I Feel Like It Deserved A Mention

I'll do a more thorough look at the fourth and final installment of the WaPo's "Fourthbranch" series later, but one thing immediately jumped out at me. Here's the first paragraph.

Sue Ellen Wooldridge, the 19th-ranking Interior Department official, arrived at her desk in Room 6140 a few months after Inauguration Day 2001. A phone message awaited her.

"This is Dick Cheney," said the man on her voice mail, Wooldridge recalled in an interview. "I understand you are the person handling this Klamath situation. Please call me at -- hmm, I guess I don't know my own number. I'm over at the White House."

The article goes on to talk about the "Klamath situation," an instance where Fourthbranch overturned accepted science and enabled regulators to reverse Endangered Species Act protections so Oregon farmers could get their crops watered. This move, which Atrios informs us was a cause celebre in the wingnut community, led to the deaths of tens of thousands of salmon and the near-destruction of the fishing industry in the region. This ruling, to go around the Endangered Species Act, was eventually overturned in court

Here's what the article DOESN'T mention. Yes, Wooldridge was a mid-level official at the time of Klamath, and apparently Cheney likes to go to them (because he can easily bend them to his will, or have them fired just as easily if they don't comply) in these kinds of situations. But after the Klamath issue, Wooldridge moved up the ladder, going to the Justice Department and becoming the chief government lawyer for environmental cases, with the title of Assistant Attorney General for environment and natural resources. She also married Steven Griles, who she was once counselor to at the Department of the Interior.

Griles was sentenced to ten months in jail yesterday for lying to investigators in the Jack Abramoff scandal.

In addition:

In February 2007, it was reported that in March 2006 Wooldridge had purchased a $980,000 vacation homephoto on Kiawah Island, South Carolina, together with two other individuals: Don R. Duncan, the vice president for federal and international affairs and a lobbyist for ConocoPhillips, a Houston-based oil corporation; and J. Steven Griles, a former deputy interior secretary of the United States (now an oil and gas lobbyist) who pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice in a Senate committee's investigation into the Jack Abramoff affair.

Nine months after buying the home with Duncan and Griles, and just before stepping down, Wooldridge approved consent decrees giving ConocoPhillips three more years to pay millions of dollars in fines for a Superfund toxic waste cleanup and install pollution controls (which are estimated to cost US$525 million) at nine of its refineries.

Would it have killed the Washington Post to mention that Wooldridge was rewarded for her loyalty in the Klamath River affair by being brought into the wingnut welfare family? And that she quickly became as corrupt as the rest of the lot?

UPDATE: In the same edition of the paper, Dana Milbank provides the context:

Some romantics shower their women with wine and roses. Griles did better than that. Prosecutors said he asked Abramoff to fund a charity proposed by one woman he was dating. They said he asked Abramoff to get his law firm to hire two other women he was dating. And then there was all that Abramoff tribal money that went to Federici. Two decades Griles's junior, she was the one who introduced the two men and eventually helped with the Abramoff probe after pleading guilty to tax and perjury charges.

When the Interior Department's inspector general looked into his dealings with lobbyists, Griles, a former mining lobbyist, sought the counsel of Sue Ellen Wooldridge, another woman in the department. Wooldridge, who later joined the Justice Department, became Griles's third wife in March, three days after his guilty plea.

Griles, 59, wept as he embraced Wooldridge after his sentencing yesterday. He and his family members, some also in tears and hugging each other, departed the courtroom slowly. It was a severe but not surprising end to the sentencing hearing for Griles, the highest-ranking Bush administration official to succumb to the Abramoff scandal.