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The biggest American political scandal before Watergate involved the Secretary of the Interior taking cash from oilmen for drilling rights. How high up will this investigation lead?

U.S. Interior Officials’ Ties to Oil Probed
January 2, 2007 (AFX News Ltd. Via Rigzone)
- Federal investigators are looking at whether Interior Department officials played favorites or took money from companies vying for big oil and gas contracts.

- The probe is the latest in a series of investigations into Interior's handling of $10 billion a year in royalties paid by companies on the $60 billion in oil and gas they produce from leased public lands…
- Those royalties are the federal government's second-biggest source of revenues, behind only taxes. Other investigations are looking at multibillion-dollar shortfalls in royalty payments.
- The Justice Department is investigating the allegations based on the work of the Interior Department's inspector general's office, an internal watchdog…

- The Minerals Management Service helps oversee a program the Bush administration has promoted that allows companies to pay "in-kind" amounts of oil and gas, rather than cash royalties, for drilling federal lands. Such payments total about $3.7 billion in oil and gas a year…Interior sent most of the oil and gas to fill the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, but lately has sold it by hiring private companies that solicit bids. Through that bidding, companies offering the highest premium over daily market prices is supposed to win the oil-trading contract…

- "The allegation that any senior official who is responsible for collecting royalties from companies that drill on public lands is also taking money from those companies as a consultant is beyond a conflict of interest, if true, it is a crime," [said Massachusetts Democrat Representative Ed] Markey, a senior member of the House Resources Committee…"The Interior Department is riddled with people who got their jobs because they were close to the oil industry and could be expected to tilt every decision accordingly," he said. "Royalties owed to the government from production on public lands have become the currency of cozy cooperation between industry and its special friends in the Interior Department."
- Markey promised that Democrats taking over Congress in January will fully examine the royalties program…
- Efforts to reach the Interior Department on Saturday for comment were unsuccessful.

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