According to the latest installment in a Washington Post series on the vice president, Cheney reached "far down the chain of command" to interfere in the Fish and Wildlife Service's decision about protecting the two imperiled fish species on the Klamath River.  The Post reports that the vice president was behind the Service's challenge of the science supporting protection for the fish species.  He looked for "a way around" the law on protecting the fish and, in order to do so, convinced the National Academy of Sciences to issue a report refuting the existing science on the fish and the water levels they needed for survival.  The Post story notes the fate of the lead biologist for the National Marine Fisheries Service team assigned to review the science academy report:  after his team's objections to the report were overruled and their dissenting critique was edited out, he resigned and has filed a whistleblower claim about the tampering from "someone at a higher level" that his work was subject to.

The revelation in the Post story that is perhaps less surprising but could have more political reverberation is that of former EPA head Christie Todd Whitman.  She told Washington Post reporters that she left the EPA not for the personal reasons she cited at the time but because of vice president Cheney's insistence that the agency weaken air pollution standards.

All this is being reported on the same day that Steven Griles was sentenced for his role in the Jack Abramoff scandal.  When you pull back and look at the situation in the Interior Department as a whole, with the combination of former Deputy Assistant Secretary Julie MacDonald's interference in endangered species protections for so many species and apparently even tampering from the vice president himself, it begins to look like serious clean-up is needed.  The Interior Department under the Bush Administration is clearly compromised beyond any levels we previously suspected.  Center for Native Ecosystems has long echoed the call of members of Congress and other conservation groups for the Interior Department to fix the corrupted decisions Julie MacDonald and others interfered with.  In addition, it would seem some deeper cultural or systemic changes are in order.