Pay for Play

I actually don't see Delay staff involvement as the story here, although it's definitely not good. To me, the story is that Interior Secretary Gale Norton sold access for a quarter mil donation to her private environmental charity.

Rep. Tom DeLay's staff tried to help lobbyist Jack Abramoff win access to Interior Secretary Gale Norton, an effort that succeeded after Abramoff's Indian tribe clients began funneling a quarter-million dollars to an environmental group founded by Norton. .....

The December 2000 e-mails show DeLay's office identified — as an avenue for winning a meeting with the new interior secretary — Norton's former political fundraiser, Italia Federici, and a conservative environmental group called the Council of Republicans for Environmental Advocacy (CREA).

Norton founded the group in 1999 with Federici and conservative activist Grover Norquist, a close ally of President Bush. When Norton was named interior secretary by Bush, Federici took over as president of CREA.

I'll be looking forward to a fuller description of this charity. "Returning Honesty and Integrity to the Whitehouse", my ass.

Here's the CREA website. I think my favorite page is the one that describes Bush's "further investigation" into climate change as positive. However the euphemism "treatment" to describe logging in the Healthy Forests initiative is pretty good, too.

UPDATE: It gets more interesting. Apparently, according to this WaPo story from Aug. 27, Abramoff was seeking to use Norton's post to refuse the construction of a competing casino by refusing the EIR.

(in an email to Federici) Abramoff wrote. "This is the casino we discussed with Steve and he said that it would not happen. It seems to be happening! The way to stop it is for Interior to say they are not satisfied with the environmental impact report. Can you get him to stop this one asap? They are moving fast. Thanks Italia. This is a direct assault on our guys, Saginaw Chippewa.".....

Federici's group, CREA, was founded in the 1990s by conservative anti-tax activist Grover Norquist and Gale Norton, now secretary of the interior. It has received financial backing from chemical and mining interests, leading some environmentalists to brand it a front for industrial polluters.

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