The Persecution & Assassination of Robert Griffin As Performed by Members of the Washington Press Corps
Byrne, Jeb
The Persecution & Assassination of Robert Griffin As Performed by Members of the Washington Press Corps by Jeb Byrne Early this year, Robert T. Griffin retired from government service. The name...
...Time ran a story about it, leaving the clear impression that the allegations were fact, and reinforcing that impression with a cartoon showing a man with a small net trying to catch a big fish...
...In reporting that Griffin had gone to work for Chrysler, The Miami Herald referred to him as “the scandal-freighted former deputy chief of the General Services Administration...
...Parry and Lambro had him leaving “quietly...
...Griffin heard rumors that Solomon was unhappy with him, but he discounted them, because face-to-face Solomon was always pleasant enough...
...There is, admittedly, nothing much more seductive than a good corruption story, but in the absence of professionalism, readers will get nothing more than-as Walter Lippmann once put it-“a species of romantic fiction which they can get much better out of the movies...
...Anderson went on to rehash several allegations about Griffin...
...In his accounts, moreover, Kessler never fully explained the role that Griffin played in starting and directing GSA’s internal investigation-before it became a media extravaganza and the subject of congressional hearings, before Solomon became GSA administrator, and long before Kessler (whose first story on the GSA investigation appeared in the Post on March 3, 1978) had discovered that an investigation was in progress...
...An Anderson column appeared on December 18, 1978, characterizing Griffin as having “such high connections that when he stubs his toe, Tip O’Neill howls and President Carter applies the bandage...
...The headline emphasized that the new job entailed “$50,000 Yearly for ONeill’s Friend”4gnoring the fact that this was the same salary Griffin had been making a t GSA...
...When Strauss switched jobs, becoming Carter’s special representative to the Middle East negotiations, Griffin went along...
...Some managers of GSA-operated self-service stores-where other agencies came for their office supplies-were found to be in cahoots with suppliers...
...Politicians of the old school like Tip O’Neill have cronies...
...They met frequently, sometimes for lunch, and it was Kessler who telephoned Griffin one afternoon with the news that Solomon was about to fire him...
...I don’t claim that all is lost...
...As reported, that’s the sequence...
...The only time he had substantive responsibility for GSA property management was when he became acting administrator and then deputy administrator in early 1977-the period during which he got the investigation rolling...
...Despite the collective efforts of hundreds of officials, it was Solomon who received the lion’s share of attention...
...There were others...
...The Post carried the “insider” coverage that set the initial pace and tone for other media to improvise upon as best they could...
...But now it has cloth boards around it...
...It was easy, of course, to translate the complexities of maladministration a t GSA into a Good Guy vs...
...Ignore such newsmongering, said Joseph Gales and William Seaton, “unless it be of too grave character to let it pass...
...The memo dusted off an old allegation by a personnel officer who claimed he had been harassed out of the agency by Griffin (then in a staff position) when the personnel officer would not go along with the supposed downgrading of an investigator...
...Ostensibly this was a private document, but more copies were floating around than balloons a t the circus...
...GSA’s administration is as complicated as that of any Fortune “500” company, and that complexity offers practically endless opportunities for low-level fraud...
...Gales and Seaton of The Daily National Intelligencer, struggling with the same problem in 1849, managed to find a ray of hope only a few years later...
...He is now on the staff of the National Archives...
...I think a congeries of news people, for reasons ranging from bad to worse, have inflicted casual mayhem on Robert Griffin’s good name...
...The name probably sounds familiar to you...
...Griffin’s competence had not been questioned, but nobody at NBC brought this to Cohen’s-or the viewing public’s-attention...
...An unsigned story in The Detroit News said the same thing...
...It’s a distinction that’s important in Washington...
...We had a long talk, but nothing ever appeared in the paper about the issues I raised...
...This shows Griffin being booted out of GSA by a foot and leg labeled “cleanup”- an interpretation that even Solomon had not placed on the firing...
...The investigators want to know why he failed to take corrective action...
...In January, Bob Parry of Associated Press and Donald Lambro of United Press International had the good fortune to discover simultaneously that last fall, they said, a man who did business with GSA had alleged bribetaking by a GSA official who, as Lambro put it, was a “long-time associate” of Robert Griffin, and in Parry’s various versions was “considered” at GSA to be a “close associate” and “a satellite” of Griffin...
...If the drawing was supposed to represent Griffin, ol’ Ollie was off the mark...
...During the few months when he was actually in a position to do something about those controls, he peppered GSA offices with orders for special audits, reviews of disbursement records, improved procedures for monitoring purchasing, better systems of vendor identification, and coordination of procedures from region to region...
...He had as many as 150 people within the agency working on the investigation under his direction...
...Missing...
...This was the first and last time that Griffin let a TV camera into his home...
...Jeb Byrne was a wire service reporter,for ten years bejore joining the General Services Administration in 1961...
...Presumably you could find Bob and Tip sitting around the local Safeway in their wool shirts, spitting into the cracker barrel...
...Almost all of his words wound up on the cutting room floor, and on the news that night, David Brinkley summarized: “Powerful politicians in Washington expect their friends to be taken care of-and certainly not fired...
...GSA is a federal conglomerate...
...He said he would look into it...
...The facts don’t square with that...
...l h e Washington Monthly managed the neat trick of throwing Griffin a bouquet and a brickbat a t the same time...
...That was just the beginning of a classic Washington flap, as you may recall...
...I’m not aware of any statement by Solomon to that effect, although it would be hard to track down everything he ever said about the GSA investigation...
...It wasn’t until the end of the year that Solomon began shifting his focus away from art and more in the direction of the investigations...
...He shuffled officials around, sending them to areas outside their own to gather information about possible fraud, and this information was regularly passed on to the FBI, leading to the 79 indictments and convictions that have since resulted...
...It was what he didn’t write that hurt...
...Some of us tried to speak out on his behalf, but it didn’t work any better...
...In point of fact, he had launched an investigation of fraud at GSA before Solomon ever appeared on the scene...
...In fact, Griffin’s one property management job in GSA occurred in 1969-72, when he was in charge of the depots in which materials of the National Stockpile are stored...
...All this was dutifully, and ominously, chronicled in the news media...
...He used to eat at his desk, but I never saw him sleeping there...
...Griffin has been close to politics for a long time-he worked in John F. Kennedy’s first congressional election campaign, back in 1946-and knows his way around, but once upon a time that fact would not have stigmatized him...
...For his part, Griffin could be blunt and straightforward- he was never insubordinate, but he was never shy about expressing his views...
...He was moved from the General Services Administration because he was incompatible with the director...
...He was, in short, a means to an end, a quick and easy way to define a story that was otherwise difficult and puzzling...
...This treatment met what Peter Braestrup has described in his Big Story as the criteria for news magazine writing: “. . . to avoid ambiguities and complexities [and] to fashion a clear story with a beginning, middle, and snappy close...
...It’s no secret that he was closer to Jay Solomon, too...
...n e Boston Herald- American improved on the Post with its headline: “$50,000 Plum for ONeill Pal...
...Alto Solo There was another flurry about records when Solomon decided that GSA should keep Griffin’s appointment calendar and telephone logs...
...its procurement activities range from the purchase of paperclips and motor oil to the GSA houses much of the federal bureaucracy in 10,000 building locations, supplies its needs, disposes of its surplus property, paves its parking lots and fills its gas tanks...
...Griffin is a lean 6‘4” and doesn’t drink...
...Anderson told his Mutual Broadcasting System radio audience on March 12 that Griffin “was fired from [GSA] because he refused Eo cooperate with the probe into corrupt purchases by the agency...
...01’ Tip and 01’ Bob The words “crony” and “cronyism” keep occurring as you thumb through the newsclips and transcripts of the Griffin story...
...But a refurbished piece on the GSA investigation appeared in the September Reader’s Digest, signed by Carl T. Rowan and David M. Mazie...
...In that instance, as it turned out, a GSA employee had cooked up a scheme whereby he received payments made to a nonexistent building services companyhe used a post office box as its addressfor work never performed...
...On August 4, the Post ran a story on Griffin’s new job with Robert Strauss...
...In early 1979 a local Washington television reporter, Stan Bernard, was still floating dark innuendos...
...By the date of the Time story, The Washington Star had been purchased by Time, Inc...
...stint with the words, “Jay Solomon is wondering who he made nervous when he fired Robert Griffin and started the investigation into the million- and billiondollar deals that go through GSA...
...It was pretty believable stuff-if you didn’t know any better...
...Although Jay Solomon had no prior experience in administering a large bureaucracy-he was a Chattanoogabased builder of shopping centers who was an early supporter of Jimmy Carter during the 1976 campaign-the press treated him as though he was the first person ever to walk through GSA’s front door carrying a broom...
...The Star’s acerbic editorial cartoonist, Pat Oliphant, got into the action with a drawing of a pudgy bureaucrat dozing at his desk while his ”in” basket swelled, musing about civil service reform and concluding that “I better buy 01’ Tip O’Neill a three-martini lunch...
...But in the excitement at the end of July 1978 over Solomon’s firing of Griffin and its repercussions on the relationship between Speaker O’Neill and President Carter, Griffin’s proper place in the investigation was overlooked, ignored, mentioned in passing, or turned upside down in the news media...
...Beneath the head was a leaked story which was supposed to disclose that Griffin’s files had been missing for seven weeks after he had left...
...I went to the Post and complained to Charles Seib, then the newspaper’s ombudsman...
...A couple of years ago, Griffin was abruptly sacked as deputy administrator of the General Services Administration...
...Well, in the early days Griffin did talk to some reporters who contacted him, including Kessler of the Post, with the results I have described...
...In its April issue this magazine reported, correctly, that while working for Strauss, he had been “instrumental in selling the multilateral trade bill to Congress” but claimed he had done so by using “the same bureaucratic skills he had honed while covering up the GSA scandals...
...The Persecution & Assassination of Robert Griffin As Performed by Members of the Washington Press Corps by Jeb Byrne Early this year, Robert T. Griffin retired from government service...
...There were two other stories in the press a t about this time which did not fit the generally accepted mold, but which I have not seen referred to since...
...Soon thereafter, he began telling Kessler what was happening and what he planned to do about it...
...Kessler’s stories, I think it is fair to say, were careful not to tie Griffin to any of the corruption a t GSA...
...Griffin, by that time, had spent more than a year thinking up and carrying out substantive changes...
...Many of them, recapitulating the details of Griffin’s departure from GSA, were replete with what Roger L‘Estrange, a 17th-century licenser of the English press, once called “convenient Hints and Touches...
...The next chapter in the chronicling of the life and times of Robert Griffin by the news media concerned his retirement from government...
...On the Griffin story over the past two years, it would have sufficed...
...When the Star story was published, the records were sitting in cardboard boxes in the offices of former members of Griffin’s staff, awaiting disposition...
...This counsel from co-editors Gales and Seaton appears in the April 7, 1849 edition of their Dai1.v National Intelligencer, an influential Washington paper of the day...
...Romantic Fiction In the library the other day I ran across two old Washington hands who gave me sage advice about what to do with reports from the capital written by newsmen who are not above substituting fancy for fact to spruce up their products...
...Technically, perhaps, this satisfied someone’s criterion for balanced coverage-but the evenhanded words about Griffin seldom seemed to appear anywhere near the beginning of a story...
...It is standard practice that- originating offices which forward correspondence and other documents to the front office keep the official files...
...Recently I ran across a new book, a collection of Mollenhoffs stories...
...Why didn’t Griffin ever hold a press conference or take some other dramatic step to explain his side of the story...
...Reporters Mary Ann Kuhn and Lyle Denpiston at the Star began catching pop flies, spurned by Kessler, from a so’urce or sources a t GSA...
...He talked not only of the corruption being unearthed a t GSA, but also of the difficulties he said he was having with Griffin...
...And one afternoon I went with another of Griffin’s aides to visit Jack Anderson’s office when we learned about the impending December 1978 column...
...Exit ‘Good Guy’ On January 21, 1979, there was a frontpage story in the Post, written by Martin Schram, which said that the White House was seeking a replacement for Solomon...
...I knew him as a man of competence and integrity, and so I was startled-at firstby the image of him that began to be shaped by the news media in the aftermath of his dismissal...
...Two days after The New York Times printed a “Man in the News” item with a complimentary assessment of Robert Griffin’s federal career, an August 6, 1978 Times editorial was complaining about “cronyism” in the Griffin affair...
...The Griffin story faded during the summer of 1979...
...Members of his staff were ordered out of their offices the following week, with instructions to take all his and their records and belongings with them...
...An NBC news team visited Griffin at his suburban Washington home on the afternoon of August 4, 1978, and he talked a t length, explaining his side of the story...
...One of Solomon’s aides was quoted in the Star as saying that Griffin’s staff offices remained locked for two weeks, and when they were opened, “We found that his offices were just totally empty: no people, no paper, no files-zip...
...Jack Anderson and The Washington Monthly didn’t bother with attribution...
...Parry used the occasion to recirculate the “satellite” innuendo offered by his ubiquitous but unidentified “GSA source...
...Solomon’s imagination...
...They were more likely to be found somewhere back on page 14, deep in the carry-over copy where many readers never venture...
...A staff request that one small office be retained in which to store the records temporarily was rejected...
...But Griffin learned that the further reporters from other organizations were from the story, the more likely they were to accept, at face value, whatever misstatements and innuendos they heard from within GSA...
...Written by Chuck Lewis of ABC, the report said, among other things, that “the constant hyping and ballyhooing of the Gigantic GSA Scandal makes one wonder where the real truth lies...
...In his stories, Kessler did mention that Griffin was known as “an effective and well-informed administrator,” and that Griffin had alerted Solomon to the discovery of corruption in GSA...
...I telephoned Post editor Richard Harwood, identified myself as Griffin’s former aide, and asked about the omission...
...Bad Guy story, but easiness isn’t supposed to be the banner around which diligent reporters rally...
...The second piece was in the April 1, 1979 “Outlook” section of the Sunday Washington Post...
...One was the business about the personnel officer, which did not mention the rejection of the charge by the civil service judge...
...On the following day, July 31, the Post ran an editorial which asserted that Griffin “personified ‘business as usual’ at GSA,” a characterization that entirely ignored his role in the investigation...
...Robert Griffin is mentioned under the familiar rubric of “political cronyism...
...I was curious to find no mention of these remarks in the Post the next day...
...Jerry Knight, in 7he Washington Post’s business section, wrote that Jay Solomon had claimed that Griffin “blocked investigations of corruption” at GSA...
...And if you remember Robert Griffin’s name now, it’s because each of these developments triggered another round of news stories...
...we had given them the keys...
...It’s probably a good thing that no people were found in offices that allegedly had been locked for 14 days...
...The way it was reported, Griffin and the Speaker of the House were old cronies, and O’Neill was outraged-reacting, as one reporter put it, “with the same protective tenderness that a grizzly bear might show a favorite cub...
...Nope...
...Another concerned Griffin’s refusal to give Solomon carte blanche with his papers...
...The Post didn’t go out of its way to correct that impression...
...If there was a real personality conflict between the two men, Griffin didn’t make much of it: the firing caught him by surprise...
...Beat the Doldrums I knew better, because I worked for Robert Griffin twice, first as his deputy from 1961 to 1968, when he was assistant administrator of GSA with responsibility for congressional relations, public information, and business services, and second as his executive assistant from 1977 to 1978, when he was GSA’s acting administrator for a few months a t the start of the Carter administration and then deputy administrator until his deparlure from the agency...
...In hindsight, which is always the preferred perspective, it’s possible to argue that Griffin might have been an even more aggressive administrative reformer...
...And he equates spending time with him with combating corruption...
...He was not fired because there was any allegation about his honesty and integrity...
...A meeting was held and this was done, without difficulty...
...Spurred by revelations in the press, and by grand-jury investigations in Washington and Baltimore,” it says, “Solomon launched an allout inquiry...
...And the label, once applied to Griffin, stuck like epoxy...
...Having been subjected to strange harassments by GSA since his departure, such as the contrived stories about the “missing” records, Griffin preferred to let the Department of Justice take any part of his records which it might want...
...but while many of the writers are too careless about accuracy, or content with mere gossip, others are better informed, or more scrupulous, and are therefore as reliable as restricted access t o authentic sources of information enables them to be...
...This was a charge which had been heard and rejected by a civil service administrative judge-but it made good copy...
...It does not seem unreasonable to conclude that the way in which the Post handled the Griffin story was reflected back in a group of letters-to-the-editor published on August 9. Post readers perceived Griffin as an incompetent hack whose sole claim to a responsible position in government was his friendship with a powerful politician...
...Griffin knew that GSA, growing over the years along with the growth of the federal apparatus it serves, could stand much improvement in managerial controls...
...One, a March 30, 1979 story by James P. Herzog of Scripps- Howard, started out this way: “Outgoing General Services Administrator Jay Solomon says 1 ,OOO names have been turned over to the Justice Department for possible prosecution...
...His story appearing in n e Nashville Banner of July 31, 1978 is typical...
...Unfortunately, the problem they addressed 131 years ago still troubles us...
...Griffin was at a disadvantage...
...When Solomon proposed to confiscate themanyhow, Griffin threatened suit...
...Of such needs are news myths born...
...Editorial writers, too, got into the epithet game...
...The shrewd Chattanoogan carefully cultivated the media as no other GSA administrator- or few public officials, for that matter-ever has...
...It was in late 1976 that Griffin, then a special assistant to the GSA administrator, received an internal memorandum alerting him to phony billings in the Chicago region...
...Television’s talent for simplification adapted itself easily to the Griffin story...
...Then, when Strauss left that post to become chairman of Carter’s reelection campaign, Griffin opted not to follow-choosing instead to leave government at the age of 63 for a high-paying job at Chrysler...
...But when we got there, he told us the column was already on its way to his syndicate...
...When you chop your way through the media imagery, you come to the stark fact that no one, to this day, has shown that Griffin did that job inadequately or unethically, and the Justice Department has long since concluded that he was not personally involved in any way in the corruption at GSA...
...During his televised press conference of August 17, 1978, President Carter remarked that he knew of nothing more distorted than the press coverage of the Griffin firing...
...The accuracy of David Cohen’s statement wasn’t subject to any kind of review either...
...The consistent impression which these stories sought to convey was clear enough: here is another chapter in the sorry tale of a political hack, probably venal, who blocked the efforts of a good guy trying to clean up corruption in the General Services Administration...
...So he made himself unavailable to the news media...
...The Chicago case was one example that came to light...
...That was in July 1978, at the height of the GSA corruption scandals...
...A Channel 4 (NBC) transcript for March 1, 1979 has Bernard ending his 6 p.m...
...Still another Anderson allegation was: “Griffin has been on the GSA payroll since the agency was created in 1949...
...By early 1980 the Washington dailies were no longer catching fungoes from the usual batters at GSA, but a pair of reporters from the wire services suddenly were out there shagging...
...There is a line which says simply that Robert Griffin is “a crony of House Speaker Thomas P. O’Neill...
...John Gardner and Theodore Hesburgh have colleagues and associates...
...In the Post, for instance, in addition to the series of pieces by Kessler on the Griffin firing, there was a noteworthy editorial cartoon by Herblock...
...In much of the reporting, there was no indication that Griffin had performed well in every post he had held (even Jay Solomon had rated him outstanding...
...With such doings afoot, you could expect to hear from Jack Anderson...
...Griffin did know the man...
...One of the ensuing frontpage stories by the Star duo had the intriguing headline: “Missing Files of Ousted GSA Official Turn Up...
...My surprise began to fadc when I realized that Griffin was being cast as the foil for Jay Solomon, who was remarkably accessible to certain reporters and seemed to have a knack for Hints and Touches...
...In the capital, The Washington Star had been trying to play catch-up ball on the Griffin story, but the Jay Solomon-Ronald Kessler link was a problem...
...after word of the investigation began to leak, it was Solomon who started talking about it...
...He sent investigators and auditors burrowing into dark corners and personally went to the Office of Management and Budget to arguesuccessfully- for more auditors...
...Here it helps to understand the way the rules apply to this kind of loaded shorthand...
...Don Campbell of the Gannett News Service, for example, was early into this easy namecalling game...
...When Solomon became administrator a t the‘end of April 1977, Griffin told him about the malfeasance that had been discovered within the agency and explained what was being done to cope with it...
...Some building managers, who had authority to award contracts for routine repairs and improvements, were found to be on the take...
...You could have tripped over them...
...But William S. Lynch, head of the Justice Department task force investigating the scandalridden GSA, calls the statement ‘baloney...
...Dissatisfaction with the way Solomon was playing the media was cited, and Schram quoted one official complaining: “He wants credit for everything...
...This was an odd construction to place upon a sequence of events with which I was very familiar...
...Despite these reassessments of the Solomon- Griffin situation, Griffin kept on getting a bad press...
...In their edition of March 23, 1853 they observed: “Washington correspondence, as a general thing, is falling into discredit, and very naturally so...
...The next day-a Saturday-the Post carried a four-paragraph story under the headline “Carter Says Press Distorted Removal of GSA Aide Griffin...
...Solomon was gone by the end of March...
...He has been responsible for property management since 1961...
...Then NBC ran an interview with David Cohen, president of Common Cause, who said, “It looks like politics as usual, buckling under to political power, saying the person’s incompetent to run one major agency and then placing him in a high White House position where he’s not really subject to any kind of review by legislative bodies...
...Thus I make no claim to being a disinterested observer, but I do claim to know something about Robert Griffin...
...That kind of reporting is all we can hope for...
...More than any other individual, he should have detected the long-festering corruption...
...Griffin honored the requests...
...The agency’s own lawyers and recordkeepers had informed the administrator that these were considered private property by GSA...
...Griffin was not fired because he was incompetent,” Carter said...
...The Bad Guy role so easily assigned to him didn’t fit the man, but that seemed to be irrelevant to many of those who were pursuing-or anxious to comment upon-a story that helped relieve Washington’s summer doldrums...
...Jay Solomon, the man designated by Jimmy Carter to run GSA, decided he had to get rid of Griffin-a career GSA bureaucrat-because it seemed clear to Solomon that Griffin commanded the loyalties of too many people in the agency, and Solomon couldn’t get control of GSA as long as Griffin was around...
...I wonder how Joe McCarthy-not the old Yankees manager, but that other one--could have improved on this kind of coverage...
...There were hasty consultations with the White House, and soon, at President Carter’s personal direction, Robert Griffin was given a $50,000-a-year job as special assistant to Robert Strauss, then serving as Carter’s special trade negotiator...
...The fact was, however, that Solomon’s staff had keys to our offices...
...So the President gave Griffin another job, newly created for him at $50,000 a year...
...In due course, the stories stopped, but the connotations lingered on...
...To many rank-and-file GSA employees, Solomon’s headline-grabbing crusade against corruption, combined with his lack of attention to the large agency’s daily management, was appalling...
...TO me, the treatment of Robert Griffin is of very grave character...
...Just a crony...
...The logical place to start looking for the origin of the myth is in the pile of stories from f i e Washington Post...
...At first Griffin talked freely to reporters when they called him at home after his dismissal, but when he read their stories he concluded that he might as well have tried saying nice things about the Queen in an Irish bar...
...These papers, however, were not extensive...
...As the summer of 1977 wore on, new revelations came to light, and Griffin kept Solomon posted on them...
...The Star picked up the Time story for its front page...
...I have no apology to make for having put a good man with great integrity and great knowledge in a productive job...
...a figment of Mr...
...Griffin had left the building without his personal papers...
...Given the timing, it wasn’t difficult for reporters to link his departure to the emerging GSA scandal...
...We did learn that Clark Mollenhoff had been the staff reporter on the story...
...True enough, they had known each other since the days of their youth in Somerville, Massachusetts...
...But the problem with that argument is that it gets all tangled up in comparative imagery...
...I found a section on GSAj Solomon/ Griffin which is just as wrongheaded as when it was a newspaper column...
...This was principally through the efforts of Post reporter Ronald Kessler, who had made GSA his beat and was closer to events there than most other reporters...
...He wasn’t disposed to talk to reporters about it-but even if he had been, he couldn’t have done so without violating explicit requests by the Department of Justice and the FBI to keep the probe quiet while suspects were being identified and watched...
...That much was true...
...In this, and similar declarations, there is no hint that the two men might actually have had some mutual respect for each other as old veterans of the governmental wars...
...A news coup of a sort was achieved when a memorandum written to Solomon by Vincent Alto, the short-term special counsel Solomon hired in May 1978 to take over supervision of the investigation, began circulating and quickly reached the press...
...No sooner had Griffin hit the sidewalk than Tip O’Neill hit the ceiling...
...Experience quickly demonstrated that responding to loaded inquiries made little sense...
...The column did not mention that Griffin let the Department of Justice review the records and papers and take what it wanted...
...Solomon, who was initially more interested in the agency’s Art-in-Architecture program-which was to involve him in a heavy schedule of dedication ceremonies across the country-told Griffin to press ahead...
...But the stories never explained who was doing the “considering” or how the “satellite” relationship was supposed to work between these “close associates...
...Griffin launched an investigation into the possibility of similar fraud elsewhere, and followed up with special audits in all GSA regional offices...
Vol. 12 • September 1980 • No. 7
