Stephen Griles was sentenced to ten months in prison this afternoon:

The Interior Department's former No. 2 official was sentenced to 10 months in prison Tuesday for lying to senators in the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal, the highest administration official sentenced in the probe.

J. Steven Griles, who was the department's deputy secretary, had pleaded guilty to obstructing justice.

Griles admitted to lying to Senate investigators about his relationship with Abramoff, the central figure in a corruption investigation that has led to convictions of a former congressman, legislative aides, lobbyists and officials in the Bush administration.

Griles had asked to be spared prison time. Under his plea deal with prosecutors, the Justice Department recommended he serve five months in prison and five months in a halfway house or under house arrest. U.S. District Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle decided he should spend the full sentence in prison. (that's our emphasis added)

 

Tax evasion and lying to Congress are the crimes to which the conduit, Italia Federici, will plead guilty according to The Hill.  Ms. Federici was the link between Jack Abramoff and top officials at the Department of the Interior according to prosecutors: 

Federici is set to admit in federal court on Friday that she helped to forge a connection between Norton’s top deputy and now-jailed lobbyist Jack Abramoff, according to court documents filed yesterday in U.S. District Court in Washington.

“During much of Griles’s tenure as [Department of the Interior] Deputy Secretary, defendant Federici served as a conduit for information between Abramoff and Griles in order to foster Abramoff’s and his client’s interests,” the court documents, filed by the Justice Department, state.

Federici is president of the Council of Republicans for Environmental Advocacy (CREA), which evolved from a group Federici and Norton founded in 1997 with tax activist Grover Norquist to push for Republican environmental goals. It originally was funded with money Federici received from an inheritance.

In today's Washington Post, Ruth Marcus profiles several of the current crop of scoundrels in the Bush administration who "illustrate the administration's fox-guarding-the-henhouse personnel plan, the disdain of its appointees for the laws they are sworn to enforce and their spoils-of-war attitude toward the government they are entrusted with overseeing."  Several of her profiles also appear in CREW's "Criminal & Scoundrels:  the 25 Most Corrupt Officials of the Bush Administration."  A couple on the Post's list didn't make CREW's list this year.  Here are a few examples:

· The Interior Department inspector general reported that Julie MacDonald, the official who oversees the Fish and Wildlife Service but who has no academic background in biology, overrode the recommendations of agency scientists about how to protect endangered species. MacDonald also shared internal documents with industry officials and groups that lobby for weakened environmental protections, not to mention an online gaming buddy, the IG found.

An Interior lawyer called MacDonald's involvement in one endangered species matter "the most brazen case of political meddling" he had seen in more than 20 years in government. Nor, it seems, is such politicization limited to MacDonald. "Policy trumps science within the Assistant Secretary's corridor on many occasions," another department lawyer told the IG.

· J. Steven Griles, a coal lobbyist who became the No. 2 official at the Interior Department (in other words, his job description didn't much change), pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about his relationship with lobbyist/felon Jack Abramoff. Griles's then-girlfriend introduced him to Abramoff and ran a lobbying group that received $500,000 in Abramoff-generated funds; in turn, Abramoff sought and received Griles's help on client matters.

· Griles's new significant other, Sue Ellen Wooldridge, who helped him fend off ethics charges when they both worked at Interior, resigned as head of the Justice Department's environmental section. Wooldridge and Griles bought a $1 million beach house with the top lobbyist for the oil company ConocoPhillips; then Wooldridge -- supposedly with the blessing of ethics officials -- signed off on a move to ease up on anti-pollution requirements imposed on ConocoPhillips as part of a settlement.

· Lurita Doan, a GOP mega-donor turned head of the General Services Administration, attended a luncheon on agency premises at which Scott Jennings, a top aide to Karl Rove, briefed political appointees on GOP targets for the 2008 election. According to six people present, Doan asked GSA employees how they could "help 'our candidates' in the next elections." Doan, displaying an Alberto Gonzales-like memory, told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee last week that she had "absolutely" no recollection of that statement.

The fallout from the Abramoff scandal continues. According to the Legal Times, Italia Federici is now a target in the probe of corruption related to Jack Abramoff. According to the report, Federici's former boyfriend is Stephen Griles. He was the number two official in the Bush Administration's Department of the Interior who pled guilty to to obstruction of justice in an Abramoff-related crime just last month:

Italia Federici, the one-time girlfriend of a convicted former senior official at the Interior Department, is a target of the ongoing federal influence-peddling investigation into the activities of former lobbyist Jack Abramoff, according to court documents obtained by Legal Times.

In a letter dated Jan. 19, the Justice Department informed Federici, founder of the Council of Republicans for Environmental Advocacy, that she was a target of the federal probe.

“The investigation is focused on the allegedly illegal manner in which you operated the Council of Republicans for Environmental Advocacy,” wrote Stephanie Evans, a trial attorney in the department’s Tax Division.

Federici co-founded CREA, a conservative-leaning environmental-advocacy group, in 1997 with Gale Norton, who became secretary of the Interior Department in 2001.

Last month, CREW designated J. Stephen Griles as one of the 25 most corrupt officials in the Bush Administration in our report, Criminals & Scoundrels.  From the Associated Press (via TPM Muckraker), we learn that Mr. Griles, who had the number two job at the Department of the Interior, will be pleading guilty to an Abramoff-related charge of obstruction of justice: 

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.

Paul Kiel at TPM Muckraker notes that Mr. Griles got himself a "very good deal."