Sue Ellen Wooldridge

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This article is about the American civil servant. For the British actress, see Susan Wooldridge.

Sue Ellen Wooldridge (b. February 15, 1961), is an American attorney and a former politically appointed U.S. government employee. She was formerly the United States Assistant Attorney General in charge of environment and natural resources, a division of the United States Department of Justice. As such, she was the U.S.'s top environmental prosecutor. She resigned from this post in January 2007.

1 Personal
2 Career
3 Controversies
4 External links

[edit] Personal

Wooldridge grew up on a farm in Artois, California. She holds a bachelor's degree in political science and history from the University of California, Davis (1983). She graduated with a J.D. degree from Harvard Law School in 1987. She is admitted to practice law in the United States Supreme Court and in the state and federal courts of California.

She lives together with J. Steven Griles, whom she began dating while he was one of her supervisors at the United States Department of the Interior.[1]

[edit] Career

Prior to her service with the Department of Justice, Wooldridge served as Solicitor for the United States Department of the Interior, that agency's highest ranking lawyer, after being appointed by President George W. Bush in a recess appointment.[2] Prior to her employment in that capacity, she served as Counselor to J. Steven Griles, Deputy Secretary of the United States Department of the Interior; she also served as Deputy Chief of Staff and Counselor for Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton, serving in that position beginning on January 31, 2001.

Prior to her position with the Department of the Interior, Wooldridge worked as a lawyer in private practice in Sacramento, California (from 1987 to 1994, and again from 1999 to 2001), served as general counsel to the non-partisan California Fair Political Practices Committee (2000), and served as a special assistant attorney general in the California Department of Justice).

[edit] Controversies

In February 2007, it was reported that in March 2006 Wooldridge had purchased a $980,000 vacation home^photo on Kiawah Island, South Carolina, together with two other individuals: Don R. Duncan, the vice president for federal and international affairs and a lobbyist for ConocoPhillips, a Houston-based oil corporation; and J. Steven Griles, a former deputy interior secretary of the United States (now an oil and gas lobbyist) who pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice in a Senate committee's investigation into the Jack Abramoff affair.

Nine months after buying the home with Duncan and Griles, and just before stepping down, Wooldridge approved consent decrees giving ConocoPhillips three more years to pay millions of dollars in fines for a Superfund toxic waste cleanup and install pollution controls (which are estimated to cost US$525 million) at nine of its refineries.