As you know, Timothy E. Flanigan is awaiting confirmation as deputy attorney general of the United States. If confirmed, it will be his second stint with the Bush administration.

Flanigan was appointed deputy white house counsel in 2001. Later, he left that job to become general counsel of Tyco Corp., which had relocated to Bermuda to avoid paying taxes to the U.S. treasury. At Tyco, Flanigan hired Jack Abramoff to fend off legislation that would have punished corporate tax dodgers like Tyco.

In the course of that hiring and work, Abramoff first boasted to Flanigan of his access to Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Texas), Karl Rove and others. And later he claimed that he had spoken to Rove and enlisted his assistance on Tyco’s behalf.

Many press reports of the Flanigan-Abramoff connection suggest that Abramoff may just have been puffing or blowing smoke when he told Flanigan he had such inside access to Rove and others. But given Flanigan’s background working as the No. 2 lawyer in the White House counsel’s office, it seems highly implausible that Flanigan would not have known just who Abramoff was and the level of juice he had with Rove and other Republican power brokers.

Now, last week, a conservative acquaintance of mine asked me a simple question. If Flanigan was so plugged in at the White House (enough to know how tight Abramoff was with the president’s key advisers), why exactly did he need to hire Abramoff in the first place? Didn’t he already have enough access to handle the issue on his own?

To a degree, of course, purchasing the aid of a well-placed lobbyist is just how things are done in Washington. One might even call it a sort of corporate due diligence when it comes to influence peddling. But there’s an even more straightforward answer to the question. And it’s one that helps clarify just what sort of operation Abramoff was really running.

On paper, Abramoff was a lobbyist. He certainly did plenty of lobbying. And he made a tidy sum of money for himself. But if you think of Abramoff as just a crooked lobbyist, most of the facts coming out about what he did don’t make a great deal of sense. He was a key player in a very big political machine, and he was managing a slush fund.

Look at the pattern.

Notice how all Abramoff’s clients seemed to get “bilked” out of large sums of money that ended up going to other conservative foundations, consulting firms, Ralph Reed, lobby shops, Grover Norquist, astroturf organizers, politicians, etc.? All of them part of Washington’s Republican infrastructure?

In the case of Abramoff’s work for Flanigan and Tyco, Abramoff ended up sending the greater part of Tyco’s $2 million lobbying fee to an astroturf outfit called Grassroots Interactive — an outfit allegedly controlled by Abramoff and run by a guy who now works as the deputy chief of staff to the governor of Maryland.

The money ended up diverted to other purposes besides the honorable task of whipping up populist enthusiasm on behalf of corporations that relocate to P.O. boxes in Bermuda to avoid paying taxes. Tyco lawyer George Terwilliger claims the firm “was a victim of a rip-off.”

So is that it? Another rip-off? Was Tyco yet another corporation that hired a lawyer out of the White House only to get taken in by Abramoff’s wiles? Please. How many times can one operator pull off the same stunt? How many times do big chunks of these fat paydays get passed on to other operators and organizations without the operators and organizations getting wise to the game?

These odd diversions aren’t the exception but the rule.

The Republican machine built by DeLay, Norquist, Abramoff, et al. and pulled into high gear after 2001 is a pay-for-play political machine. This is just another part of the operation, like the diktat for trade associations to hire only Republicans. Big political machines need their soldiers to be taken care of — jobs on K Street that also discipline the trade associations under Hill leadership. Just so, they need big sums of money to move around off the books.

How does Rove keep the millions moving to Norquist? To Reed? To all the other operatives whose names you don’t know about?

Indian tribes bursting with millions who need very focused sorts of legislative intervention — that’s one good source of money. Corrupt Pacific Island governments that need similar help — another good source.

If Tyco wanted help, it had to pay in. That’s what the $2 million was. Of course it got passed on to some other GOP outfit with Abramoff connections. That was the point!

Like Mark Felt said, follow the money.

Marshall is editor of talkingpointsmemo.com. His column appears in The Hill each week. E-mail: This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it