The biggest one yet in Bush's administration to be charged.
But the "The Post off-leads and everybody else stuffs news that a former Deputy Secretary of the Interior pled guilty to lying to a Senate committee about the extent of his involvement with disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff. J. Steven Griles is the 10th person to face criminal charges in the Abramoff probe. He's expected to receive a 10-month sentence."
STEVEN Griles spent much of his career making it easier for out-of-state coal corporations to blast the majestic crests off mountains in West Virginia and elsewhere.
He was deputy chief of the U.S. Office of Surface mining during the Reagan-Bush administration in the 1980s. Then, while Republicans were out of power in the 1990s, he was a top lobbyist for the coal industry.
Incredibly, his old lobbying firm paid Griles $568,000 while he was No. 2 at Interior. He tried to sabotage federal studies into the damage caused by mountaintop removal mining — ordering the researchers to focus instead on “streamlining coal mine permitting,” Ward reported.
Vanity Fair magazine summarized the situation in a report titled “Sale of the Wild.” It detailed West Virginia cases in which Griles blocked pollution actions against coal companies. It recounted how he ordered federal inspector Jack Spadaro to reverse his charges against a mining firm, and suspended Spadaro when he refused. The inspector said he met with Griles about the charges “and explained why I could not vacate them. He became enraged, his face got red, he was almost spitting. I knew then that this was a different kind of animal.” Spadaro appealed his suspension and won.
But he didn't go to jail for any of the above excerpt, he went to jail for lying that he knew Abramoff. He is not going to jail for any corruption he and Abramoff may have done, he is just going to jail because he said he didn't know Abramoff.
For ten months.
Then case closed.
There is so much here unreported and unpunished, but the story on Griles guilty plea just vanished off most of the left side of the web. Just thought it deserved at least one more thread before the Griles story disappeared altogether.