Next Tuesday’s sentencing of former Bush administration official J. Steven Griles has drawn comparisons to the prosecution of vice presidential aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, sparked a feud between Griles’s attorneys and prosecutors, and brought many of Griles’s longtime foes out of the woodwork.
The lead plaintiff of an Indian trust lawsuit and the head of Friends of the Earth have sent letters to U.S. District Judge Ellen Huvelle, who will decide whether Griles, the former No. 2 official at the Department of the Interior, goes to prison or does community service for an industry group.
In a letter sent yesterday, Elouise Cobell, a Blackfeet Indian, wrote “Hopefully, your actions and words will now send a message that he will not forget. It is time for government officials to be held accountable.” Cobell filed suit more than a decade ago, accusing the government of mismanaging more than $100 billion in oil, gas, timber and other royalties from their lands.
The letters are in response to statements of support for Griles from former Interior Secretary Gale Norton; former high-ranking Justice Department official Tom Sansonetti, now a contender for U.S. Senate in Wyoming; and numerous other past and present Bush administration officials.
“I can say, as someone who saw his work on a daily basis, that I continue to believe he served the department and the nation well,” Norton wrote. Griles served as her deputy.
Griles pleaded guilty in March, admitting that he lied to the Senate Indian Affairs Committee about the access and influence on Indian casino issues that he had given to Jack Abramoff, a “pioneer” fundraiser for President Bush.
Griles’s guilty plea indicated he would likely have to serve five months in jail. On her part, Huvelle warned Griles that she might not accept the prosecutors’ recommendation. She increased the sentence of former Rep. Bob Ney (R-Ohio), citing the trust placed in him as an elected official.
Griles has asked the judge to spare him any jail time, and his request has sparked a war of words with government prosecutors.
The brief from the defense noted that while other Abramoff defendants took money from the lobbyist, Griles had not. Griles noted that he had been invited on Abramoff’s now-infamous golf trip to Scotland with former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) but “expressly and affirmatively rejected” the offer.
Griles proposed to do volunteer work for the American Recreation Coalition, an industry group he had worked with at Interior that supports motorized recreation on public lands, according to the news service Greenwire.
Prosecutors at the Department of Justice (DoJ) have fired back with a two-inch-thick document that offered new details of how Griles helped Abramoff’s Indian casino clients.
They said Griles “was not shy” about seeking favors in return, even getting to the level of party planning. When his former girlfriend Italia Federici threw a party to introduce Abramoff’s clients to Interior officials, Griles approved the seating chart that put Norton and the department’s solicitor, William Myers, at the same table as Abramoff. Myers later withdrew from an appeals court nomination after Democrats questioned his repeated assertions that he had had no interaction with the now-convicted lobbyist.
Prosecutors have also compared Griles’s offenses to those of Libby, calling Libby’s two-and-a-half-year sentence “perhaps the single most relevant obstruction of justice case in recent memory in this district.”
The DoJ, the subject of repeated investigative hearings into the truthfulness of top department officials, also stressed in its document the importance of telling the truth to congressional panels.
“A sentence of incarceration will send a message to all would-be congressional witnesses that they are expected to testify fully and completely, or face serious punitive consequences,” said the DoJ memo, written by career prosecutors Armando Bonilla and Kartik Raman.
That raised eyebrows among congressional Democrats involved with the U.S. attorney probes.
“You have to laugh at the irony and wonder when they will get around to practicing what they preach,” the aide said. But Griles’s attorneys rejected the comparison to Libby.
“Mr. Libby was convicted after trial of multiple counts of obstruction of justice, making false statements and perjury in a grand jury investigation related to a very serious issue of national security and covert operations in foreign countries,” said the defense’s brief. “Mr. Griles’s concealment of a personal relationship and how it led to his meeting and knowing Mr. Abramoff is hardly comparable.”
