Italia Federici, who once headed a GOP anti-environmentalism front group, Council of Republicans for Environmental Advocacy (CREA), and who was used as a conduit between disgraced and imprison Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff and former Interior deputy secretary Stephen Griles, a high official in the Interior Department who was her lover, was sentenced on Friday to 60 days in a halfway house, four years of probation and a fine of $77,000 in restitution.

“Judge: You didn’t understand there was any quid pro quo going on?”
Federici: “It did strike me as odd.”

Federici admitted that she knowingly failed to pay income taxes on $187,000 in salary she drew over three years from the Council of Republicans for Environmental Advocacy (CREA) and that she “minimized the extent of information I had” when she testified in 2005 about Abramoff and … Griles before openly skeptical members of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee.

Federici, 38, was a go-between for Griles, with whom she was linked romantically, and Abramoff, who had his tribal clients donate $500,000 to her group…

[The judge] asked Federici why anyone would “believe for a minute” that Abramoff’s client contributions were unconnected to her role as an intermediary: “You didn’t understand there was any quid pro quo going on?”

“It did strike me as odd,” Federici said. But, she added, “at the time I viewed Mr. Abramoff as what we in the nonprofit community call an angel,” explaining that she saw him as “a truly ideologically aligned Republican.”

CREA, which used its resources to oppose the environmental movement, was as cynical an enterprise as any the Republican Party has come up with yet, was founded by Gale Norton, George Bush’s first anti-environmental secretary of the interior, and Grover Norquist, an anti-United States government crusader.