Wampum

The Wall Street Journal's Jeanne Cummings has an update on current happenings in the Abramoff case. While there is a lot of meat there, my perservations on J. Steven Griles, former Deputy Secretary for the Interior, and lead official over so-called Indian Trust "reform", have me focusing on these paragraphs at the end of the piece:

Mr. Griles is waging a vigorous effort to avoid being charged in the Abramoff investigation. He has offered to meet with prosecutors, though so far they have declined. In emails that surfaced in a Senate inquiry, Mr. Abramoff referred to Mr. Griles as his "man" in the department that oversees Native American issues. Another Interior Department official last year told the Indian Affairs Committee that Mr. Griles showed unusual interest in such issues while serving as the department's chief of staff.

Barry M. Hartman, Mr. Griles's attorney, has written the Senate committee, dismissing the idea that Mr. Griles was close to Mr. Abramoff as a lobbyist's boast to his clients. Mr. Hartman said his own review had uncovered only a handful of telephone calls and email contacts between the two men -- none of which resulted in official Interior Department measures that would have benefited Mr. Abramoff's clients. Mr. Hartman also cited a 2003 email by Mr. Abramoff in which he lamented that Mr. Griles "can't (or at least won't) discuss any of my clients with me."

Now, if Cummings were serious about this piece, she would have pulled up the July 17th email from Abramoff to Federici, along with all the two and a half years of correspondence between the two prior to that date. In those emails, it is very clear that Griles and Abramoff had a relationship anyone with half a brain would see as more than "casual". From just a cursory review (I've read all the docs in depth previously) there are at least a dozen instances where Abramoff indicates that Griles is explicitly intervening on behalf of his clients.

So why the big change in July, 2003? Probably because he was under investigation, beginning in April 2003, for unethical behavior in regards to his relationship with his former industry clients. Griles was a lobbyist himself before joining Interior in 2001, and he would know better than to keep talking with Abramoff when the heat was on high. Just a few months later, things were back to normal between the two, so much so that Abramoff offered Griles a job at Greenberg Traurig, and was led by Griles to believe he would accept it a few months down the road.

Cummings' leaving such assertions by Griles attorney unchallenged is irresponsible, especially since the rebutting information is easily available to anyone with a .pdf reader. She's a better journalist than that.

[Link via Indianz.com