Maddow: Eight go from White House to 'big house'

David Edwards and Rachel Oswald

Do you know how many former Bush administration officials have been sentenced with jail time? The answer is a whopping eight, as MSNBC's Rachel Maddow pointed out Wednesday night.

Most recently there was Felipe Sixto, who served as special assistant to President Bush for intergovernmental affairs. He recently pled guilty to embezzling $600,000 from the Center for a Free Cuba, a government-funded program and received a 30-month prison sentence. Sixto left his job with the Bush administration when he learned that he was being investigated for embezzlement.

"That 'oops, I‘d better quit my job in the administration before I report to prison' phenomenon, that happened kind of a lot in the Bush administration," Maddow noted, going on to list in a brief segment titled 'White House to the Big House,' the seven other Bush officials who have received various jail sentences, most often on corruption charges.

*Most famously, there was former Vice President Dick Cheney's chief-of-staff, Scooter Libby. He was sentenced to 30 months, though President Bush quickly commuted the sentence, for his role in the leaking and subsequent coverup of CIA agent Valerie Plame's identity to the press.

*David Safavian, chief-of-staff of the General Services Administration and the head procurement official of the federal government went to prison for 18 months on charges related to the Jack Abramoff lobbyist scandal.

*For obstructing the Senate investigation into Abramoff and for tax evasion, Italia Federici, a political aide to then Secretary of the Interior, Gail Norton, received a two month sentence in a halfway house.

*Fedrici's boyfriend, Steven Griles, who was the number two official at the Interior Department, also received 10 months in jail for his part in the Abramoff scandal.

*Bob Stein, the comptroller of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, received the longest sentence of any Bush official (as of yet) - nine years in prison for money laundering, conspiracy and bribery.

*Brian Doyle, a deputy press secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, was sentenced to five years in jail for attempting to use a computer to seduce a child.

*Former executive director of the CIA, Dusty Fago, received a three year prison sentence on corruption charges.

"[That] brings the total number of Bush administration officials who have gone to jail already to at least eight," Maddow said. "That is not counting all the other convictions that didn‘t result in jail time, all the other investigations. That is just the lucky Bushies who made it all the way to the crowbar hotel."

She joked, "They could like have a prison softball team at this point."

This video is from MSNBC's The Rachel Maddow Show, broadcast Mar. 17, 2009.

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