Comments (22)

nofltwlt wrote on June 20, 2007 3:00 PM:

Griles lied, send him to jail. He should serve five months in the general population of a REAL prison; this would institute immediate ethics reform among politicians.

cervantes wrote on June 20, 2007 3:17 PM:

Tell it to Richard Cohen.

parrot wrote on June 20, 2007 3:23 PM:

Huh? Tell it to the parole board!

oldtree wrote on June 20, 2007 3:25 PM:

I think it will be good to get him in for the 5, because new indictments could allow only for his getting to put on a empty suit for court appearances in future. he might want to talk before he has to go down for a longer stretch.
felon.

cervantes wrote on June 20, 2007 3:27 PM:

Tell it to Richard Cohen.

cevrero wrote on June 20, 2007 3:27 PM:

You should have plea bargained. I'm sure someone else needs protecting. Don't you see how this ship sinks. One little hole at a time.

gchaucer2 wrote on June 20, 2007 3:28 PM:

It appears that Griles should just be happy he isn't getting Libby's or Savafian's sentence, rather five months. His community service offer should be a real signal to the court that this guy has not learned his lesson.

paul wrote on June 20, 2007 3:52 PM:

Lobbying to get snowmobiles into national parks. I can see it now: the next big-business creep who gets convicted of tax evasion will do a community service sentence at Cato writing about the evil of taxes.

Powkat wrote on June 20, 2007 3:52 PM:

I lied, I admitted I lied, but it wasn't my fault I lied because they didn't ask me the questions I wouldn't have lied to answer. So it's not my fault.

Is that about right?

johnnydoughey wrote on June 20, 2007 3:54 PM:

Too bad the taxpayers (that's us) have to pay for the investigation, hearing, trial, etc. and not the clown who is helping to dissolve our democracy... 5 months or less... bet he's smiling no matter what the penalty is... he'll be able to better his tennis serve while in the federal spa... I mean prison.

SteveW wrote on June 20, 2007 4:27 PM:

Don't you just love this "law and order" administration and Republican Party? They believe folks who steal food...to live...should go to jail, yet ANY law they break is minor in scope and not deserving of a prison sentence like the rest of us "commoners."

Mrs Panstreppon wrote on June 20, 2007 5:18 PM:

The judge should throw the book at Griles for insulting the court and shamelessly exploiting injured Iraq war veterans to get a stay-out-of-jail card.

Griles suggested to the court that he spend 250 hours of his community service working for a lobbyist and another 250 hours working for a non-existent charity, Operation Coaches and Warriors.

Talk about dumb ideas. Operation Coaches and Warrioirs is supposed to help injured Iraq war vets by sending them college memorabilia and free sporting event tickets.

A marketing guy named Rick Kell came up with the scheme but it is not clear as to who Kell works for - possibly the Defense Department or the USO. It is also not clear as to whether Kell came up with the scheme solely to benefit Steve Griles.

It is highlly unlikely that Operation Coaches and Warriors has been approved or funded by a legitimate charity and it is even more unlikely that a legitimate charity has approved the participation of Griles, a convicted felon in one of its programs involving sensitive information.

How low can Griles go?

Jane wrote on June 20, 2007 5:46 PM:

Judge Ellen Segall Huvelle is the Judge in J. Steven Griles Case. Criminal No. 07-CR-079. The Web site for the D.C. District Court for the District of Columbia is http://www.dcd. uscourts.gov. The Judge's phone number is available there. I do not know what the proper procedure is for submitting a letter concerning sentencing is but it seems to me, Mrs. P, that your information concerning the nature of the proposed community service should be presented to the Judge.

Since he is to be sentenced Tuesday time is short.

Griles is an idiot. His lawyers write:

In fact, if the Senate Comitee had simply agreed with Mr. Griles' repeated requests to see the hundreds of documents in its possession or in some cases actually asked a question about a particular subject, Mr. Griles may have been able to supplement his answers and possibly provided to Senate Committee with the very informantion that the DOJ now presents to the Court."

Translated: If you told me what information you had in your possession I could have parrotted it back to you and I would have known where it was safe to lie and where it wasn't and I could have alerted all my co-conspirators.

His lawyers also lament that given that Griles contacts with Abramnoff were routine that the DOJ "seeks to create a nefarious overtone that is absurd and divorced from reality."

At the point that Griles testified it was highly public that Abramnoff was working every contact he had to buy as much influence as he could, therefore, it was vital to trace out the tentacles of his influence and who introduced Abramnoff to Griles is highly relevant to tracing Abramnoff's nefarious actions. To say otherwise is absurd.

Mrs P wrote on June 20, 2007 6:11 PM:

Jane, I would write the judge because I am livid about how lightly Griles is getting off even if he does jail time. Griles insulted the Senate Indian Affairs Committee and now he is insulting Judge Huvelle and the court.

But I am missing a piece of information. The sentenging memo submitted to the court by Griles's laywers (link below) refers to Kell's letter at Exhibits Vol. II, Exhibit B-8. According to the memo, Kell outlined the Operation Coaches and Warrior plan.

Kell's letter is not online so I don't know what is in it. I can't write to the judge without knowing what Kell wrote in his letter because I might say something wrong.

What I do know is that Kell used to be with Kell Communications, an advertising agency in Laurel MD. Another commenter here called Kell Communications and was told that Rick Kell no longer worked there.

Kell was last in the news in December 2006 when he accompanied some pro golfers on a week-long tour of Kuwati and Iraq which was sponsored by the USO.

He is also associated with Operation Hardwood which sponsors a military basketball tournament in Kuwait in which the teams are coached by college coaches who volunteer a week of their time. Operation Hardwood is funded by the Armed Forces Entertainment Division and the USO.

Griles is supposed to put together a database of college coaches who would participate in Operation Coaches and Warrior, coordinate public relations and facilitate communications between the coaches and the wounded.

Yeah, right, like Griles is going to do all of this in 250 hours.

I'd like to know how Kell found out that Griles was available for community service and how he judged Griles's integrity and "sense of honor for country."

Steve5117 wrote on June 20, 2007 7:03 PM:

Mrs. P

Give Rick a call

Kell, Richard C
16312 Dahl Rd
Laurel, MD 20707-2706

(301) 490-1321

You might get a kick out of knowing that when Rick travelled between his house and the offic of Kell & Co., or whatever the name is of where Terrance said he no longer works, that Rick had to drive on Brooklyn Bridge Rd.

Where Rick lives is close to a lot of interesting govt. facilities: NSA; NASA Goddard Space Fight Center; Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab where they develope classified things that explode; Aberdeen Proving Grounds where they test things that explode; and Camp David. All of these are in Maryland and then all the govt. agencies in DC only 20 miles away and then Virginia over the Key Bridge and the Pentagon.

If Rick likes hobnobbing with military types he sure lives in a good place. I wonder if he ever stops by the VFW on Montevideo Road in Jessup?

Mrs P wrote on June 20, 2007 7:24 PM:

Steve, Yesterday, you wrote that the folks at Kell Communications told you that Rick Kell could be reached at rckellco@aol.com.

I think I'll give rckellco@aol.com a try. Maybe Laura or Paul can call Kell at (301) 490-1321 and ask him how he knows Griles.

Steve5117 wrote on June 20, 2007 8:08 PM:

Mrs. P

Do you have any idea how old Kell is? If he's hanging around with Griles maybe he's in his 50's or 60's.

I will confess that right now I am conducting a personal experiment about the way information spreads over the internet. Here's what I'm doing:

I am using Rick Kell, a person I may or may not have met, worked with, servered with or gotten drunk with, along my knowledge of the area he lives in to see if there is a response to my writings here and only here on the subject of Rick Kell.

There are several reasons I doing this:

1. I'm retired with an implanded medical device that limits my movements at times and sitting at at computer is something I can do.

2. I think it's an interesting thing to study: Once unon a time I lectured on the subject of communications at a Florida University. I would conduct an experiment to show how a message would change after passing from the originator thru nine people. Now envision what it would have been like at a large organization when the telephone was a primary part of the grapevine along with the mail person and how easy a minor event could develope into a fantastic rumor. Compare that to today where a lot of messages are written in emails, IM's or text-messaged on a cell phone, and we now copy, cut and paste, or forward with the original message still intact.

So I want to see is:

1. Whether or not what I am doing here gets noticed anywhere else?

2. Will there be any response from Rick to TPMmuckraker?

3. Can anyone identify me from the hints I've given and will give while raking muck here?

Mrs P wrote on June 20, 2007 9:00 PM:

Steve, I'm sitting at my computer all day to try to convince people that Washington is thoroughly corrupt. I am sorry to hear about your disability but I'm glad that you can still do research. Every bit helps!

I sent an email to Kell just now and told him that some people online think he made up the idea of Operation Coaches and Warriors just to help Steve Griles and, btw, tell me more about the program.

I posted about Kell at POGO and Legal Times so his name is out there.

I suppose someone might be able to identify you if he or she tried. I know I can easily be identified a couple of ways. One way is to just send me an email via the TPM Cafe.

After mulling it over, I think I will try to send a letter to Judge Ellen Segall Huvelle as Jane@June 20, 2007 05:46 PM suggested. Griles has shown absolutely no remorse for what he did and his suggested options for community service is a middle finger to the law-abiding public.

Steve5117 wrote on June 20, 2007 9:57 PM:

Mrs. P

If I could see a picture of Rick I might recognize him .... or not. I did manage to get around. I was wondering if Rick ever stoped at the American Legion on Main St, in Laurel? I have. (I've had a few beers in Huntington too!)

Once, when I was at that American Legion I struck up a conversation will a chap at the bar. He asked me what branch of the military I had served in and I told him the Navy. Then he asked, "Whose Navy?"

After laughing and telling him, "Ours, the United States Navy," he explained that he worked at the Pentagon where recently a new employee who wrote on the forms that he served in the Army was later discovered to have been in the Russian Army! This that was before the Berlin Wall was taken down and the position required a security clearance.

Thinking about some of the major things I was associated with in minor capacities is sort of Forrest Gump-like. If you are old enough to remember when we landed on the moon in 1969 you probably didn't know that late in the program a decision was made to put a reflector on the moon to be used in experiments with the new technology of Laser light. I was involved with converting a used piece of Air Force equipment for ground support for NASA and traveled to Goddard Space Flight freqently.

My Navy job description was "The collection, evaluation, display and disemmination of all combat tactical information" and I was good at what I did. I also remember taking a course in Business Communications at Catonsville Community College where the instructor said that the average business communication cost a company 67 cents. That was a while ago also.

As far as my experiment it will be interesting to see if there is any play on it. I know you are getting mentioned in other blogs and from reading your cafe bio and postings there I think I recogonized your comments somewhere else under a sifferent name, maybe even your real one. I still haven't thought of anything to put in my bio but when I do it will probably be a sea story.

I promise that everything I reveal here however, will be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth with some history thrown in.

xargaw wrote on June 21, 2007 12:46 AM:

I would disagree with his attorney. I recall reading about the antics of Mr. Griles several years in a book by Molly Ivins. It seems Mr. Grilles has been working for the corporations, against the people, the workers and public safety for some time and his talents have been less than honorable. It is rather comforting to know his career doing such things is at an end.

xargaw wrote on June 21, 2007 12:47 AM:

I would disagree with his attorney. I recall reading about the antics of Mr. Griles several years in a book by Molly Ivins. It seems Mr. Griles has been working for the corporations, against the people, the workers and public safety for some time and his talents have been less than honorable. It is rather comforting to know his career doing such things is at an end.

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