An ex-associate of Jack Abramoff picked to serve as number two at the Labor Department was approved by a Senate Committee on Wednesday.
Patrick Pizzella, nominee for Deputy Labor Secretary, was advanced on a strict party line vote, along with a handful of other Trump administration political appointees.
Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.)–who had grilled Pizzella about Abramoff ties during the confirmation hearing–denounced the nominee before Wednesday’s vote. The lawmaker said that Pizzella was unrepentant about his past and offered “misleading answers” to senate staffers, after his July hearing.
Abramoff is a former lobbyist who pleaded guilty in 2006 to one count each of mail fraud, tax evasion and conspiracy. He spent more than three years behind bars before his early release in 2010.
One of Abramoff’s lucrative clients was the government of the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CMNI)—a US territory in the Pacific, since the end of the Second World War.
The territory was long exempt from US labor and immigration law, leading it to play host to vicious, systemic abuses of migrant workers. Pizzella worked with Abramoff to keep those legal exemptions in place—in part by arranging trips to the Marianas for lawmakers and right-wing influence peddlers in Washington.
“In 2007 and 2008, after Abramoff and Pizzella had stopped lobbying for the CNMI government, Congress overwhelmingly passed bills revoking the islands’ wage and immigration exemptions,” as Mother Jones noted in August, in a story on Pizzella.
On Wednesday, Franken said that Pizzella should be disqualified from top Labor Department work given his past duties for Abramoff—and his recent justification of them.
“If Mr. Pizzella had acknowledged that he was wrong on this issue many years ago, his nomination would be a little less troubling to me,” Franken said. “But in my private meeting and in his nomination hearing, he was dismissive about these abuses.”
Franken also said that Pizzella “provided misleading answers” to questions for the record after the hearing.
According to the senator, the nominee said he arranged meetings between congressional delegations and Department of Interior officials to discuss concerns about labor abuses.
“But my staff spoke to Al Stayman,” Franken said, referring to an ex-Interior official assigned to CMNI, who also spoke to Mother Jones for its recent Pizzella article. Stayman told Franken that the briefings occurred at Interior’s insistence, and that “Abramoff’s lobbying team tried to block the briefings.”
“I am concerned that someone with this record would be nominated to be the number two person at the Department of Labor,” Franken said.
