Marie Cocco
This White House Scandal Finally Tips the Scale
Sat Oct 11 21:09:49 2003
64.140.158.151
Marie Cocco
This White House Scandal Finally Tips the Scale
If there's no independent counsel in the forest, does a corrupt tree ever
fall?
The question came first to mind not in these days of frenzied speculation over
the exposure of a CIA operative by top Bush administration officials. It
arose, or should have, in May of 2001.
Dick Cheney, vice president for four months, held a reception for elite
Republican donors at the sprawling house that is his taxpayer-owned residence.
Word of the event brought snickers from those with a memory. They recalled hot
Republican demands for investigation and a blizzard of congressional subpoenas
when President Bill Clinton used similar public perks for the care and feeding
of political fat-cats.
Cheney's identical transgression did not elicit an identical response.
"I'm sure it's being done in an appropriate way, or Dick Cheney wouldn't do
it," Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.), then the Senate majority leader, said.
That is how it's been. No ethical horror is too frightful to have roused
official indignation in a town that once demanded three taxpayer-funded probes
into the suicide - yes, it was suicide - of Clinton White House lawyer Vince
Foster.
Around the time big donors were sipping wine with the vice president, Cheney
was chairing meetings of his secret energy task force. That is, he was hearing
from lobbyists, many of them elite Republican donors and most with a large
financial stake in this or that detail of national energy policy. Cheney has
fought, successfully so far, to keep secret the list of those who so
generously offered their expertise.
Executives of Enron got six meetings with the Cheney task force. According to
an analysis by Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), the White House energy plan
adopted all or most of Enron's recommendations in seven of eight areas in
which the now bankrupt and criminally entangled firm made suggestions.
Enron-affiliated political committees and employees were among the top donors
to the Bush campaign in 2000. Chairman Kenneth Lay was a Bush "Pioneer," who
raised $100,000.
No prosecutor looked into this dazzling coincidence. There is no longer a law
providing for independent counsels, after Washington exhausted itself with
them during the Clinton years. Soon Enron unraveled, victim of its own twisted
schemes to defraud investors and bilk ratepayers. It left its employees with
empty retirement funds when company stock became worthless.
It so happens that during the time when the Enron schemes were being exposed
and the company's executives were cashing out their own stock, Army Secretary
Thomas E. White, a former Enron executive himself, placed dozens of calls to
officials of the embattled company. Forty-nine occurred between Aug. 14, 2001,
the day former CEO Jeffrey Skilling resigned from Enron, and Dec. 3, 2001, the
day after Enron filed for bankruptcy. White cashed out his Enron stock for
$12.1 million.
Martha Stewart, eat your heart out.
White was forced from office last April, not because of suspicious calls or
stock sales. These brought no rebuke. It was because he disagreed with Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld over a weapons program.
The Enron imbroglio came to light before a subsidiary of Halliburton, a
company once headed by the vice president and from which he still receives a
generous compensation, won no-bid contracts for rebuilding Iraq. The contracts
have no apparent limit and, according to an analysis by Rep. Waxman's staff,
could be worth up to $7 billion.
But Halliburton is becoming old news. So is the little-noticed fact that three
top officials of the Interior Department are under scrutiny by inspectors
general for involvement in matters affecting their former clients in the
grazing, mining, oil and gas industries.
But suddenly, now, Washington twitters with the prospect of full-fledged
scandal. The CIA called in the Justice Department to probe what apparently was
a White House effort to retaliate against a career diplomat for having the
audacity to say the president's claims of an Iraqi plot to obtain enriched
uranium from Niger had no basis. Vengeance was to come from having journalists
reveal the identity of the diplomat's wife, a CIA operative.
The rotten tree finally has gained notice. What took so long?
Marie Cocco is a nationally syndicated columnist and member of Newsday's
editorial board. Her e-mail address is
cocco@newsday.com .
Email: cocco@newsday.com
Copyright © 2003, Newsday, Inc.
CIA who might think of leaking information that might be embarrassing to the
President - a kind of "we burned her and we'll burn you too"
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