It seemed so sudden, the way
Interior Secretary Gale Norton resigned back in early March.
It wasn’t like the other resignations from President
George Bush’s cabinet. Everyone in town knew that then-Secretary of
State Colin Powell was an odd-man-out before Powell announced he
would leave at the end of the first term. As to former Treasury
secretaries Paul O’Neill and John Snow, there was so much leakage
from the White House speculating about — and encouraging
— their departures, that the torrent alone could have swept
them from office.
There was nothing like that with
Norton. Not a hint of displeasure seeped out of the White House.
Almost up to the day she quit, Norton had been setting policies,
making plans, acting as though she’d enlisted for the duration. And
then — bloop! She was gone, ready, she said, to return to the
West and to the private sector.
So a few tongues wagged:
Did she jump, or was she pushed? There was this investigation into
whether disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff had exerted undue
influence over Interior via Norton’s top deputy at the department,
J. Steven Griles, and one of her close friends, Italia Federici.
Just what an administration with dismal approval ratings does not
need — a spreading scandal involving a sitting Cabinet
secretary. It would have been neither surprising nor unprecedented
if some senior White House or Republican Party official had called
Norton quietly one evening suggesting — no, make that
commanding — her immediate departure.
We still
don’t know whether that happened. But we do know that if it didn’t,
whoever didn’t do it should be fired. No minimally competent
political operative could read the Senate Indian Affairs Committee
investigative report into the Abramoff scandal without knowing that
Norton had to go.That report was not issued until June 22, but only
a political naïf would doubt that the Republicans running the
committee, whether chairman John McCain of Arizona or someone on
the staff, would have warned the higher-ups earlier.
The
357-page report, entitled “Gimme Five,” for the term Abramoff and
his partner used to describe some of their activities, paints a
scathing and almost comical picture of sleaze surrounding the
Interior Department. The report traces how Abramoff got his client
Indian tribes, awash in casino money, to contribute $500,000 to the
Council of Republicans for Environmental Advocacy (CREA), an
organization started in 1997 (under a slightly different name) by
Norton, Federici and their (and Abramoff’s) friend, conservative
strategist Grover Norquist.
The report also reaches an
official finding of possible criminality. It reveals that Abramoff
regularly told his clients that Griles was “our guy” in the
Interior Department, that Norton was “involved” with CREA, and that
the contributions to CREA were enhancing their clout at Interior.
It also asserts that CREA used tribal money “for purposes
unintended by the tribes,” suggesting without quite alleging that
Federici was taking the tribal money and doing nothing in return.
Most damaging to Norton were the Indian Affairs Committee’s
suggestions for further investigations into the truthfulness of
Federici’s and Griles’ testimony. No administration will tolerate
perjury trials of a cabinet officer’s close associates.
But there’s another twist to the story. The Abramoff investigation
might be only one of the reasons Bush wanted a new Interior
secretary. With former Idaho Gov. Dirk Kempthorne the new Interior
secretary, the president also seems to be cutting his ties to one
of Norton’s recent policy proposals — one that was further
damaging the president’s already-battered approval ratings.
Norton never officially endorsed a controversial draft of
a new National Park Service management plan proposed by then Deputy
Assistant Secretary Paul Hoffman. But neither did she express any
reservations about its move to place recreation on a par with
resource protection as Park Service policy. The latest draft,
prepared since Kempthorne replaced Norton, restores the 90-year-old
approach toward protection of resources, says Laura Loomis, the
senior director of government affairs for the National Parks and
Conservation Association. The new version, on which Kempthorne
consulted with the NPCA, also drops language calling for more
partnerships with private firms in managing the parks.
There has been no public announcement of this policy change, so
there has been little reaction to it. Jim DiPeso, the Seattle-based
policy director for Republicans for Environmental Protection, noted
that there was “quite a bit of pushback across the board,” against
the Hoffman draft, much of it from retired park rangers and members
of Congress, including Republicans.
For what it is worth,
Paul Hoffman also has a new job: He’s a deputy assistant secretary
in a non-policy-making position.
Jon Margolis
is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of
High Country News (hcn.org). He writes from
Barton, Vermont.
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