scandal over super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff is the biggest one going-and Oregon Republican Sen. Gordon Smith has a ringside seat.

Yet in three public hearings on the matter in the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, transcripts show Smith hasn't uttered a single word.

So why might that be.

Why so mum? Perhaps because the issues raised by Abramoff-who was arrested by the FBI last week-hit a little too close to home.

Smith and Abramoff aren't strangers. The senator has held fundraisers at a D.C. restaurant that Abramoff owned until recently, and he has taken thousands of dollars in campaign donations from Abramoff and his tribal clients.

Follow the money:

Between May 2001 and May 2002, Abramoff wrote three $1,000 checks to Smith, followed by a $2,000 check in June 2002 from one of his main clients, the Mississippi Band of Choctaws. In late October 2002, right before Smith's reelection, while he enjoyed a large lead in the polls over Democrat Bill Bradbury, the senator accepted three more checks totaling $4,000, two from the Mississippi tribe and one from another Abramoff client, the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians in California. Since the election, Smith has received two additional checks from Abramoff's Indian clients, totaling $6,000.

[.....]

Smith's total take of $15,000 is not huge for Abramoff, whose donations to Indian Affairs committee members usually ranged from $3,000 to $7,000 each to more than $100,000 for his closest ally, Sen. Conrad Burns, R-Montana.

Smith knows Abramoff but doesn't know him.

Matthews says Smith has held more than one fundraiser at Signatures-but says it has nothing to do with Abramoff. "That's just a matter of convenience," Matthews says. "It's convenient to the Hill, and it has good meeting rooms." He says that while his boss may have been acquainted with Abramoff, the two did not have a close relationship. "You meet people in passing all the time, but they've never, like, met, sat down in an office and discussed an issue or anything like that."

If you have nothing to hide Senator Smith why the silence?