CA-02: Wally Herger and the Klamath Fish Kill

TJ at Loaded Orygun has been doing some great work gettig to the bottom of the 2002 Klamath River fish kill, an incident that recently gained more prominence when a recent Washington Post article detailed the influence of Vice President Fourthbranch in the decisionmaking process.

TJ has been filing Freedom of Information Act requests to determine what the level of involvement was for political officials in the region. Most of his findings concern Senator Gordon Smith (R-OR) and his inserting himself into the scientific debate over whether to hold water for river salmon and attempting to influence it on the behalf of self-interested farmers who wanted that water for irrigation.

But a California congressman also figured into this issue: Rep. Wally Herger of CA-02. The "pages" in the blockquoted text that proceeds refer to TJ's FOIA page request.

The last item on page one is a two-fer with Greg Walden to a "Science Advisor" in 2002, recommending "immediate review of study known as Hardy Study re Klamath River." The Hardy Phase II report was a set of flow measurement models that formed the basis of the federal biologists' opinion protecting the fish. Here you have two Members of Congress attempting to impugn the best available science, because they don't like what it says [...]

On page two we see the precursor to the last item on page one--a complaint from Smith, Walden and Wally Herger (R-CA2) sharing their "concern" about the Hardy study, amazingly all the way back to February 7, 2001. The summary isn't shy about the topic of the conversation. The authors

"question its science, credibility and the fact that our constituents (ie water users) have been excluded. Ask for an immediate suspension of the Hardy Study pending a complete review, audit by the IG, and scientific peer review."

This is an ongoing investigation on the citizen journalism model. I'm anxious to see just how involved Herger has been in this environmental, ecological and economic disaster.

Fourthbranch Gets To Keep His Office

Although it was quite an amusing debate, with one Republican legislator wondering "whether Cheney would get a 'Katrina trailer' in place of his official residence," the bid to take Fourthbranch's office off the executive payroll failed by a vote of 217 to 209. Two Republicans, Ron Paul and Walter Jones, did cross the line to vote against Fourthbranch.

The vote was a bit of political theater. But there is real work to be done in the Congress about how the Vice President has acted outside and above the law from the day he came into office. 36 House Democrats from the Pacific Coast want hearings and investigations into Fourthbranch's imposition into the Klamath Falls dispute, chronicled in Part IV of Bart Gellman and Jo Becker's WaPo series. Fourthbranch basically trumped the science showing that re-routing water to Oregon farmers for irrigation would kill thousands of salmon, and got the Department of the Interior to reverse their decision. Predictably, 68,000 adult salmon died in the largest fish kill in US history, crippling the fishing industry in the Northwest and damaging the ecological balance of the region. House Democrats are angered by Fourthbranch's inserting himself into the policy debate.

“According to today’s article, the Vice President called Sue Ellen Wooldridge, deputy chief of staff to Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton, to pressure her into a policy for the Klamath River Basin that would benefit some farmers, over the protection of federally threatened fish – all to win votes in Oregon,” the letter stated. “His political interference resulted in a 10-year water plan for the Klamath River that has been unanimously ruled ‘arbitrary and capricious and in violation of the Endangered Species Act,’ by three courts.”

“Moreover,” the letter continued, “his action resulted in the largest fish kill in the history of the west. The ramifications of that salmon kill are still felt today, as returns to the Klamath River are so low that commercial, sport and tribal fishing season have been curtailed for the past three years. In fact, last year’s commercial fishing season for all of California and Oregon was cut by over 90 percent, and was the largest commercial fishing closure in the history of the country, causing over $60 million in damages to coastal economies.”

And oversight really is the least of Fourthbranch's worries. Outrage about his manipulation of the levers of governmental power and his acting as something of an imperial figure have led many to join Dennis Kucinich's call for impeachment, including Ronald Reagan's former deputy attorney general:

In grasping and exercising presidential powers, Cheney has dulled political accountability and concocted theories for evading the law and Constitution that would have embarrassed King George III. The most recent invention we know of is the vice president's insistence that an executive order governing the handling of classified information in the executive branch does not reach his office because he also serves as president of the Senate. In other words, the vice president is a unique legislative-executive creature standing above and beyond the Constitution. The House judiciary committee should commence an impeachment inquiry. As Alexander Hamilton advised in the Federalist Papers, an impeachable offense is a political crime against the nation. Cheney's multiple crimes against the Constitution clearly qualify.

Read the whole stinging rebuke. There are three more cosponsors for Kucinich's impeachment bill, which I doubt will get a fair hearing, but in the wake of seeing the near-dictatorial powers Fourthbranch has assumed for himself, I'd say is worth exploring.

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.