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From the L.A. Times--Former Interior Secretary Gale Norton is focus of corruption probe:

The Justice Department investigation centers on a 2006 decision to award oil shale leases in Colorado to a Royal Dutch Shell subsidiary. Months later, the oil giant hired Norton as a legal counsel.

Reporting from Washington - The Justice Department is investigating whether former Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton illegally used her position to benefit Royal Dutch Shell PLC, the company that later hired her, according to officials in federal law enforcement and the Interior Department.

Could we finally see the Justice Department coming down on a member of Bush administration?

Maddow: Ken Salazar inherited responsibility for about 500 million acres of the Earth when President Obama appointed him secretary of the interior. Yesterday, as we reported, he announced that he would shut down the Interior Department office known during the Bush administration as the place where department staffers snorted meth off of toaster ovens.

The inspector general reported that in addition to the toaster oven meth-snorting, employees of one middle management office had sex with, did drugs with, and took embarrassingly small bribes from people in the oil and gas industry they were supposed to be regulating.

Now, the secretary of the interior during the time of the toaster oven, meth-snorting, what‘s known as the department‘s orgy era, was a person named Gale Norton. During the orgy era at her department, Gale—at her department—Gale Norton awarded Shell Oil a bunch of extremely lucrative leases to squeeze some oil out of federal lands.

Two months after the big present for Shell Oil was announced, Gale Norton quit the Department of the Interior. Where did she go to work after that? You guessed it. Shell Oil.

Dear Miss Norton, thank you for submitting your resume.

If then-Interior Secretary Gale Norton discussed her future employment with Shell while she was making the decision to award the company those lucrative leases, she will have broken the law. An internal investigation was launched of this while George W. Bush was still in office.

And “The Los Angeles Times” reports today that it has now been turned over to the Justice Department in a formal criminal referral. That makes Gale Norton the first Bush cabinet secretary to be the subject of a formal corruption investigation. She, of course, is also the first to have multiple results show up when you goggle her name along with the words meth, toaster oven and snorting.

This USAToday piece leaves out an important piece of the puzzle here. The company who sold the pumps was closely tied to the Bush family, at one time even employing Jeb Bush:

WASHINGTON — Huge flood-control pumps installed in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina don't protect the city adequately and the Army Corps of Engineers could have saved $430 million in replacement costs by buying proven equipment, a federal investigation finds.

The investigation by the federal Office of Special Counsel finds there was "little logical justification" for the corps' decision to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on the "untested" hydraulic pumps, which are meant to empty millions of gallons of water from the below-sea-level city during storm-related floods.

Nope, no "logical" justification. Just political! From March 2007:

Meanwhile, Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., asked the Government Accountability Office on Thursday to investigate the Corps and the contract it entered into with Moving Water Industries Corp.

MWI is owned by J. David Eller and his sons. Eller was once a business partner of former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush in a venture called Bush-El that marketed MWI pumps.

But wait, it gets even worse:

In 2002, the U.S. Justice Department amended its suit against Eller, alleging that he twice flew suitcases of cash to offshore tax havens to hide his assets, the St. Petersburg Times reported. The DOJ also claimed that MWI improperly used more than a third of a $74.3-million U.S. loan to pay a Nigerian agent for the company. In turn, that agent and other company officials paid Nigerian government officials involved in buying MWI's pumps, the lawsuit alleges. MWI denies the charges.

According to the paper:

Between 1985 and 1993, the government says, Eller flew on his company plane to the Bahamas and to Grand Cayman, once with a "large suitcase filled with currency" and once with a "large duffel bag or suitcase filled with currency." At both places, a chauffeured limousine whisked him and the money away. Eller told his pilot he was "moving his assets out of the United States," the lawsuit contends, calling it an effort to shield the money from creditors.

Eller's lawyer, William Scherer, said the flights never occurred and neither Eller nor MWI has accounts in either country.

The lawsuit by the George W. Bush Justice Department suggests no wrongdoing by Jeb Bush, who from 1988 to 1994 worked with Eller marketing MWI pumps to foreign countries, including Nigeria.

Indeed, the amended complaint omits allegations of influence-peddling by MWI -- including Eller's bringing Jeb Bush into the pump business -- leveled in the whistle-blower's recently unsealed lawsuit. That lawsuit prompted the federal investigation.

This begs a couple of questions: Why was a company under DOJ investigation for such serious charges given a major federal contract for New Orleans reconstruction in the first place? And why is the DOJ suit against MWI still unresolved after so many years?

It's all so damned incestuous, isn't it?

The man leading the Obama administration’s efforts to restructure the auto industry has been described in Securities and Exchange Commission documents as having arranged for his investment firm to pay more than $1 million to obtain New York State pension business.

Although he is not named in the documents, a person with knowledge of the inquiry said the investment executive is Steven Rattner, co-founder of the Quadrangle Group, the prominent private equity firm.

The S.E.C. complaint, filed as part of an expansive state and federal investigation into corruption at the state pension fund, details the efforts of Quadrangle to gain business from the pension fund beginning in 2004.

The person who received most of the $1 million-plus payment has been indicted, accused of selling access to the fund.

There is no indication in the complaint that Mr. Rattner faces criminal or civil charges in connection with the inquiry.