Wampum

But who's counting?

From the letters in support of J. Steven Griles: First, his dear friend, Tom Sansonetti,

We maintained a social friendship for the years up to and including 2001, when as the head of the Bush-Cheney transition team for the Department of the Interior, I introduced Steve to Interior Secretary Gale Norton as a potential candidate for Deputy Secretary. The two of them hit if off. Shortly thereafter, President Bush nominated Steve to be Deputy Secretary and the Senate confirmed him to the position in the early part of 2001.

Well, what does Gale Norton have to say about that?

I have known Steve for over twenty years. When I first came t work as an attorney for the Department of the Interior in the 1980s, Steve was already the Assistant Secretary for Lands and Minerals.

So Sansonetti was the Solicitor of the Interior during the Reagan Administration, which is how he came to know Steve Griles, as he claimed he was "Griles' attorney". As Solicitor, Sansonetti was the department's lead attorney, and Gale Norton worked for him. In addition, Norton was the Chair of CREA, the organization run by his then girl-friend, Italia Federici. Norton and Federici were good friends, and Griles was raising money and soliciting legal advice for the organization. We're to believe they were introduced, per Sansonetti, for the first time in 2001?

So what's Sansonetti up to? It seems as though, despite the fact he had clear hire authority as Transition Team leader for Interior, he's trying to fob it off onto Norton: "I merely introduced them - she liked him so much, she hired him." In early 2001, Federici, in close contact with Norton, confided to Abramoff that the politicos, not Norton, were pretty much calling the personnel shots. Sansonetti at the time was Finance Chair for the RNC. He was was consumate politico running the show.