Another Key Resignation at Department of Interior

by emptywheel

Via POGO, I see that one of the key officials involved in giving away our (and Native American) natural resources at cut-rate prices has stepped down.

Last night Interior Department Secretary Dirk Kempthorne announced the resignation of the embattled Director of the Minerals Management Service Johnnie Burton. Burton’s tenure at the agency was fraught with decisions and policies which impaired the government’s ability to collect oil and gas drilling fees owed to the federal government and Native Americans.

For a background on Burton, go see this mbw post and--more importantly--the diary where mbw predicted that Stephen Griles' plea deal would be followed shortly by Burton's resignation. From the diary:

Less than a month after Burton joined Interior, Griles invited her to a very cozy dinner party at the home of his former lobbying partner at National Environmental Strategies, Marc Himmelstein [link, pdf]  Jim Cason, Kathleen Clarke and Rebecca Watson also attended. Himmelstein retained most of Griles' gas, oil and coal clients when he joined Interior in 2001, and a many had significant interests in the Powder River Basin.  The meeting was so controversial, it, like the memo to EPA earlier that week, Griles became the subject of an ethics probe by the Office of the Inspector General.

It's quite possible that Burton is the key link in understanding Griles ardent interest in the Indian Trust Fund case.

I've maintained for a few years now that there were certain interests whose greatest fear in regards to Cobell v. Babbitt/Norton/Kempthorne was that the court, namely presiding Judge Royce Lamberth, would agree with the litigants that, due to the massive destruction and neglect of royalty reciepts on the side of the US government over the past century, that it was necessary instead to demand that the lessors, those extraction industries with leases on Indian land, open their accounting books to auditors.

Hopefully, mbw isn't driving across southwestern deserts and will weigh in at Wampum on the meaning of the Burton resignation. In her diary, she suggested Burton may be one piece of glue between Stephen Griles and Abramoff. Which would make this resignation very interesting indeed.

Comments

[orionATL]

good reporting.

the fates are weaving, weaving, weaving.

[readerOfTeaLeaves]

O.M.G. I can't quite visualize how all the innumable Venn diagrams overlap:

DoI: Griles, Johnny Burton, Native Claims Act (mineral wealth)
** Surely, DoI scandals connect with the mess in Alaska (via mineral and resource wealth, plus Native Claims).
DoJ: USAG scandal (Goodling, Sampson, Elston, Gonzo, et al --> leading back to Rove at WH.)
**Troy Eid (USAG in CO; previously worked at law firm with Abramoff, and also focused on Native Am affairs?) --> connecting up with DoI and also DoJ scandals
** the Civil Rights division of DOJ (voting rights and election integrity) --> connecting up with WH
K Street: Abramoff, Cunningham, Ney, Lewis, et al. (And via Cunningham, Foggo, Ney, Wilkes, et.cetera, the K Street Project clearly implicates the CIA [and connects with Lam/DoJ scandal] --> leading back to WH/ OVP).

How does the DC Madam play in to all this? In addition to the legal secretary who worked for [Monica Goodling's attorney] Dowd, and moonlighted for the DC Madame, the DC Madam must be a nexis of connections to all these other scandals.
** The DC Madam must tie back into Cunningham, Foggo, and the K Street mess,
**** which ties back to the USAG/WH/Rove mess,
****** which is related to the Dept of Interior/K Street mess,
****** which leads back to the CIA/OVP mess...

Aaaaakkkkk!! I'm getting dizzy!

EW, so glad your keyboard is smokin'.
You're certainly going at a Gordion Knot thread by thread. Thank you so much.

[emptywheel]

r OT l

Definitely click through to MBW's post--she's got a great diagram of DOI, which is a start at least.

[Dismayed]

Freepatriot has been yelling "RICO, RICO, RICO!" at the top of his lungs for some time now. Good lord, the repuglican machine is now beginning to look like the biggest racketeering operation in the history of man. Can you imagine the org chart on this thing once it all gets sorted out?

EW may be the only person on Earth who can actually keep up with all of this. Unbelievable, and I'm one gullible sob! Rico, Rico, Rico!

[freepatriot]

yo, readerofTealeaves

I think the DC Madam is a totally unrelated case that is being used as a "Shiny Object"

I don't think the DC Madam had anything to do with Abramoff's prostitution ring

The DC Madam may have had some Democratic customers

the Abramoff prostitution ring, no so many Democrats, but lots of "Family Values" repuglicans

I think Ms Palfrey is a pawn from another game, that is being used as a decoy

[MB Williams]

Sigh, yes I did just happen to be driving across the Eastern Nevada desert. But thanks so much for putting this up, Marcy. Re-reading my dKos diary, even I'm amazed at how prescient I was at the time.

I love how the NYTimes kept using the word "retire" - Please - the woman was lucky to get out BEFORE indictments landed on her desk. She clearly lied to Congress regarding when she learned of the royalties mess, by a full two years. Heck, even I remember hearing rumors through the red grapevine back in 2003/2004 that there was some huge mistake at MMS.

It'll be interesting to read Indianz.com today. There's no love loss between the editors and Burton.

[Pete Bogs]

all Bush's people are resigning because they are finding they were never right for those jobs in the first place... it was pure cronyism that put them there...

[hauksdottir]

readerOfTeaLeaves,

Yup. That's why I think we'll need a 3D program like Mathematica to manage the database. With points plotted into it, we can make gridded sections for various aspects such as time, degrees of relationship (Kevin Bacon) which would include the spouses, corporate affiliations, attendance at meetings, whatever we want to pull out and study. If there are patterns, no matter how unlikely, they would be revealed.

Example, Monica says that she only wanted to serve the President (in her crying jag at the office). Is this her excuse: "I did it all for you"? What all has she done? (I'm thinking of Lady de Winter serving Richelieu, "By My Hand, and for the good of the State, the bearer has done what has been done.") When did she meet Bush? Personally charmed? Brainwashed at Regent U? Blackmailed? It must have been before she was doing oppo research with Comstock.

If we can find the pattern of how she was recruited, and how the other "loyal bushies" that we know about were recruited, we can use that pattern to recognize and root out moles in other agencies.

How many departments and agencies were remade and reorganized after 9/11? In that tumultuous environment, getting loyal bushies positioned without proper vetting would have been easier. Right now we are concentrating on Justice and Interior, but Homeland Security is scandal-plagued and I wouldn't trust the overlapping Intelligence Agencies to find north with a compass.

[readerOfTeaLeaves]

hauksdottir, thx mightily ;-)
Agree with your basic parameters.

As for software.... I tried Maya a few times, but honestly it made me dizzy (even more dizzy than this K Street/WH/CIA/OVP/DoJ/DoI/ Corruption Mashup). Nevertheless, I agree that the data points need to be 3-D, and would certainly require a dB. Maya would be hefty enough, but I don't actually use it. However, the document structures could be analyzed with XML markup, and contrasting views could be provided via a few XSLT schema.

IMHO, there's evidently a political retrovirus at work (authoritarian genre). If there were a field formally titled 'Political Epidemiology', tracking this authoritarian retrovirus would be as high a priority to political epidemiologists as tracking the genetic characteristics of H5N1 is to medical epidemiologists. How is it transmitted? What are the optimal conditions for tranmission? Who has been infected? What's the prognosis? I would approach construction of a dB from the view of political epidemiology. Hope this makes sense.

EW would have my email. Please contact if interested.

[P J Evans]

I have a database program called Sesame. It's easy to use, but you'd have to figure out how the data should be set up: one form, main-with-subforms, whatever. You can easily search one or more fields and see what turns up. (Interfacing it to other programs is a pain, though. It's more than I want to do.) I've been told that it maxes out somwhere around a million records, which might even be enough.

There's also a program that can take Excel spreadsheets and build websites based on the data. It's called WebMerge, and it's very fast.

(Disclosure statement: I'm building the database for www.fontage.com , currently about 27,000 records. The website is built using WebMerge.)

[hauksdottir]

readerOfTeaLeaves:

Maya is quite good for creating CGI characters and effects for movies and games, but takes about 18 months to learn... and requires a lot of specialized plug-ins to do the interesting stuff. It used to be heinously expensive ($30K and another $12-15K for the SGI box to run it on), but now the time to master it is the larger expense. There are other programs which are better for handling light and making materials look realistic, but any company which has invested in Maya workstations will continue with that investment.

I've got a batch of software (Vue, Bryce, Carrara, Poser, Shade) which do a nice job of creating 3D images at a moderate price. However, none of them is a database program. We need something scientific. The resulting images won't be as pretty, but prettiness isn't a factor.

Disease transmission is a fair analogy... sailing ships full of flea-bitten rats bringing plague to Europe wouldn't have been quite as much of a problem if people didn't also have rats in their homes. Why did they have rats? Cats were killed and mistreated (witch familiars), food was kept in bedrooms (dole cupboards), and general lack of sanitation. Here we have lobbyist rats and rats inside government and general lack of oversight. Once the rats are inside the walls, getting them all out is a problem. Someone tracking the conditions required for spreading plague and the conditions required for spreading corruption might see a similar pattern.

P J Evans:

Ooooohhh... fonts! :)= (a major weakness, understandable given my handwriting)

It would be good if we had a programmer-type who was already familiar with databases and the software, so that there wouldn't be a learning curve. Just plugging in all the data as it is uncovered will be work enough! We have a lot of lawyers and analysts on these sites, but perhaps a biologist or physicist will speak up. Patterns are easier to see if they are pictorial, but people who crunch numbers and code may spot things even without a printout.

Before we start entering data, someone overlooking this mess will need to determine those parameters, perhaps dividing factors into categories of relevance (really relevant, possibly relevant, not relevant). At this point we can see that religious schooling is a factor, but what about military service (also authoritarian)? Degree field? Lobbying/consulting? Leader vs follower vs independent?

If I was doing this as a logic puzzle, with Venn diagrams to solve it, I'd start with the people and what was known about them. However, it may turn out that starting with a subject (such as Indian Affairs) would yield information across departments and agencies.

[Attila the Hun]

One more down, thousands more to go. Death and destruction to the Christianist traitors!

[P J Evans]

haukssdottir

Um, multiple fields - they can be Boolean: Abramoff, USAs, mineral rights, Native Americans, casinos, Wilkes/Foggo, DCMadam ... what else would we need? (You can add, but it's a good idea to start with more.) Do it in Excel as name plus simple columns with marks, and WebMerge then can build pages with lists of who's involved based on whether there's a check in that figurative box. You could at least see then who shows up where. (Last year I was thinking in terms of tracing who did what for whom: date, received-from, received-what, gave-to, gave-what, because 'what' isn't necessarily money. Also who they're married to or going out with.)