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Emperor1956 -> RE: Bet no one asks HER for a blow job anymore! (2/26/2007 10:55:09 PM)
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I don't know why the link doesn't work. But to indulge those who want the full tale:
Sacramento lawyer's ascent takes a turn
The timing of her resignation from the U.S. Justice Department is being linked to the Abramoff corruption scandal.
By David Whitney - Bee Washington Bureau
Published 12:00 am PST Sunday, February 25, 2007
Story appeared in MAIN NEWS section, Page A4
Sue Ellen Wooldridge received a hero's send-off from her partners at a Sacramento law firm when she took a job as special assistant to Interior Secretary Gale Norton in 2001.
Six years later, after climbing to a top position at the Justice Department, the lawyer whom the Sacramento County Bar Association journal said in a 2001 headline was on her way "into the stratosphere," instead is facing tough questions about her professional ethics.
Wooldridge has been linked by love, if little more, to a Justice Department target in the still unfolding Jack Abramoff scandal, J. Steven Griles, the former No. 2 person at the Interior Department.
The House Judiciary Committee also is investigating how she came to jointly own a $1 million beach house with Griles and the chief lobbyist for an oil company she let off the hook in a pollution case while serving as the Justice Department's top environmental prosecutor.
In a Feb. 15 letter to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, D-Mich., and House Democratic Caucus Chairman Rahm Emanuel, D-Ill., cited "significant ethical questions" and "concerns" about enforcement actions by the Justice Department's Environment and Natural Resources Division while Wooldridge was at its helm.
While Wooldridge has been charged with nothing and has explanations for everything, her linkage to unfolding corruption scandals has cast a cloud over her reputation that a matter of months ago was unassailed.
Wooldridge's attorney, Stephen Grafman, declined a request for an interview with her, and offered no comments himself.
Wooldridge, 46, grew up on a farm near Willows, where her father was superintendent of schools. She was an honors graduate from the University of California, Davis, and Harvard Law School.
As a government official, she was regarded as tough but fair. She once told a gathering of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service workers that "when I was growing up I used to castrate sheep with my teeth."
The suggestion that Wooldridge is linked to anything scandalous has come as a shock to those who knew her as a hard-working and committed public servant.
"Everybody I've talked to is surprised," said Dan Keppen, executive director of the Family Farm Alliance in Klamath Falls, Ore., who knows Wooldridge from two years of work as Norton's chief aide in the battle between fishermen and farmers over allocation of Klamath River water.
Among Wooldridge's defenders is Rep. Dan Lungren, R-Gold River.
Lungren said he had recruited Wooldridge from his old Sacramento law firm after he was elected California attorney general. As his special assistant, her assignments included negotiating the state's $25 billion settlement with the tobacco industry and a $200 million false claims settlement with Bank of America.
Lungren said that Wooldridge always has paid close attention to ethical principles, and there's nothing that he sees in what's been alleged so far that should present any enduring problems for her.
"I will be a character witness for her," said Lungren, a senior Republican on the Judiciary Committee whose Democratic chairman is promising committee action.
Wooldridge has not been linked directly to Abramoff, the once-prominent Republican lobbyist now imprisoned for political corruption. But after joining the Interior Department, Wooldridge began dating Griles, an assistant secretary whom Abramoff was wining and dining, according to published reports.
Abramoff, according to e-mails made public by a Senate committee, regarded Griles as the Interior Department insider to whom his lobbying team could turn for help. Abramoff also said in the e-mails he was trying to hire Griles away from the Interior Department, a claim Griles denied knowing anything about.
In early January, Griles was notified that he had become a "target of investigation," which means that he was on the verge of being indicted. Three days later, Wooldridge announced her resignation from the Justice Department, resulting in reports by the Washington Post, New York Times, Associated Press and others that the two were romantically connected.
Earlier this month, the newspapers revealed that Wooldridge and Griles were partners with a ConocoPhillips vice president and senior lobbyist, Donald R. Duncan, in the purchase of a $980,000 beach house on Kiawah Island, S.C.
Nine months before the April 2006 purchase, Wooldridge had signed a consent decree giving the oil company more time to install pollution control devices at its refineries. But the Justice Department said Duncan had not been involved in the consent decree, and that Wooldridge had done nothing in the ConocoPhillips matter except to sign, as the division head, an agreement negotiated by others with the approval of the Environmental Protection Agency.
Additionally, Wooldridge had run the beach house deal through the Justice Department's ethics officer, and it had been cleared.
"Sue Ellen went through the proper channels in seeking advice from career ethics staff regarding the purchase of the property," according to a department memo. "They informed her that the purchase did not raise ethical issues."
That explanation, however, has only added to the questions Democrats are raising about Wooldridge. Conyers and Emanuel said in their letter to Gonzales that they not only have questions about "potential unethical, if not illegal, conduct" by Wooldridge but "even more disturbing, apparent complicity in such behavior by the department."
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