The Washington Post reports Jack Abramoff’s claim that he has met President Bush “almost a dozen times” in the last five years. The claim was contained in e-mails that Abramoff wrote to Kim Eisler, an editor for Washingtonian magazine who says he is sympathetic to Abramoff. But the e-mails were not published in Washingtonian; rather, they appeared on ThinkProgress, a website run by the Center for American Progress, the liberal think tank founded by former Clinton chief of staff John Podesta.

The Post apparently asked Eisler why he gave the e-mails to ThinkProgress. “Eisler confirmed the contents of the e-mail and said he recently provided portions of it to the liberal Web log ThinkProgress because he thought he was dealing with a fellow reporter,” the Post reported. “The blog posted the contents of the Abramoff-Eisler communication.”

The unspoken suggestion is that Eisler would not have given out the e-mails if he knew he was dealing with a liberal advocacy website rather than a fellow reporter. It is not clear whether Eisler is saying that ThinkProgress staffers misrepresented themselves, or that he just didn’t know who they were. But if it is the latter, that would be surprising, given that Eisler is a long-time Washington journalist, and given that the Center for American Progress has taken a high-profile role in virtually every anti-Bush cause in recent years, including the Abramoff story, and given one last bit of information in the last sentence of the Post account:

“Eisler’s wife, Judy Sarasohn, covers lobbying issues for The Washington Post.”