WASHINGTON — Susan B. Ralston, a former aide to the disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff who went on to work for the presidential adviser Karl Rove, has resigned from the White House after a report that she was a conduit between the two men.
Ralston submitted her resignation to President Bush on Thursday night, saying the time had come "to pursue other opportunities."
Administration officials acknowledged, however, that she quit as a result of a congressional report, released last week, that documented hundreds of contacts between Abramoff and the White House.
"A protracted discussion of the report was not in anyone's best interest, and when she chose to step down, we supported her decision," a White House spokeswoman, Dana Perino, said.
According to the report, Ralston was repeatedly lobbied by Abramoff after she became a top aide to Rove, as her former boss sought to curry favor with her new one. Once a high-rolling operator who lavished gifts on lawmakers and officials — in exchange, he hoped, for help with his clients — Abramoff has become, in the midterm elections, synonymous with corruption.
For more than a year, Ralston was entangled in two Washington scandals at once. A nexus between Abramoff and Rove, she was also pivotal in the CIA leak case. It was Ralston who patched through a telephone call from a Time magazine reporter to Rove, a conversation that cast a suspicion on the White House strategist. Ralston testified to a grand jury on the leak and was interviewed by pro- secutors in the Abramoff case.
Ralston was never accused of wrongdoing. The congressional report suggested she merely passed on messages from Abramoff to Rove, who sought basketball tickets from the lobbyist and ate at his restaurant (where, White House officials said, Rove paid for his own meals).
On Friday, Rep. Henry A. Waxman of California, the ranking Democrat on the House Government Reform Committee, which issued the report, accused White House officials of "trying to make Susan Ralston the scapegoat."
"There is a lot that we don't yet know about the assistance that Ms. Ralston provided Mr. Abramoff from inside the White House," Waxman said in a statement. "But there are also many unanswered questions about the assistance that higher-ranking White House officials appeared to provide Mr. Abramoff."
She was promoted after the 2004 election, receiving the title special assistant to the president and a raise to $122,000, from $64,700.