The White House may have lost a battle, but they have not lost the war.

For nearly two years, D.C. watchdogs Judicial Watch and Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington have been battling in court for Secret Service records of visits to the Bush White House and the Vice President's Office. The first request was for Jack Abramoff's visits, but they also set out to discover how often his associates and various conservative religious leaders had visited. Did they know what they were in for?

Over time, the White House has tried various legal theories to block the release. There was the imposing "mosaic theory," whereby seemingly innocuous information, such as visits to the White House, could prove a national security threat when combined with other seemingly innocuous information. And there was the Vice President's secret agreement with the Secret Service that even though the Secret Service makes and keeps the visitor records, they're not really Secret Service records (even though they'd been treated that way in the past), they're White House records, and thus not subject to FOIA. Oh, and there was the Vice President's order to destroy the records. And on and on.

Today, CREW had a good day in court, with a federal judge deciding that the secret agreement was bunk and that the Secret Service records really were public records. And there was also a partial victory. The judge denied CREW's motion to declare that the Secret Service could not destroy its White House visitor records once it had transferred copies to the White House; but because the judge said the records are public records, the White House now cannot destroy them without the say-so of the National Archives and Records Administration. And when you want to destroy documents, you really don't want any red tape, do you?

Read more »

If there's one thing that the Abramoff scandal has taught us, it's that it pays to snitch.

From the AP:

An environmental advocate who provided Jack Abramoff's entree into the Interior Department was sentenced Friday to two months in a halfway house and four years probation.

Italia Federici, who pleaded guilty in June to tax evasion and obstructing a Senate investigation, was spared prison only because she has become a key witness in the Justice Department's ongoing corruption investigation.

(I would be remiss if I didn't amusedly note the AP's description of Federici as an "environmental advocate." She did indeed head a group called Council of Republicans for Environmental Advocacy (CREA), so the word "environmental" was in her group's title. But her advocacy was definitely against the environmental movement, not with it.)

Federici was key in helping the feds bag Steven Griles, formerly the deputy secretary of the Interior Department (and formerly her boyfriend). Griles was sentenced to 10 months in prison back in June. And for that, she's been rewarded.

The scheme went this way: Jack Abramoff's tribal clients gave CREA at least $500,000 in contributions, providing practically the entire operating budget for the group. In return, Federici used her close connections to Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton (for whom she used to work) and the #2 Steven Griles (whom she was dating) to make sure that Abramoff's concerns were addressed. Here's the whole rundown.