Bush Administration regulators are so tight with lobbyists from the companies they’re supposed to oversee that they buy $1 million vacation homes with them.
Only nine months before approving a deal to let ConocoPhillips delay a $500-million pollution cleanup, the federal government’s top environmental prosecutor bought a posh South Carolina retreat with Conoco’s top lobbyist. According the Washington Post, also in on the Kiawah Island, S.C., house deal was former Deputy Interior Secretary J. Steven Griles, the highest-ranking Bush administration official targeted for criminal prosecution in the Jack Abramoff corruption probe. Before she resigned in January, Assistant Attorney General Sue Ellen Wooldridge signed two proposed consent decrees with ConocoPhillips: one giving the company as much as two to three more years to install $525 million in pollution controls at nine refineries and the other dealing with a Superfund toxic waste cleanup. Last April, Wooldridge, ConocoPhillips Vice President Donald R. Duncan and Griles had gone together on a $980,000 home in a gated community at Kiawah Island, SC.
Not that it’s at all reassuring, the Justice Department said that Wooldridge sought and received approval from an ethics official in her office before buying the vacation property. And Duncan was said to have run the deal by Conoco’s legal department.
The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee wasn’t impressed and vowed to investigate.
"There appears to be a breakdown of ethics at the Justice Department," the committee’s chairman, Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., said. "Senior Justice Department officials should not be handling cases
that affect their close friends and investment partners."