I have NEVER read Rolling Stone Magazine until last week when a friends gave me a copy to read what Bush had been up to while he was President.

There has been very little said about this piece, almost like it is hidden away or maybe because most people don't read Rolling Stone and those that do would just by-pass anything having to do with Obama and Bush.

Since the article was large and I didn't really want to type it all out I went online to check it out and found only two references for it, one of which I copied and pasted into this blog.

What I am recommending is that everyone that is interested and has read this blog tell someone else about the article and then go read it themselves. It came out in the April 16th issue.

Under Bush, the Interior Department was as lawless as the Wild West. But can the new secretary bring the wrongdoers to justice?
TIM DICKINSON

As top officials in the Obama administration settle into their new offices, they are just now beginning to uncover some of the worst abuses committed by their predecessors. And of all the corruption that characterized the Bush years, none is more shocking — and more responsible for lasting damage — than the pervasive scandals and cronyism at the federal agency charged with managing one-fifth of America's land.

Under Bush, the Interior Department became a lawless bureaucracy that actively worked to enrich the nation's most powerful energy interests. Top-level officials secretly allowed oil companies to keep billions in royalties owed to taxpayers, opened up 26 million acres of federal land to oil and gas drilling, denied wilderness protection to another 220 million acres, rewrote scientific reports to eliminate safeguards for endangered species, and even snorted coke and had sex with the very oil interests they were supposed to be regulating. "It was Dodge City," says Sen. Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon who chairs the Senate Energy Subcommittee on Public Lands and Forests.

But unlike some Democrats in Washington who insist that it's time to "turn the page" on past misdeeds, newly appointed Interior Secretary Ken Salazar is already showing a determination to hold the Bush administration accountable for its wrongdoing. Sporting his signature Stetson, the secretary casts himself as the man in the white hat — a new sheriff in town, come to restore law and order. In his first two months in office, Salazar has done more than simply reverse many of the Bush administration's worst moves, including the authorization of gas drilling within sight of Utah's national parks. He and his top deputy, Tom Strickland — both of whom served as attorney general of Colorado — have also initiated a top-to-bottom investigation of what Salazar calls the "blatant and criminal conflicts of interest and self-dealing" that took place in Interior.

"We've got to make sure this mess gets cleaned up," Salazar tells Rolling Stone, revealing that he has already referred evidence of wrongdoing to the Justice Department for possible prosecution. According to the secretary, he's looking at "criminal behavior that extended to the very highest levels. The 'anything goes' era is over."

During the Bush era, the scandals over America's wilderness areas were centered at the Mineral Management Service, the Denver office that serves as Interior's collection agency. The government auctions off the right to drill on public lands, and taxpayers are supposed to receive a cut of any profits that energy firms make on the oil and gas they extract. Last year, MMS collected more than $23 billion in royalties from drilling — second in revenues only to the IRS. "The oil companies were basically running MMS during the Bush years," says Bobby Maxwell, a top auditor for the service who was forced out of his job in 2005, despite having recovered more than $500 million in unpaid royalties during his career.

Maxwell and other auditors sensed the change in direction as soon as Bush took office: Collections of unpaid royalties from oil and gas companies plunged from $300 million a year to less than $50 million. "The focus changed," says Maxwell. "It was 'Quit doing detailed audits. Stop getting records from oil companies.' " The push was no longer to collect money owed to taxpayers for drilling on public land — it was to provide what the Bush administration euphemistically called "royalty relief" to big energy firms.

MMS not only slashed audits by 22 percent, it even prohibited auditors from recouping money in cases involving clear evidence of fraud. In what would become the costliest scandal, it also looked the other way when it learned that, because of a massive bureaucratic fuck-up, it had failed to collect billions in royalties for deep-water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. Instead, the Bush administration fought to let oil companies keep the money, and a judge appointed by Bush recently overturned royalty collections on 75 percent of all oil produced in the Gulf. Should the ruling stand, taxpayers will forfeit as much as $53 billion owed by Big Oil.

As another favor to oil and gas companies, MMS also set up an office called "Royalty in Kind," allowing drilling interests to pay the government not in cash but in petroleum products. The RIK office would then sell those products on the open market, bringing in some $4 billion a year. But since the office owned no pipelines or refineries, it was forced to extend lucrative contracts to the oil companies to transport and process the oil — taking another costly bite out of the revenue owed to taxpayers.

Instead of negotiating tough deals with the oil companies, officials in the royalties office indulged in what an internal investigation later termed "a culture of substance abuse and promiscuity." A third of RIK staff members, the investigation found, accepted illicit gifts from the industry. Others "used cocaine and marijuana, and had sexual relations with oil and gas company representatives." One pair of government-employees-gone-wild, celebrated among oilmen as the "MMS Chicks," partied hard during corporate snowboarding trips — one got so drunk at a ski resort that Shell had to put her up for the night in its "Dutchman Haus" chalet — and repeatedly had sex with representatives for Chevron and Shell. The "Chicks" did not recuse themselves from negotiations with the companies. Worse, they allowed Chevron and other firms to revise the terms of 118 contracts that had already been finalized — favors to the industry that cost taxpayers $4.4 million.

"They were literally and figuratively in bed with the oil industry," says Maxwell. The director of the Royalty in Kind office, Greg Smith, was apparently too busy worrying about where his next line of coke was coming from to rein in his underlings. According to Interior's inspector general, Smith regularly bought cocaine from a subordinate, offering her a $250 "perform ance award" as a reward for provisioning him with quality "office supplies." When Smith wasn't high — or pressuring women on his staff for blow jobs, as the inspector general found he did repeatedly — he was busy accepting payments from an oil–services consulting firm in return for insider information about the RIK program.