It has been three years, 10 months and 22 days since Jack Abramoff walked into a federal court and pleaded guilty. So you thought the Abramoff scandal was over and done with? Well, not quite.

This week, an ex-Justice Department lawyer was sentenced for his role in the case. The AP reports:

The lawyer, Robert Coughlin, was sentenced in Federal District Court to a month in a halfway house, three years of probation and a $2,000 fine. He admitted providing assistance to Mr. Abramoff's lobbying team and its clients while accepting free meals and tickets from an Abramoff lobbying partner.

Next year, a motion picture starring Kevin Spacey will revive memories of the Abramoff scandal. Spacey portrays the man who was at the center of the corruption scandal. The movie's title will be "Casino Jack."

What is it about golf and political scandals? In today's New York Times, Nick Confessore writes that these two worlds seem to intersect a lot:

It was on a golf junket to Florida that [former N.Y. State Senate leader Joseph Bruno] first sold an Albany-area entrepreneur on the idea of paying him generous fees to help drum up investment, including earmarks that were arranged by the senator himself.

... In June, Salvatore F. DiMasi, a former speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, was indicted on charges that during rounds of golf, he plotted to rig state computer software contracts. This fall, an Indiana congressman, Steve Buyer, came under scrutiny when it was revealed that a charity he established to help teenagers pay for college had spent nothing on scholarships but $260,000 on lavish golf junkets.

And, of course, there was the infamous Jack Abramoff golf junket.

CREW Executive Director Melanie Sloan was quoted in the N.Y. Times article:

"More politicians will succumb to a pricey golf outing than to a sexy woman in a negligee. You have a lot more privacy than in your office and in a restaurant, and it’s socially acceptable to leave your office for half the day to play golf."

At NPR’s Political Junkie blog, Ken Rudin agrees with CREW’s assessment that Sen. Roland Burris (D-IL) shouldn’t have been "pleased" with the letter he received from the Senate Ethics Committee.

In its letter, the ethics committee wrote, "You should have known that you were providing incorrect, inconsistent, misleading, or incomplete information to the public, the Senate, and those conducting legitimate inquiries into your appointment to the Senate." NPR’s Rudin sarcastically asks:

This is what they call good news these days?

Some observers speculated that the ethics committee couldn’t have taken stronger action against Sen. Burris unless it believed his actions were going to earn him an indictment. But NPR correspondent Peter Overby throws cold water on that viewpoint. Overby writes:

The committee sometimes drops the hammer hardest on senators who've never been indicted, let alone convicted. For instance, in 1995 it recommended expulsion for Sen. Bob Packwood (R-Ore.), accused of sexually harrassing women on his staff and cutting a backroom deal to get his wife a job. He was never indicted (but never expelled either; he resigned first).

CREW’s Melanie Sloan offered this statement on the ethics committee’s letter admonishing Burris.

ABC’s interview with Doug Hampton on last night’s "Nightline" continues to keep the controversy surrounding Sen. John Ensign (R-NV) on the public’s radar screen. (CREW’s Melanie Sloan was also interviewed by ABC.) But the real question is whether the Ensign scandal is on the Senate Ethics Committee’s radar screen.

As most people now know, Sen. Ensign had an affair with Hampton’s wife, Cynthia. Both Doug and Cynthia Hampton worked for the senator at one point.

In this recent post, the Nevada-based blogger Desert Beacon takes aim at Sen. Ensign:

... the "everybody does it" argument minimizes the nature and depth of Ensign's betrayal of his constituents, and his unethical behavior. Having an affair with an employee's wife isn't something new on the planet, but when the perpetrator has been touting his high moral standards, affecting a devoted set of Christian ethics, and heralding his family values orientation, the hypocrisy is obvious and intense.

However, lest we forget, the Ensign scandal is not mostly about sex. The actions that Ensign and his family took after his affair with Cynthia Hampton raise serious ethical concerns. As Desert Beacon notes:

... as the issues surrounding Ensign's affair and his handling of the aftermath thaw around him some core questions remain. Did he violate Senate Ethics rules concerning the payment of the "severance" money to Hampton? Did he violate Federal statutes regarding lobbying by former staff members?

Those are key questions that the ethics committee should answer. CREW’s Melanie Sloan raised at least one more good question in her comments to a "Nightline" interviewer.

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner is under such intense criticism these days that some observers are openly speculating who — if anyone — might be waiting in the wings if Geithner vacated this key cabinet post. One name that's being floated is Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JP Morgan Chase.

So what do we know about Dimon and how he views the way the government responded to last year’s financial crisis?

Even though JP Morgan Chase employs more than 220,000 employees, Dimon has written that he rejects the "too big to fail" mantra. According to Dimon:

... if some unforeseen circumstance should put this firm at risk of collapse, I believe we should be allowed to fail.

On the other hand, Dimon does not support legislation to cap the size of a financial institution:

Artificially limiting the size of an institution, regardless of the business implications, does not make sense. The goal should be a regulatory system that allows financial institutions to meet the needs of individual and institutional customers while ensuring that even the biggest bank can be allowed to fail in a way that does not put taxpayers or the broader economy at risk.

CREW has been pressing federal officials for greater transparency and oversight of TARP funds. We created the blog TARP Tales to post and monitor developments — the latest news stories and reports can be found there.

Earlier this month, CREW filed a lawsuit against the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, challenging the Board’s failure to produce records that identify the recipients of the Board’s financial assistance over the last six months. Our lawsuit seeks to know the amount each institution received and the terms of the assistance.

Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) appeared yesterday on ABC News' "This Week" with host George Stephanopoulos. This was a good opportunity for Sen. Coburn to clarify the specific role he played in the controversy surrounding Sen. John Ensign (R-NV).

Unfortunately, it was a wasted opportunity.

Although Coburn admitted that he acted as an intermediary between Doug Hampton and Ensign (who had an affair with Hampton's wife), TPMMuckraker's Zachary Roth writes:

Coburn also seemed to be saying that Hampton lied by telling "Nightline," in an interview to air tonight, there was a negotiation. But Hampton never said that. He only said that Coburn offered to help him negotiate a deal with Ensign. And, crucially, that Coburn suggested having Ensign make a payment to the Hamptons, and help them buy their home.

Coburn never directly says whether those key claims by Hampton are true. And Stephanopoulos never pins him down on it.

If you read the ABC "This Week" transcript, it isn't clear exactly what Coburn claims Hampton is being untruthful about. Coburn's qualified "no" response does not refute Hampton's allegations. It only seems to raise anticipation of what Hampton will say on tonight's ABC "Nightline."

Over the past several hours, some headlines have proclaimed that Sen. Roland Burris (D-IL) has been "cleared" of ethics charges. It makes us wonder if these media outlets have read the actual letter sent to Sen. Burris by the Senate Ethics Committee. This letter states:

"The committee found that you should have known that you were providing incorrect, inconsistent, misleading or incomplete information to the public, the Senate and those conducting legitimate inquiries into your appointment to the Senate."

In addition, the letter stated that Burris' actions and statements had reflected "unfavorably upon the Senate ..."

CREW’s Melanie Sloan commented on the ethics committee's letter:

"This is one of the harshest letters the Senate Ethics Committee has issued in recent times and Sen. Burris clearly deserved it. It is apparent Sen. Burris would have done almost anything to obtain and hold the Senate seat, including lying to law authorities investigating his appointment.

"Sen. Burris follows Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK), Sen. David Vitter (R-LA), Sen. Larry Craig (R-ID), Sen. Pete Domenici, and Sen. John Ensign (R-NV) in failing to live up to the high standards the public has a right to expect of our country’s elected leaders. America deserves better."

CREW filed a Federal Election Commission (FEC) complaint today against Sen. Mary Landrieu’s (D-LA) campaign committee, Friends of Mary Landrieu, Inc., over a mysterious $25,300 “donation” the committee made to the Treasury Department last year according to reports filed with the FEC.

The campaign committee likely discovered it had accepted illegal contributions and, rather than following the normal practice of returning a contribution to its original donor, decided to turn the money over to the Treasury. When Sen. Landrieu’s campaign lawyer Marc Elias was asked to explain the payment, he refused, seeking to protect the identity of the donor.

However, while Friends of Mary Landrieu, Inc. may not be talking, federal campaign finance law is clear – the only time campaign committees can transfer illegal contributions to the Treasury rather than back to the original donor is when that donor:

• is under a Justice Department investigation, or
• has been convicted for making illegal contributions.

And even in those cases, the campaign committee still must make the donor’s identity public. CREW’s complaint alleges that because there has been no suggestion of an ongoing Justice Department investigation into illegal contributions to the Landrieu campaign, the committee improperly turned the money over to the Treasury.

CREW executive director Melanie Sloan said,

We all know politicians don’t give up campaign contributions – much less $25,000 – without a very good reason. It appears Sen. Landrieu’s reason may have been to avoid a scandal or, even worse, a federal investigation into some of her contributions. Our campaign finance laws were designed to ensure transparency. Sen. Landrieu cannot ignore a law she finds inconvenient simply to save herself the embarrassment of acknowledging she received illegal campaign contributions. If Sen. Landrieu did nothing wrong, she has no reason not to come clean with the American people and explain why she turned over $25,000 in contributions to the Treasury.

Click here to read CREW’s FEC complaint.

If Sen. Mary Landrieu’s (D-LA) campaign genuinely wants to end the controversy around the campaign’s $25,300 “donation” to the U.S. Treasury, it will need to come up with a much better explanation than it has provided so far.

According to TPM’s Zachary Roth, an attorney for Landrieu’s campaign declined to offer an explanation for the Aug. 2008 donation “to avoid compromising the privacy of the original donor” from whom the money was received. Roth writes:

[A lawyer for Landrieu’s campaign] described the donation as "routine." But several experts took issue with that. One veteran Washington campaign-finance lawyer called Elias's claim "bullshit."

"Campaigns don't routinely cough up money to the Treasury," he told TPMmuckraker. "FEC regulations require campaigns to return questionable contributions to the contributor — not send them to the Treasury Department."

It's sad to observe that perhaps the most high-profile ethics news in the U.S. House of Representatives this autumn has had nothing to do with actually enforcing ethics rules. Instead, the big ethics "news" has been the House ethics committee report that recently was leaked to the media.

Now, only a few weeks after this leak, a bill has been introduced in Congress to ban federal employees from using peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing applications. Because the ethics committee report was leaked through a P2P application, several House members are eager to ban P2P apps.

Wouldn’t it be nice to see the House move as swiftly on ethics enforcement as it is on the P2P issue?