This is why tribal campaign reporting is important (and why falsifying that documentation should be closely monitored). I know this is on different scale but the set up is the same. It’s how lobby money can affect tribal government. The chairman of the Cheyenne Arapaho tribe is under investigation for how a gaming management company funded her campaign for C&A Governor. It’s our civic duty to monitor the vendor relationship between our elected officials. Essentially, there should be NONE in my opinion. This is the trailer to a documentary about Jack Abramoff and his rise and fall. For anyone who works in and around the gaming industry in Indian country will say…there are snakes everywhere…and they are right.

Any informed person watching “Casino Jack” would conclude that Gibney has some vague perception that money has taken over politics. Yet, the inaccuracies he portrayed along with his blatant agenda to tar the individuals associated with Abramoff made his C-Span interview and film uncomfortable to watch.

Let’s take a look at the cast of characters whom Gibney has brought forth as “experts,” who were showcased in clips broadcast on C-Span:

1. The Washington Post‘s Susan Schmidt

Already Carlyle Consulting’s Tom Rodgers, a rival of Abramoff’s, has admitted to providing her “Pulitzer Prize” winning material to her, much of which she got wrong and was allegedly lifted without attribution from local newspapers.

1. CREW’s Melanie Sloan

Rodgers also said that he fed Sloan her material, which led Oprah to name the head of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics “one of the most powerful” women in American for taking out Congressman Tom DeLay and Abramoff. Yet, again, this source did little, if any, original work. Her only contribution to the investigation seemed to be ill-informed commentary and snarky blather about DeLay’s appearance on Dancing with the Stars.

1. Commonwealth of Northern Mariana Islands Gov. Juan Babauta

Wasn’t this the same governor who appointed an attorney general to prosecute alleged human rights abuses on the CNMI, and didn’t this same attorney later join Milberg Weiss, whose partners were indicted on fraud for having paid plaintiff’s to appear in class actions?

1. Lt. Gov. of Tigua Tribe, Carlos Hisa

Hisa presides over a tribe whose membership is so diluted that it had to appeal to Congress to remove the blood quantum requirement – as at 1/8, the tribe couldn’t find a sufficient number of members to qualify for free federal dole outs? Does Hisa think that hard working American taxpayers should subsidize tribal members who are not even Indian? No wonder he hated Abramoff so much.

1. Carlyle Consulting lobbyist Tom Rodgers

Rodgers has admitted to coordinating the tribal dissidents and lobbyists against Abramoff and then leaking the information to newspapers.

How are any of these people credible witnesses?

At least Lamb asked relevant questions and demonstrated a fair level of objectivity, which would have made any documentary he organized well worth watching. In contrast, Gibney’s portrayal of Abramoff is pure buffoonery.

What inspired Gibney to write this film, Lamb wanted to know. “I had read some of the stories in the Washington Post, and I was surprised by the audacity of the story and how colorful it was….and I thought it would make a good movie,” the director replied. Was he also surprised by the audacity of newspaper reporters to lie so brazenly to the American people?

What was this film really about?

Rodgers said: “We had no idea it would lead to the conviction of Tom DeLay….It was all about the money.”

Gibney offered this: “Jack Abramoff was not on the periphery. ….He was at the center of Washington.”

This was a Washington in which conservatives were effectively rolling back taxes, empowering indigenous people, and cutting into the power and market share of monopolies, whose banks would eventually send the economy crashing to its knees in 2008. Yet Gibney expressed shock, bordering on crocodile tears, that after Abramoff was downed, few if any other big fish were netted in this scandal his allies manufactured.

Another clip from Gibney’s mockumentary showed Abramoff escorting legislators to the CNMI just to play a round of golf, party, and pick up campaign contributions. Gibney couldn’t understand the CNMI affair within an ideological or contextual framework. He could not fathom that extending minimum wage and labor federal law to the archipelago, which Abramoff’s team was attempting to block, would decimate the indigenous economy and force those factories to relocate to China, where unions cannot organize and human rights abuses are chronic.

Thanks to Abramoff, for a time, workers returned home with between $10,000 and $15,000 when the average per capita income for the Chinese was between $400 and $1000. As a result, the system Abramoff defended from liberal encroachment rendered the workers quite wealthy by local standards. Yet, somehow Gibney would have the public believe that Abramoff was exploiting them.

What is clear is that after Abramoff’s ouster, many of those garment factories relocated to China, where U.S. manufacturers are able to mass produce items for the American consumers at rock bottom prices The resulting trade imbalance has generated a surplus, that has enabled China to buy American debt, to the great profit of Goldman Sachs, among other banks, which eventually received federal bailouts.

Whatever the case, Gibney seems fascinated with AIG’s business interests. His first documentary was on Enron, which fell out with AIG after a nine-figure insurance claim. Years later, the energy giant was downed by a scandal replete with sensational claims which bear remarkable similarity to the activities of Goldman Sachs, AIG, and their affiliates. The firm prosecuting this case was none other than Milberg Weiss, which also filed a billion dollar class action against the CNMI garment manufacturers and whose partners were later indicted for having paid plaintiffs to appear in class actions. These same scandal-ridden attorneys appeared in Gibney’s Enron documentary.

Now Gibney has set his sights on doing a a documentary about former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer, who was removed from office in a prostitution scandal, allegedly spurred by lobbyists, while in the process of investigating fraudulent activity at AIG, which is also represented by Akin Gump. Not only has this firm lobbied McCain extensively but it enjoys a strategic alliance with Ietan Consulting. Both firms played a strong role in the Abramoff investigation and acquired his clients afterward.

The “Casino Jack” director cannot be faulted for the slant of his mockumentaries. After all, his father, Frank Gibney, worked for Time and Life magazines, which were established by Henry Luce, a close friend of AIG founder C.V. Starr. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

For all intents and purposes, Gibney is a self-professed “skeptic” and “moralist.” If he genuinely possessed either of these attributes, his documentaries might be worth watching. As it stands now, one should consider the source and marvel at Gibney’s audacity to make the world a better, more profitable place for his friends.

Susan Bradford is the author of Jack Abramoff: Lynched, a forthcoming book which provides the complete story behind McCain’s Senate Indian Affairs Committee hearings.