HELENA — U.S. Sen. Conrad Burns, R-Mont., met with a Marianas official with close ties to disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff in the weeks before Burns received an Abramoff-related $5,000 contribution from the Marianas and reversed his earlier position on a bill about the islands.

The politician, Gov. Benigno Fitial, has said he will cooperate with the Justice Department’s ongoing investigation into potential bribery of public officials involving Abramoff, a man Fitial once described as “close friend,’’ according to Pacific Magazine, a Hawaii publication that covers the Pacific region.

Burns, who a little more than a year before had not opposed an identical Marianas measure, voted against a bill in May 2001 that would have strengthened U.S. oversight over the commonwealth’s labor and immigration laws. He has come under scrutiny for changing his position on the bill after receiving the donation, which came from an Abramoff client.

The bill dealt with labor and immigration laws on the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas Islands, a U.S. territory near Guam. Citizens of the commonwealth are U.S. citizens, although the island is exempt from many U.S. federal standards including minimum wage.

In the late 1990s, some 58 percent of the island’s population was non-citizen immigrants, many from China, drawn to the island’s garment manufacturing jobs, government reports show. Such non-citizen workers stay in the islands on visas that will not lead to U.S. citizenship. At the time, workers in the factories earned a minimum of $3.05 an hour, below the U.S. minimum wage of $5.15. Clothes made there can be imported to the U.S. with a “Made in USA’’ label and factory owners pay no U.S. tariffs.

Some critics called the working conditions there “sweatshops,’’ although others praised the island’s economy, which made it less dependent on U.S. federal help.

In 2000, the Senate passed a bill by unanimous consent that would have given the U.S. government more oversight of the island’s labor and immigration laws. Burns did not oppose the measure. Because the law passed by “unanimous consent,’’ it did not require an active vote by any senator, but any senator could have opposed it. The next year, however, Burns voted against the bill and requested that the vote be recorded so there would be a written record of it.

Burns has said the money had nothing to do with his 2001 stance on the bill. Rather, the senator told Lee Newspapers this month, he was persuaded to vote against the measure after reading two government reports about the islands and meeting with Fitial, who was then speaker of the Marianas House of Representatives.

Initially, Burns said he didn’t know why he adopted his later position.

Burns’ records show the senator met with Fitial for 15 minutes on the afternoon of April 3, 2001.

Campaign finance records and reports in Pacific Magazine show Fitial is a former executive of Tan Holdings. Eloy Inos, another Tan Holdings executive, donated $5,000 to Burns’ Friends of the Big Sky on April 20, 2001, a little more than two weeks after Fitial’s meeting with Burns.

Inos worked on Fitial’s transition team last December, shortly after Fitial won the islands’ governor seat, Pacific Magazine reports.

Inos’ check was among $12,000 Burns collected in the weeks before the vote from Abramoff, his clients and associates.

Tan Holdings, the largest employer on the islands’ according to the company’s Web site, is a member of the Saipan Garment Manufacturers Association. Saipan is the largest island in the commonwealth.

Records show the garment association also hired Abramoff in 2001 to defeat laws that would put greater federal oversight over labor and immigration on the islands. The association paid him $460,000.

The Los Angeles Times and Pacific Magazine have both reported that Fitial won his bid for speaker of the Marianas house through the actions of Abramoff’s lobbying partner, Michael Scanlon.

Scanlon has since pleaded guilty to bribery and other crimes and is cooperating with the Justice Department’s lobbying probe.

The publications reported that after Fitial assumed his role as speaker, he pressed the island government to revive Abramoff’s lobbying contract with the island, which had expired in 1998.

Records show the commonwealth government hired Abramoff again in 2001 and paid him $1.1 million to defeat the kind of bill Burns voted against.

Burns spokesman James Pendleton said the senator couldn’t know how Fitial became speaker in 2001. As far as Burns knew, Pendleton said, Fitial was a duly elected official from the islands and it made sense that he would want to talk to Burns.

Pendleton said the senator may have known Abramoff represented the island government at the time, but was unsure.

“When the speaker of the house comes, you listen,’’ Pendleton said.

The Burns aide said Fitial told him the local government was working to deal with problems of non-citizen workers and that the U.S. government should give them a chance to fix it.

Burns said Fitial’s visit wasn’t the only reason the senator reversed his vote on the 2001 Marianas bill. He said he read to General Accounting Office reports that came out in the spring of 2000, one looking into immigration and another on the role of the garment industry and tourism.

Those reports specifically say that investigators did not consider the social and political effects of maintaining a majority of the islands’ population as non-citizen workers or how well the island government upheld its existing labor and immigration laws. One report states that investigators did not look into whether such laws needed to be changed, only the economics of the current situation.

Pendleton said that’s what Burns was most interested in, too.

“That was point one,’’ he said. “The economic impact of (the defeated bill) would be negative.’’

Pendleton said the senator also deferred to local control.