Wampum

If you want the big one, try looking in the ocean, not the mud puddle.

For months now, Democrats have been trying to bring down the Bush Administration through Abramoff's dealings with Congressional crooks such as Delay, Ney and Doolittle. These men should be frog-marched down the Capitol steps for their own crimes, not as a means to get to the bigger fish. The fact is, there's already plenty of clear evidence that the Bush Administration, in particular, the Interior Department, headed up by long-time Bush buddy Gale Norton, allowed Abramoff open access to its decision-making process.

In my posts the other day, I emphasized the importance of the Indian Trust lawsuit, Cobell v. Norton. Well, today, Lee Helfrich, a partner at the Washington, D.C. law firm of Lobel, Novins & Lamont, released a scathing update on the case. While the piece itself contained no mention of Abramoff, near the end was a rather damning detail. In its background on the installation of "fort Indian" Ross Swimmer as director, aka "Special Trustee" of the OST (Office of Special Trustee), Helfrich writes:

The first Special Trustee was Paul Homan, an experienced Trust manager. Mr. Homan resigned in 1999 because Interior's plans for Trust "reorganization" were not consistent with Trust principles.

Mr. Homan was replaced by Thomas Slonaker, who has 36 years of private sector Trust experience. In July 2002, Secretary Gale Norton and then-Deputy Secretary Steve Griles gave Mr. Slonaker a letter of resignation to sign; the alternative, according to Mr. Slonaker, was being fired. According to press reports, this "transition" was due to Mr. Slonaker's refusal to testify before Congress that Secretary Norton's plan for Trust reform was sound.

Apparently, Interior, its lawyers and others in the Administration did not want Congress, let alone the Cobell courts, to hear Mr. Slonaker's expert analysis on the Trust reform. During the July 2002 congressional hearing, Mr. Griles testified that Interior's plan was hunky dory. Although he was the politico over BIA, Mr. Griles had no experience in Trust management, but considerable private experience in lobbying – the ultimate PR guy and a well-known friend to industry.

So what does this have to do with Abramoff. In order to understand, we need to know a little more about this woman, Italia Federici, president of CREA. A good place to start is Salon's November 2005 article on her testimony before the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs. [AP photo]

Excerpt:

Italia Federici is a minor Republican player in Washington, the sort of dime-a-dozen functionary who can build a career trading favors in backrooms and producing political campaigns for moneyed interests. Her specialty is the environment. She leads a conservative front group called the Council of Republicans for Environmental Advocacy, or CREA, a tiny outfit, originally founded by Interior Secretary Gale Norton, that argues it is healthy for forests to clear-cut trees, good for the air to weaken air-quality controls, and "environmentally responsible" to drill for oil in the Alaskan wilderness.

...

On Thursday, she appeared before the Senate Indian Affairs Committee to explain under oath her relationship with Jack Abramoff, the disgraced Republican lobbyist whose exploits have already led to a handful of criminal indictments. For critics of Republican politics, the Abramoff investigations are a gift that keeps on giving. They reveal a world of ethical violations, illegal money transfers, perjury and graft that flowed between some of the biggest names in Republican politics. Already, Abramoff has been charged with fraud; a top White House official, David Safavian, has been charged with perjury; and another former White House official, Timothy Flanigan, has withdrawn from a Senate confirmation process.

...

Under the direction of Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., the committee has uncovered evidence that suggests Federici entered into an unspoken deal with Abramoff, who is accused of stealing millions of dollars from his Native American clients. He funneled nearly $500,000 in donations from these clients to her environmental organization. In exchange, Federici became his advocate in the inner sanctum of the Bush administration, offering him access to at least two of her close friends, Norton and Deputy Secretary J. Steven Griles. "Ms. Federici would help get inside information about and possibly influence tribal issues within the Interior," explained Sen. McCain, at the start of the hearing.

...

The e-mails released by the committee on Thursday certainly presented a damning case. At minimum, it appears Abramoff believed he was buying access to the Interior Department through Federici. He claimed to colleagues that Federici had "juice" at the agency. He claimed that CREA functioned as "Norton's main group outside the department." He offered Federici skybox seats at Redskins games and paid the bill for her meals and cocktail parties at his downtown restaurant, Signatures.

At the same time, Federici appeared to be catering to Abramoff's every wish. She arranged meetings, requested photo opportunities, delivered memos and newspaper articles to Interior officials. She even organized Georgetown dinner parties, under the cover of CREA, so Abramoff's clients could meet with Norton and Griles. "Thanks for all you do for my clients, the cause and me personally," Abramoff wrote her in a 2002 e-mail.

What Salon and most others working the Abramoff/Interior angle only see is Abramoff, via Federici, funnelling requests favorable for Greenberg Traurig's tribal clients, e.g., positive rulings on Indian gaming issues.

But CREA, under Federici, had a very public mission, to promote Bush's environmental agenda, particularly extensive deregulation of the oil and gas industry and the dismantling of 30 years of clean air and water legislation. Although Abramoff funnelled $500,000 in tribal funds to CREA, since its creation in 1997 by none other than Gale Norton and Grover Norquist, the purported 501(c)3 was primary funded by Norton's friends in the oil, gas and mining industries.

Federici's tight relationship with Deputy Secretary Steven Griles is particularly troubling. Griles stepped down from Interior last year, joining former Congressman Nethercutt in forming a new lobbying firm. According to AP's reporting on the events,

Griles, who earned a reputation as a go-to broker in Bush's program to lease out vast oil, gas and coal reserves below federally owned land in the West, said he was excited to be joining Nethercutt and Lundquist.

But Griles did not leave the DoI untarnished. Check out this DoJ investigative finding [,pdf] on Griles unethical conduct in regards to access peddling. (Girles, btw, is implicated heavily in Cheney's secret energy task force scandal.)

I'll try and summarize my current suspicions, in light of the growing body of information I'm compiling on this subject over the past few weeks. The Indian Trust fund case was reaching a point, despite all Norton's roadblocks, where some form of accurate accounting and settlement would be ordered. As is apparent from the NYTime's story on underpayment by federal oil, gas and mining leases, the kind of scrutiny the Indian litigants were requesting of industry accounts would have shown years ago that there was an immense amount of fraud and outright theft going on, all while the DoI lessened its enforcement, going as far as firing employees who sought to uncover the corporate misconduct.

The Interior Department also fired two of its most aggressive and successful auditors. One of them was Bobby L. Maxwell, a veteran auditor who had recovered hundreds of millions of dollars in underpayments over a 22-year career and received an award for meritorious service in 2003 from Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton.

Mr. Maxwell was fired in early 2005 after clashing with superiors over his belief that Kerr-McGee had shortchanged the government $12 million. Mr. Maxwell charged that he had been wrongfully fired, and the government paid him an undisclosed amount of money to settle out of court.
...

One of those auditors was Kevin Gambrell, director of the Federal Indian Minerals Office in Farmington, N.M. Mr. Gambrell fought with his superiors over many issues, one of which was their demand that he do fewer audits and simply monitor posted prices of companies in the same area.

"Where the M.M.S. approach falls short is that there are so many different types of deductions you can take in getting gas and oil to the market, and there are so many premiums and bonuses in the contracts," Mr. Gambrell said in a recent interview. "You have to take a detailed look at the contracts to know what's going on."

The Interior Department forced Mr. Gambrell out in 2003, charging that he had improperly destroyed office documents. Mr. Gambrell sued for wrongful termination, arguing that he had discarded only copies of documents. He also presented evidence that his office had recovered eight times as much money as offices that used the administration's preferred approach.

The government settled his case in 2004 by clearing him of any wrongdoing and paying him an undisclosed amount of money.

In 2002, involved tribes went as far to demand Congressional oversight of the DoI: As Helfrich writes:

In July 2002, "tribal leaders and Indian organization" demanded that Congress establish an independent commission to oversee Interior. As reported by the Associated Press: "Tribal leaders want the commission to have the power to subpoena documents, audit the department's accounting of ... royalties and impose fines against the interior secretary to repair the history of mismanagement that has squandered an unknown amount of money."

At this point, Abramoff is also using his tribal client slush-fund to buy off Congressmen, such as Pombo who could have influence over any pending or future Trust Fund legislation. Abramoff was able to keep the tribal money coming in by asking petty favors from Griles and Norton, when all the while he was forwarding the interests of Republican's real underwriters and policy makers, the oil, gas and mining industries. A revelation that these groups were massively ripping off not only the tribes, but the federal government, could have untold consequences for the Administration and Republicans in general.

The thing that's most troubling about all this is that the guilty parties have both a scapegoat (tribal gaming interests) and a smokescreen (casino legislation) to utilize in pursuit of their original goals. By feeding the public indignation over tribal gaming lobbying interests, the GOP knows it can undermine most Congressional support Indians enjoy, even those without gaming properties (including most of the Trust tribes), leading not only to a negative settlement of the Trust issue, but continuing the cover-up of decades of corporate plundering of federal and Indian trust lands.