Rep. Tom Feeney (R-FL) appears to have filed a false report to Congress when he estimated that a lavish 2003 golfing trip to Scotland with lobbyist Jack Abramoff cost over $5,000, according to court documents released Tuesday. The documents were filed yesterday as part of a guilty plea by Mark Zachares, a former aide to Rep. Don Young (R-AK).

According to the documents, “Abramoff’s expenses for the luxury trip averaged about $20,000 per person for each of the eight people who went.”

In his plea, Zachares admits that his travel reports were false:

Zachares had said the trip was paid for by a conservative think tank, the National Center for Public Policy Research, that it had cost $5,643 and that the purpose was fact finding. All three were lies, according to the documents.

Feeney, 48, an Orlando-area Republican who has been contacted by the FBI as part of the Abramoff investigation, reported precisely the same details in his travel report on the Scotland trip.

Feeney, who is being questioned by the FBI over his relationship to Abramoff, originally told Congress that the National Center for Public Policy Research had paid for his trip, claiming that he only learned later from reporters that Abramoff had paid for it. The House announced in January 2007 that Feeney would pay $5,643 to the U.S. Treasury for allowing the corrupt lobbyist to pay for the trip.

But now Zachares’ revelations raise questions about whether Feeney misled Congress when he said that his trip only cost $5,643 rather than the $20,000 Abramoff actually spent, and if not, whether he should have to pay the full $20,000.

Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) in a letter today called on Alberto Gonzales “to disclose by Friday all contacts between the office of Rep. Rick Renzi (R-Ariz.), the Justice Department and the White House related to his department’s probe of the lawmaker.” Schumer told Gonzales that the new reports out today “raise new and serious questions about whether improper political motivations were involved in your decision to force [former U.S. Attorney Paul] Charlton to resign just a few weeks after the election.”

UPDATE: House Judiciary Committee is looking for documents too:

Paul Charlton, the ousted U.S. attorney from Arizona, followed the rules. He reported an inappropriate contact last fall about an investigation into Arizona Republican Rep. Rick Renzi from the lawmaker’s own chief of staff as is required by Justice Department rules.

But that document is nowhere to be found among the thousands of pages of records turned over by the Justice Department to the House and Senate Judiciary committees investigating whether Charlton and seven other prosecutors were fired to silence public corruption investigations like the one into Renzi.

A House Judiciary Committee aide said that the document is “missing” and they plan to ask the Justice Department to find it and find it fast.

Robert Novak: “While the current clich© is that Bush never should have named Gonzales as attorney general in the first place, the consensus in the administration was that he was already at sea in his first post as White House counsel. Colin Powell, Bush’s first-term secretary of State, was so appalled by Gonzales that he would shunt him off to Deputy Secretary Richard Armitage, who in turn handed him down to lower levels along the State Department chain of command.”

“Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) should be recalled by voters over his ‘un-American’ remarks about the Iraq war, Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK). Asked if the Nevada Democrat should resign from his leadership position because of his comments, Inhofe said: “I think it’s more serious than that. I think there should be a recall…for saying something as un-American as that.”

UPDATE: AmericaBlog has much more.

Juan Jos© Daboub, a strong advocate of the Iraq war, was rewarded with a managing director post when Paul Wolfowitz took over the World Bank. In that role, Daboub appears to have been Wolfowitz’s designate to drive the conservative agenda.

Daboub has started to come under heavy criticism from the Bank’s executive directors for pushing a hard-right agenda that stands in stark contrast to many of the Bank’s long-standing policies. In addition to his efforts to undermine family planning policies, Bank scientists are now disclosing that Daboub also tried to eliminate references to climate change in official reports:

Robert Watson, the chief scientist, said Mr Daboub tried to dilute references to climate change in the Clean Energy Investment Framework, a key strategy paper presented to the bank’s shareholder governments at its annual meeting in Singapore last September.

“He tried to water it down. He tried to take out references to climate change,” Mr Watson said. Two other officials confirmed this account.

The chief scientist said Mr Daboub, who oversees the sustainable development division, tried to remove some references to climate change completely and, in other cases, replace them with the phrases “climate risk” and “climate variability”, which convey greater uncertainty over the human impact on climate.

Mr Watson said: “My inference was that the words ¬’climate change’ to him implied human-induced ¬climate change and he still thought it was a theory and was not proved yet.”

Daboub’s efforts at the Bank bear a striking similarity to efforts by Philip Cooney, the former chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality. Handwritten notes on drafts of several climate reports issued in 2002 and 2003 showed Cooney repeatedly edited government climate reports in ways that play down links between such emissions and global warming.

Today is Africa Malaria Day. Over one million people die each year from the treatable and preventable disease; 80 percent of the deaths take place in Sub-Saharan Africa. Today, President Bush called for “a smart and sustained campaign” that involves distributing insecticide-treated bed nets, expanding indoor insecticide-spraying, providing anti-malaria medicine to pregnant women and delivering cutting edge drugs to people living with the disease.

After his remarks, Bush took a moment to showcase a few dance moves. Watch it:

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“By 21-10, the House oversight committee voted to issue a subpoena to Rice to compel her story on the Bush administration’s claim, now discredited, that Iraq was seeking uranium from Africa.” The oversight committee “also issued subpoenas for the Republican National Committee for testimony and documents about White House e-mails on RNC accounts that have apparently gone missing.” In the Senate, the Judiciary Committee “approved – but did not issue – a subpoena on the prosecutors’ matter to Sara Taylor, deputy to presidential adviser Karl Rove.”

“Extended overseas deployments affecting soldiers serving in Afghanistan and other locales overseen by U.S. Central Command should help to alleviate the stress on the Army,” a senior U.S. official claimed. Noah Shachtman: “Yeah, yeah. Water is dry, ice is warm, and up is down, too.”