Ex-Interior No. 2 to plead guilty in Abramoff lobbying probe

By Staff Writer, Associated Press, March 22, 2007

23 Mar 2007 // WASHINGTON (AP) — Former Deputy Interior Secretary Steven Griles will plead guilty to one count of obstruction of justice in the Jack Abramoff corruption investigation, The Associated Press has learned.

Griles, an oil and gas lobbyist who became an architect of President Bush's energy policies while at the Interior Department between July 2001 and July 2005, is the highest ranking Bush administration official implicated in the Washington lobbying scandal.

The former No. 2 official at the Interior Department has agreed to a felony plea admitting that he lied five times to the Senate Indian Affairs Committee and its investigators about his relationship with Abramoff, people involved in the case told the AP.

Griles will admit in federal court Friday that he concealed that he had a unique relationship with Abramoff, people involved in the case said on condition of anonymity, because a federal judge had not yet approved the plea deal. Griles and Abramoff met on March 1, 2001, through Italia Federici, a Republican environmental activist whom Griles had been dating.

That was just one week before Griles, who had been serving on Bush's transition team for Interior, was nominated by the president as deputy to Interior Secretary Gale Norton. Second in rank only to Norton, Griles effectively was Interior's chief operating officer and its top representative on Vice President Dick Cheney's energy task force.

Prosecutors dropped earlier allegations that Griles did anything improper to help Abramoff or gained anything of value from the former Republican lobbyist, the AP was told. The agreement does not require Griles to help investigators with their grand jury probe.

In exchange for the plea, federal prosecutors will seek no more than a 10-month prison sentence for Griles — the minimum they could seek under sentencing guidelines — but they will agree to let him serve half that in home confinement, according to one person involved in the case.

Griles lives in Virginia with Sue Ellen Wooldridge, who until January was an assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department's environmental division.

The AP reported in February that Wooldridge, as the nation's environmental prosecutor, bought a $980,000 vacation home last year with Griles and Donald R. Duncan, the top Washington lobbyist for ConocoPhillips. Nine months later, she signed an agreement giving the company more time to clean up air pollution at some of its refineries.

The Justice Department planned to file papers proposing the plea deal with Griles. He was scheduled to appear before U.S. District Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle in a Washington at 11 a.m. ET Friday. Huvelle will decide Friday whether to accept or reject the plea, but her decision on sentencing is likely to come two to three months later.

In government papers, Griles acknowledges he obstructed the Senate committee's investigation into Abramoff and his associates' dealings with Indian casino clients. Griles admits he testified falsely four times to the committee on Nov. 2, 2005, and once to the panel's investigators two weeks earlier.

Abramoff persuaded his Indian clients to pay him tens of millions of dollars to influence decisions coming out of Congress and the Interior Department. Part of his pitch to clients was that he had serious pull at the department, especially with Griles.

Awaiting sentencing in the bribery scandal, Abramoff already is serving six years in prison for a bogus Florida casino deal. A congressman, several congressional aides and the administration's top procurement official also have either pleaded guilty or been convicted in the case.

Others convicted so far in the Abramoff investigation include former Rep. Bob Ney, R-Ohio, and former White House official David Safavian.

Ney was sentenced in January to 2 1/2 years in prison after admitting to taking bribes from Abramoff. Safavian, a former chief of staff for the General Services Administration, was sentenced to 18 months in prison in October after he was found guilty of covering up his dealings with Abramoff.

The investigation has also produced guilty pleas from Tony Rudy, lobbyist and onetime aide to former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay; Michael Scanlon, a former Abramoff business partner and DeLay aide; William Heaton, former chief of staff for Ney; Neil Volz, a former chief of staff to Ney; and Roger Stillwell, a former Interior Department official.

In government papers to be filed Friday and obtained by the AP, Griles acknowledged it was untrue when he told the Senate committee that it was "outrageous and is not true" that Abramoff had any special access to him at Interior and that no "special relationship" existed between them. He also conceded that he misled the committee's investigators when he told them his relationship with Abramoff was "no different" than with other lobbyists.

Griles now admits those statements were untrue, because Abramoff was the only lobbyist he ever met while at Interior through a woman that Griles was dating. Griles and Federici had a romantic relationship between 1998 and mid-2003, the documents say. They met through Norton, for whom Federici once did campaign work.

Griles lied in trying to "conceal the true nature" of how he met Abramoff and "did not testify fully and truthfully" about his relations with Federici or Abramoff's access to him, the documents say.

The Justice Department says Federici's introduction gave Abramoff "more credibility as a lobbyist than Abramoff ordinarily would have had with Griles," quickly putting them on terms "that ordinarily would have taken years to develop."

Prosecutors in January had outlined other possible charges against Griles. They included "honest services" fraud, based on his meetings with Abramoff; lying to Congress about information favorable to Abramoff that Griles had passed on to other Interior officials; and lying to Congress and criminal conflict of interest over a job that Abramoff had offered to Griles.