Executive Summary

After preparing reports on congressional corruption for the past two years, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington ("CREW") realized that as an organization focused on government ethics, we also need to evaluate conduct in the executive branch. This report represents CREW's first effort to apply the methodology from our examination of congressional corruption to executive branch corruption.

CREW is well aware that the vast majority of those who work for the federal government are hardworking, dedicated and law abiding; this report is not intended as an indictment of the federal workforce. Nonetheless, after culling through publicly available documents including inspector general reports, court papers and press accounts, we have been able to create a list of 25 people whose conduct is particularly egregious. Their offenses range from sexual misconduct to theft to immigration fraud.

The misconduct covered here [0] tends to fall into four general categories: using power to benefit friends and family members, engaging in private activities that conflict with government positions and a lack of supervision over high-level personnel. For example, Margaret Burnette, Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, J. Steven Griles, David Safavian and William Myers used their positions to financially benefit friends, family members and political cronies. Lester Crawford, Darleen Drunyan, Angela Grimsley and Kevin Marlowe were indicted for conflict of interest crimes. Eric Andell, Brian Doyle and Donald Keyser could have been caught much sooner, had they been subject to greater oversight. Perhaps the most disturbing conduct from a good government perspective, however, falls outside of these categories: it is overseers, such as Lurita Doan and Janet Rehnquist, using their positions to undermine oversight.

Because the executive branch includes so many more people than does Congress, this report cannot and will not be as comprehensive as our congressional reports. Moreover, this report does not focus on policy or agency-wide practices, but only misconduct by individuals, both personal and professional. Those named in the report were (or in some cases are) high level officials with significant responsibility and their misdeeds represent the worst sort of abuse of the public trust. This is not to say that there are not other government employees who may have committed very serious crimes, but such employees likely have not enjoyed the same level of responsibility as those named here.

Agency contracting abuses overall like those reported in Iraq and Louisiana, which are clearly very serious, are beyond the scope of this report because at this juncture no one has been charged or prosecuted for offenses related to these scandals. In addition, incompetence alone, like that exhibited by former Federal Emergency Management Agency Director Michael Brown, was not enough to justify inclusion.

This report is not intended to be the last word on corruption in the Bush administration, but perhaps can serve as an opening to discuss the larger problem of the abuse of power by high level government officials.

To determine the 25 most corrupt Bush administration officials, CREW reviewed hundreds of articles, thousands of pages of court records, inspector general reports from multiple agencies, and four years of U.S. Department of Justice public documents. CREW found and documented more than 160 cases of significant criminal behavior and/or misconduct over the last six years and then whittled the list down to 25 by weighing the following factors: 1) type of criminal activity and level of misconduct; 2) seniority or level of influence of the official; and 3) impact on the public trust.

Report home [0]

Lewis "Scooter" Libby, though a high-level administration official under indictment, was not included in the report because CREW serves as counsel to Joseph and Valerie Wilson and, in a December 21, 2006 order, U.S. District Court Judge Reggie Walton strictly prohibited CREW from commenting on the Libby matter for the duration of the criminal case. For the same reason, we have not included anyone else involved in publicly disclosing the identity of former CIA covert officer Valerie Wilson.