Rep. Jim Ryun (R-KS) lost his re-election bid this November -- but he won't leave Congress empty-handed.

Back in April, Paul broke the story of the strange house deal between Ryun and the DeLay/Abramoff-connected sham charity, U.S. Family Network.

In 2000, Ryun bought the Capitol Hill property from USFN for $100,000 below market -- odd, because the D.C. housing market was booming then, and houses were selling for above-market prices. The good deal has gotten even better, according to FECInfo.com: the house has recently been assessed at $920,870, up 125% from when he bought it in 2000.

Update: A belated but heartfelt tip of the hat to Reader GY, who alerted me to this.

Ladies and Gentlemen, we have a new champion in the ongoing competition between lawmakers to distance themselves from Jack Abramoff.

Up until now, the lamest denial I'd heard was Rep. Ginny Brown-Waite's (R-FL) "I wouldn't know the man if I tripped over him." This, however, is just one of many varieties of the "I wouldn't know Abramoff if..." excuse.

Rep. Jim Ryun (R-KS) stormed into the lead this weekend with the following: "I never met with (Abramoff) in my office."

He never met with him in his office. He was therefore safe from any undue influence. Feel better, Kansas?

Ryun, of course, is still trying to spin his way out of his purchase of the U.S. Family Network's townhouse for tens of thousands of dollars under market price, a story we broke in March. The U.S. Family Network was controlled by Abramoff's close ally Ed Buckham, who's reportedly in the Justice Department's sites. Kansans should be relieved to know that Ryun vows he never met with Buckham in his office, either.

Last week, Rep. Jim Ryun (R-KS) released a statement purporting to prove that the townhouse he purchased from Ed Buckham's U.S. Family Network was sold at fair market price. But his statement (which we've posted here) and its accompanying documentation doesn't prove any such thing. In fact, it only confirms how odd the sale actually was.

Let's review.

As we reported for the first time last Monday, Ryun bought the Capitol Hill townhouse at far below market value in 2000 - as much as $100,000 below, according to experts we spoke to. The seller was the U.S. Family Network, a nonprofit controlled by Tom DeLay's former chief of staff Ed Buckham. The USFN was little more than a front for Buckham, a slush fund pumped full of money ($2.3 million over four years) by Jack Abramoff's clients. (Buckham was recently implicated in Tony Rudy's guilty plea for helping Abramoff bribe Rudy.)

So what's Ryun's defense?

Ryun claims that he found structural deficiencies that effected the price of the townshouse. According to his statement, Ryun consulted a housing inspector who found that "the upstairs master bathroom was in danger of falling through the living room ceiling because of the size of the bathtub put in by the previous owner." He then followed up by speaking with a contractor who estimated the repairs would cost "between $10,000 and $20,000."

But Ryun does not produce documentation for these estimates, nor does he suggest that such documentation ever existed or that he provided it to the U.S. Family Network as part of the negotiations. What he did do, according to his account, was "ask" the USFN to take the contractor's estimate "into consideration." The USFN then apparently voluntarily depressed the sale price based on Ryun's verbal assurances that repairs were needed. That's seems far from a normal process of negotiation. And how many building inspectors produce no written record of their work?

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On Friday, Paul noted how the guilty plea by ex-DeLay aide Tony Rudy is bad news for a man named Ed Buckham. Buckham's fall -- and what he could tell prosecutors -- would be even worse news for a lot of other people, including many elected officials, Paul pointed out.

Well, recent news reports tell us more about the man who's increasingly looking like the Grand Central Station of recent Congressional scandals, and what prosecutors might know.

Recall that shady house deal Paul reported on between Rep. Jim Ryun (R-KS) and Abramoff's multimillion-dollar sham charity, the U.S. Family Network? ABC News says Buckham facilitated it. And the Houston Chronicle this morning gives new details on how Buckham, who was both a private lobbyist and head of DeLay's ARMPAC, converted the majority leader's political donors into lobbying clients -- or was it the other way around?

I can never remember. Good thing prosecutors have a thousand emails from Rep. Tom DeLay's (R-TX) office to help them keep track, Newsweek tells us.

What other balls did Buckham have in the air? In addition to running the U.S. Family Network, DeLay's ARMPAC and Alexander Strategy Group, he lobbied for Brent Wilkes, a major figure in the Cunningham bribery scandal; he "employed" DeLay's wife Christine and Rep. John Doolittle's (R-CA) wife, Julie, in arrangements widely recognized to be channels to pump money to the husbands; and he had a funny habit of being around when DeLay was helping out Abramoff's Choctaw's clients, or DeLay met with Abramoff's shady Russian oil pals. Will he sing like a canary when the heat comes down?

So the AP picked up our story on Rep. Jim Ryun's (R-KS) townhouse deal. Let's look at what he came up with in his statement - he refused to be interviewed about it. There are some gaping holes in his story.

To repeat the facts: the U.S. Family Network bought the house in 1999 and sold it about two years later for a $19,000 loss, when they should have sold it for about a $100,000 gain in that market, according to experts we spoke to.

And the USFN wasn't just any old political organization - they were a front group that Ed Buckham used to funnel in $2.3 million from Jack Abramoff's clients. The money propped up Buckham's lobbying firm Alexander Strategy Group, paid for the townhouse which also housed Tom DeLay's political committee, and generally helped fund Abramoff's and DeLay's political machine.

So let's just focus on the USFN for a second. Ryun's spokeswoman told the AP that "Ryun 'was not specifically lobbied by USFN' and that the group has not made any contributions to his campaign."

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TPM reader RI writes in:

Just called Ryun's office and told the person that answered my name. Then I said that Jim Ryun [who was an Olympic athlete] was a childhood hero of mine, and that I was very disappointed to hear that he had made a kiling in a real estate deal with the US Family Network. I was asked to hold on, and the person then came back on the line to say that Rep Ryun had done nothing wrong and that he is going to produce documentation to back it up. I thanked him and told him that I was looking forward to his announcement.

Sounds like it took calling him as a disillusioned track and field fan to get any kind of statement out of him!

We wait with bated breath.

Here's an update on our report on Rep. Jim Ryun's (R-KS) sweetheart real estate deal.

Yesterday we reported that the U.S. Family Network, a sham nonprofit controlled by former DeLay Chief of Staff Ed Buckham and funded by Jack Abramoff's lobbying clients, sold a Capitol Hill townhouse to Rep. Jim Ryun (R-KS) at a $19,000 loss. Given the hot real estate market in Washington, D.C. at that time, the low sale price raiseed the question of whether transaction was a de facto gift to Rep. Ryun.

To refresh everyone's memory, the USFN bought the house in January of 1999 for $429,000. Almost two years later, they sold it to Ryun for $410,000.

That sounded low to us -- and legions of TPM readers, a number of whom work in real estate, wrote in to agree. So today we spoke to two real estate appraisers who work in the Capitol Hill area to get a sense of just how low that sounded to them.

Don Boucher, an appraiser who focuses on residential properties in the D.C. area, said that the property should have appreciated “about 15% or more” during that time period, meaning that it would have sold around $500,000.

Another appraiser, who preferred to remain anonymous because he often works with members of Congress, said that the townhouse should have appreciated "by $100,000 at least." He said the low sale price "wouldn't make sense at all unless there was a fire and the place was gutted." He added, "It looks like they gave it away."

There's also a question of whether the house was ever actually formally put on the market as opposed to being sold to the Ryun's in a private sale.

The property was not listed in 2000 on the Metropolitan Regional Information System as are most properties when a realtor is involved. The area real estate professionals we spoke to said that members of Congress frequently ask that properties not be listed on the MRIS out of privacy concerns. In this case, though, the seller (USFN) was a nonprofit tied to a lobbying firm, not a member of Congress, which raises the question of why they opted not to list the property and whether the U.S. Family Network pursued competitive bids.

We again contacted Rep. Ryun's office for comment, but our calls were not returned.

Recently, the Washington Post and TPMmuckraker.com have been reporting on the DeLay-Buckham front group, U.S. Family Network. Ed Buckham, you'll remember, was Tom DeLay's Chief of Staff until he left the Hill to open up his lobby shop, Alexander Strategy Group. USFN purported to be a grassroots activist group pushing causes dear to social conservatives. In fact, it functioned as a slush fund and all-purpose political favor mill through which Jack Abramoff clients (Russian tycoons, Marianas sweatshop owners and the Mississippi Choctaw Indian tribe) funneled money to Buckham, his lobbying shop and other DeLay causes.

One thread of the USFN story was the townhouse it bought near Capitol Hill. Called the "Safe House" by former Majority Leader Tom DeLay's aides, it was the headquarters for DeLay's ARMPAC, Buckham's lobby shop, Alexander Strategy Group, and of course it even had a little office for the USFN itself.

By 2000 the FEC was starting to look into the USFN, and the USFN's Capitol Hill neighbors had begun to complain that it was a business operating in a residential area in violation of local zoning laws. In their big piece on the U.S. Family Network yesterday, the Washington Post reported that when Buckham's USFN had to part with the beloved "Safe House" in late 2000 it took a $19,000 loss.

Now, that got us to wondering. A loss of that scale is far from Duke Cunningham territory. But the DC housing market was pretty hot back then and the USFN held the property for just about 2 years.

So who got such a good deal?

The buyer was Rep. Jim Ryun (R-KS).

D.C. property records show that the townhouse was sold to Ryun for $410,000 on December 15, 2000. According to the Post, the USFN purchased the townhouse for $429,000; the deed was signed January 12, 1999.

(To confirm that this was the same Jim Ryun, we found this 2004 FEC contribution listing in which a Jim Ryun who identifies his profession as "congressman" lists the former "Safe House" address, 132 D Street, as his place of residence. Roll Call, it turns out, briefly noted Ryun's purchase on June 4th 2001, but long before the scope of Buckham's and Abramoff's bad acts had come to light.)

Property sold to a member of Congress at substantially under market value can, in some instances, be construed as a de facto gift. In this case, that would be from the Buckham-controlled and Abramoff-client-funded front group USFN to Rep. Ryun.

Naomi Seligman of CREW told TPMmuckraker.com that Ryun's house deal should prompt a House Ethics Committee investigation. "Who else in America has lost money on a real estate transaction except [Cunningham contractor felon] Mitchell Wade?"

According to Ryun spokesperson Michelle Schroeder, Rep. Ryun was on a plane Monday and unavailable for comment.