Interior's Steven Griles, the Deputy of Sleaze

Steven Griles is finally on the run. Griles is Interior Secretary Gale Norton's top lieutenant, holding the keys to the nation's oil and mineral reserves. Now he is hiding out from reporters and congressional investigators after accounts of his ongoing sleazy relationships with his former associates in big oil have begun to ooze out into the open.

Griles was one of Bush's most controversial appointments. A veteran of the Reagan administration, Griles worked closely with disgraced Interior Secretary James Watt to open the public lands of the West to unfettered access by oil and mining companies. As Deputy Director of Surface Mining, Griles gutted strip-mining regulations and shamelessly promoted the oil-shale scheme, one of the greatest giveaways and environmental blunders of the 1980s. He also pushed relentlessly to overturn the moratorium on offshore oil drilling on the Pacific Coast, a move that even caught Reagan off guard.

After leaving public office, Griles quickly cashed in on his tenure in government by setting up a DC lobbying firm called Stephen Griles and Associates. He rounded up a demon's list of clients including Arch Coal, the American Gas Association, National Mining Association, Occidental Petroleum, and more than 40 other gas, mining, and energy concerns.

For the past year and a half, Griles has used the cover of the 9/11 attacks and the war on Iraq to advance his wholesale looting of the public domain for the benefit of some of his former clients and business cronies.

Griles wasted no time compiling a wish list from his pals. Within days of assuming office, Griles convened a series of parlays between his former clients and Interior Department officials to chart a game plan for accelerating mining, oil leasing, and coal-methane extraction from public lands.

In the early days of his tenure, Griles huddled on at least three occasions with Harold Quinn, Jr., a chief lobbyist with the National Mining Association. Quinn and his associates are Griles' former clients. Quinn had business that needed attention. He urged Griles to move quickly to loosen restrictions on the most environmentally malign form of coal mining, the aptly-named mountaintop removal method. Quinn also reminded Griles of Bush's pledge to preserve the archaic 1872 Mining Law, which gives away gold-rich public lands for as little as $2.50 an acre. The giveaway law had come under attack even from Republicans.

Griles also convened a meeting on September 10, 2001, with a dozen top executives from the Edison Electric Institute, another former client of his lobby shop. The energy bosses came to congratulate Griles on Bush's plans to scale back enforcement actions on filthy and aging coal-fired power plants. But they also came to gripe. They were unhappy with Bush's pledge to toughen up emission standards on sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, and mercury. Griles, who was then the Bush administration's point man on the financial impacts of air quality rules on the energy industry, lent a sympathetic ear.

>From July 27, 2001, to February 20 of last year, Griles' logs show that he met on at least 32 occasions with other administration officials to discuss pending regulatory matters that were a concern to his former clients.

These meetings flout federal ethics rules which prohibit executive branch officials from participating in any "particular matter" which could advance his own financial interest or that involves former employers or clients. Griles claims that the meetings were merely social visits, utterly lacking in political intent. "We don't talk about work," Griles assured the Washington Post last year in an interview. "We're not allowed. We are all as scrupulous as we can be to assure that I will not be involved in any particular matter that would violate the ethics agreement or even have the appearance of a conflict of interest. The president said he wanted this administration to be held to the highest ethical standards. And I don't ever want it said that I didn't."

But it now turns out that not only was Griles shilling for his former clients, he was also pushing environmentally malign policies that would also pump up his own pocketbook. Griles was an ownership partner in a DC lobbying firm called National Environmental Strategies, a polluter's lobby founded in 1990 by Marc Himmelstein and Haley Barbour. Barbour soon left the firm to become head of the Republican National Committee. Griles moved in.

When he was tapped to become deputy secretary of Interior, Griles was forced to sell his interest in the firm for $1.1 million to Himmelstein, a friend and Republican powerbroker. Instead of paying him off in a lump sum, Himmelstein agreed to pay Griles $284,000 a year over the next four years. Griles said he arranged this payment plan so as not to leave NES "strapped for cash."

But in effect Griles remains financially tied to the health of Himmelstein's firm. And, in fact, Himmelstein has admitted that over the past two years he and Griles have gotten together several times over beers and dinner.

One of the issues high on the list of priorities for some of NES' clients was coal-methane gas drilling. In April of 2002, Griles directly intervened in abitter dispute over the huge deposits of coal methane in Wyoming's Power Basin River. This looms as the largest energy development project in the country and has been assailed as an environmental nightmare by environmentalists and native groups. The project, which calls for the development of more than 80,000 coal-methane wells, is so fraught with danger that even the Bush administration's own EPA issued a report sharply criticizing the environmental consequences of the scheme.

This roused Griles into action. On April 12, 2002, Griles sent a scorching memo on Department of Interior stationery chastising the EPA for dragging its feet on the project. He chided the agency for being uncooperative with industry. It turns out that Griles had formerly represented the very companies that he was now accusing the EPA of failing to give proper deference. As a lobbyist, Griles' clients included the Coal Bed Methane Ad Hoc Committee, Devon Energy, Restone, and Western Gas Resources--all companies seeking to gain access to the Powder Basin gas fields. His old firm, NES, also hosted an industry-sponsored tour of Powder Basin for EPA and Interior Department officials.

Griles' meddling in this matter came to the attention of the Department's lawyers. On May 8, they forced Griles to sign an agreement disqualifying himself from any further involvement in the coal-methane issue. He later said he did so "for all the world to know that I'm not even going to be talking to anybody about it again."

Now the Inspector General of the Department of Interior has launched an investigation into Griles' conflicts of interest and Griles isn't talking to anybody, especially the press.

On May 9, reporter Roberta Baskin tracked Griles down at a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the opening of the Meadowood Farm Trail in Lorton, Virginia. Baskin approached Griles with a cameraman and began asking him unsettling questions about Powder Basin. As Baskin zoomed in for the kill, Griles grabbed hold of the nearest object he could find: a 94-year-old woman named Gladys Bushrod, a ceremonial guest. Griles used Bushrod as a human shield to deflect Baskin's questions about his sleazy ties to his friends in big oil until he reached his waiting limo, whereupon he relinquished the woman and made his getaway amid a puff of dust and smoke.