{"id":10302,"date":"2007-03-23T16:20:25","date_gmt":"2007-03-23T20:20:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/10302.html"},"modified":"2007-03-23T16:20:25","modified_gmt":"2007-03-23T20:20:25","slug":"griles-pleads-guilty-in-abramoff-case","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/griles-pleads-guilty-in-abramoff-case\/","title":{"rendered":"Griles pleads guilty in Abramoff case"},"content":{"rendered":"

The timing of this isn’t terribly convenient for the Bush White House. Just as the president and his team are arguing that administration officials would never<\/i> lie to Congress and wouldn’t dream<\/em> of preventing lawmakers from receiving the information they need to conduct a thorough investigation … Steven Griles pleads guilty<\/a> to lying to Congress in order to impede a thorough investigation.<\/p>\n

Former Deputy Interior Secretary J. Steven Griles pleaded guilty Friday to obstruction of justice, becoming the ninth person and the highest-ranking Bush administration official convicted in the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal.<\/p>\n

The former No. 2 official in the Interior Department admitted in federal court that he lied to Senate investigators about his relationship with convicted lobbyist Abramoff, who repeatedly sought Griles’ intervention at the agency on behalf of Abramoff’s Indian tribal clients.<\/p>\n

Griles pleaded guilty to a felony charge for testifying falsely before the Senate Indian Affairs Committee on Nov. 2, 2005, and during an earlier deposition with the panel’s investigators on October 20, 2005.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Griles said in a statement that he now realizes that when a Senate committee asks questions, “they must be answered fully and completely and it is not my place to decide whether those questions are relevant or too personal.” In court, he was asked: “Do you acknowledge that these were materially false statements about your relationship with Mr. Abramoff?” Griles replied, “Yes, your honor.”<\/p>\n

Now, I realize that when it comes to the Bush administration, Republicans in DC, and Abramoff & Co., it can be challenging to remember which corrupt conservative did what to whom. So, here’s a primer on what Griles was up to.
\n
\nAfter serving on Bush’s transition team, Griles, a former lobbyist, accepted a position as Bush’s Deputy Secretary of the Interior. (He also served on Cheney’s energy task-force.) Shortly after taking office, Griles was accused of doing what he does best — arranging favors for his former clients.<\/p>\n

At the time, Griles was dating Italia Federici, who was running a conservative think tank after having served as an aide to then-Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton. Abramoff directed his clients to give big bucks to Federici think tank ($500,000), and in return, she arranged favors at Interior for Abramoff’s clients. Griles, Federici’s boyfriend and the second-highest-ranking political appointee at the agency, was particularly “helpful.”<\/p>\n

When the Senate investigated all of this, Griles lied under oath. That’s a no-no.<\/p>\n

Better yet, as ethics complaints started mounting, the Interior Department assigned an official to keep an eye on Griles, to make sure he didn’t get into too much trouble while Interior’s inspector general looked into his activities. The official was Sue Ellen Wooldridge, then the deputy chief of staff to Interior Secretary Gale Norton.<\/p>\n

Griles then started dating Wooldridge, all the while doing favors for Abramoff’s clients. He lied to Congress about that, too, and now he’s going to jail.<\/p>\n

It’s quite a colorful cast of characters Bush hired to staff his administration, isn’t it?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The timing of this isn’t terribly convenient for the Bush White House. Just as the president and his team are arguing that administration officials would never lie to Congress and wouldn’t dream of preventing lawmakers from receiving the information they need to conduct a thorough investigation … Steven Griles pleads guilty to lying to Congress […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10302","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10302","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10302"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10302\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10302"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10302"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10302"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}