My long-ago colleague and still-friend David Klinghoffer, formerly of NR as well, has published a long piece in Los Angeles Jewish paper that attempts to offer a compassionate portrait of Jack Abramoff, whom he knows. It relies heavily on Jewish law, and claims Abramoff used his ill-gotten gains to perform good deeds, and it’s very much worth reading because it is so contrarian and therefore challenges the conventional wisdom in a valuable way. David is a wonderful and very earnest guy, and one of the most moral people I’ve ever known. But though I can’t offer Biblical verse or Talmudic midrashim to support this view as David can for his case, it’s hard to square the circle here. Just because Jack Abramoff gave money he now acknoweldges he obtained fraudulently to help some religious Jews does not cleanse the money or him. If anything, it dirties those who received it — even if they received it in all innocence.