Yesterday a message was sent from the working staff of the Department of Justice to AG Alberto Gonzales and the Bush Administration.
On Friday, the former number two at the Department of the Interior, J. Steven Griles, pleaded guilty for only one aspect of his involvement in the Abramoff scandal.
Griles is up to his eyeballs in the Abramoff scandal and the guilty plea was very specific and limited (emphasis added):
J. Steven Griles pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court to a felony for making false statements in testimony before the Senate Indian Affairs Committee in November 2005 and in an earlier interview with panel investigators.
Of all his crimes, Griles only plead guilty to lying to Congress in sworn testimony.
It looks like a message has been sent. And it also raises some questions about where things stand in the ongoing investigation of the Abramoff scandal.
To the jump...
Steven Griles has been a deeply corrupt member of the Bush Administration. He was number two at the Department of the Interior when it served as an ATM for Jack Abramoff and many, many other lobbyists.
He is at the hub of multiple scandals. His connections to Jack Abramoff are involved in only a portion of his misdeeds.
So I was amazed when I read about his guilty plea. It was so unlike all the other pleas related to the Abramoff scandal.
Griles only plead guilty to lying to Congress. That was it.
Here is how the Washington Post explained it:
"I fully accept the responsibility for my conduct and the consequences it may have," he said in the statement. "When a Senate committee asks questions, they must be answered fully and completely and it is not my place to decide whether those questions are relevant or too personal." [snip]
Griles told the Senate panel and its investigators that his relationship with Abramoff was no different from that with any lobbyist. Griles's then-girlfriend, however, had introduced him to the lobbyist and then acted as a go-between. The woman, Italia Federici -- identified as "Person A" in court papers -- ran an advocacy group to which Abramoff and his clients donated $500,000. [snip]
"Today's guilty plea clearly establishes that former deputy secretary J. Steven Griles was ready and willing to serve as Jack Abramoff's 'man inside Interior,' " said Inspector General Earl E. Devaney, whose criminal investigators worked with the Justice Department and the FBI on the case. [snip]
The plea deal, which does not require Griles to cooperate in the continuing investigation, gives the government a felony conviction without having to use Abramoff as a trial witness. The former lobbyist could be a star witness if the government brings charges against other political figures unwilling to plead guilty. [snip]
E-mails released as part of the Senate panel's Abramoff investigation detailed contact Griles had had with Abramoff or Federici.
This is interesting on a number of levels.
First, the obvious: the professional staff of the Department of Justice is sending the signal that lying to Congress is a crime that they will punish.
If I was in the White House tonight I would read the Griles plea as hard evidence why nobody working for George W. Bush should ever testify under oath. Mr. Gonzales and the others who have already lied to Congress might read the Griles plea as encouragement to get a lawyer and start looking for a plea deal of my own.
The Griles guilty plea provides only enough details to prove that he lied to the Senate Indian Affairs Committee.
Unlike other Abramoff related plea deals, this one leaves the relationship between the DoJ and the admitted felon unclear. Griles did not agree to help the DoJ in the continuing investigation of the Abramoff scandal and from news reports; I would guess that his involvement in the scandal is still under investigation.
Perhaps pleading guilty to lying to Congress was an easy way for Griles to help the DoJ without agreeing to full cooperation. It sends a message about lying to Congress while allowing those investigating the Aramoff scandal to keep their cards face down on the table.
The message is simple: Lying to Congress is a bad thing to do.
It is a message that should worry Team Bush and the zombies who support them.
The second question raised by the Griles plea concerns the interplay between the Senate and the Department of Justice on investigating the Abramoff scandal.
News reports about the Griles plea seem to suggest that there have been some sharing of information:
E-mails released as part of the Senate panel's Abramoff investigation detailed contact Griles had had with Abramoff or Federici.
But I’m not sure that is the case.
A recent article in the Legal Times, No End in Sight for Abramoff Investigation, left me thinking that the Senate Indian Affairs Committee did not shared the documents they collected about the Abramoff scandal with the folks investigating Abramoff over at the DoJ (emphasis added):
Prosecutors have also had significant evidence at their disposal. Greenberg Traurig, Abramoff’s former law firm, turned over thousands of pages of the former lobbyist’s e-mails early in the investigation. Additionally, the investigation’s two central figures, Abramoff and Scanlon, began cooperating with investigators more than a year ago. Both are awaiting sentencing — a sign that there are likely still more prosecutions to come. (Abramoff is already in prison serving a sentence in a federal conviction in Florida.) [snip]
One specific decision that has been a subject of debate among some of those interviewed for this article was the way in which prosecutors chose to obtain Abramoff’s e-mails from his former firm, Greenberg Traurig — a process that began in 2004.
One option the Justice Department could have pursued was to send a so-called "taint team" of government lawyers not involved in the case to search Greenberg’s computers. (Taint teams are used to ensure that prosecutors don’t discover attorney-client-privileged material in such searches, which can derail criminal prosecutions.)
Instead the prosecutors agreed to let Greenberg’s lawyers — at D.C.-based Williams & Connolly — conduct the searches of Abramoff’s e-mails, and they initially turned over thousands of documents in paper form — making it more difficult to search and analyze the documents than if they had been handed over electronically.
This is curious. According to the Legal Times the DoJ has gathered "thousands" of pages of printouts from Greenberg Traurig related to Abramoff. Meanwhile, the Senate Indians Affairs Committee has gathered hundreds of thousands of pages of documents.
In Peter Stone’s new book, Heist there is this revealing statistic (emphasis added):
During the course of its two-year investigation, the [Indian Affairs] committee issued more than seventy subpoenas and other requests for documents and received over 750,000 pages of records.
Recently, I’ve been told that the actual page count is even higher.
ALL of the news about the Abramoff scandal so far has been based on less than 10,000 pages of documents in the public record.
That leaves more than 740,000 pages of documents waiting to see the light of day.
Because I believe in common sense, I’ve always assumed that SIAC shared everything they had with the Abramoff task force in the DoJ, but maybe that was naive. The Griles plea seems to be based on emails in already released by the Senate. I wonder when (or if) we will ever see the remaining documents.
I think the SIAC Abramoff documents are loaded with smoking guns and that they scare the daylights out of Republicans and their enablers in the press.
The reason is simple, all of the many, many scandals of the Bush era point to one clear and indisputable fact:
The focus of the Bush White House and the Republican Party is obstructing justice
A great way to slow down the Abramoff investigation is to have the DoJ try to replicate the SIAC investigation from scratch. Sharing the details would be a way to speed things up.
I wonder if this hunch is correct. Does anybody know if the Senate Indians Affairs Committee has shared their Abramoff file with the DoJ?
Regardless of how the DoJ investigation moves forward, it should be noted that these 750,000 pages of documents are within the walls of the Senate. These documents should be examined by House and Senate Committees investigating corruption.
Like the Prosecutor Purge emails, every page should be made public.
Anything less just protects the culture of corruption.
So far, all of the damage to the Republican Party from the Abramoff scandal has come from a very small sample of SIAC documents. The most damaging documents were not mentioned at all and John McCain intentionally only released documents that would protect his Party. Now that Democrats control the 110th Congress, we need to see them all.
We can not let up. We have a Country to renew and a planet to save.
2007 is a year for gathering facts and holding their feet to the fire. 2008 is a year to defeat these scoundrels at the ballot box.
- Write letters, contact the press, call talk shows, post comments, and otherwise promote this effort.
- Research. Follow the money. Find the quid pro quos. Dig into the many other aspects of this cesspool of corruption.
- Get out the truth and hold the GOP accountable in 2007 and 2008. Perhaps Republican candidates will want to explain to voters why they wanted to kill the Abramoff and other corruption investigation. We should force the question.
The Griles plea shows that lying to Congress is a crime that will be prosecuted.
Let’s send out the subpoenas, swear them in and watch spin knowing that a lie might land them in jail.
Pass the popcorn.
Cheers!