NY Times Probes Daschle Spouse Lobbying; Argus Leader Skips Story

WASHINGTON (Talon News) -- Tuesday's New York Times reported on a $20 billion Pentagon plan to lease air refueling tankers from the Boeing Company. The newspaper cited that liberal and conservative groups opposed to the arrangement called it a "sweetheart deal" that must be approved by Congress. The article pointed out that Boeing has hired lobbyist Linda Daschle, the wife of the Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-SD) to represent the company.

South Dakota's largest newspaper, the Argus Leader, is not reporting the story today. In fact, the Argus Leader never prints a story about the lobbying of Linda Daschle. In recent weeks, Executive Editor Randell Beck has been quoted as saying that this is because the Argus Leader doesn't report on the wives of candidates.

The Argus Leader did write a 1995 editorial critical of Marianne Gingrich, wife of the House Speaker, Republican Newt Gingrich, for taking a position with Israel Export Development Company. The newspaper wrote, "The spouses of U.S. leaders should be held to a high standard: Not only should they avoid impropriety, they should avoid all appearances of impropriety."

In 1990, the South Dakota newspaper published a thirty-six paragraph article about Harriet Pressler, wife of Republican Sen. Larry Pressler that suggested the senator had used his office to help his wife's real estate business. By contrast, the recent purchase of a $2 million Washington, DC home by Sen. Daschle and his wife is mentioned by the paper in only five sentences.

Last week, South Dakota businessman Neal Tapio accused the Argus Leader and its political reporter David Kranz of covering up a long association between the senator and Kranz that goes back 30 years. The Argus Leader has refused to acknowledge or disclose that relationship. Tapio implies that the newspaper's reporting has been skewed in favor of the powerful senator and against his critics.

Linda Daschle's lobbying has long been a source of potential conflict of interest issues. Her firm's clients include American Airlines, a recent recipient of billions in taxpayer funds to keep the company in business. Another client, L-3 International, a manufacturer of baggage screening equipment, won a lucrative contract from the Federal Aviation Administration in 2000. Mrs. Daschle had been an official with the FAA before joining the lobbying firm of Baker, Donelson, Bearman and Caldwell.

None of this makes it to the pages of the Argus Leader. Even the Daschles' refusal to make their income tax returns public didn't get a notice from the same publication that aggressively pursued Harriet Pressler a decade ago.

When Kranz was with the Mitchell Daily Republic in 1982, he wrote an opinion piece that praised Mr. Daschle for releasing his income tax returns and criticized his opponent Clint Roberts for not doing so. Kranz wrote, "We believe it is the obligation of a candidate to produce the financial health as represented in his federal income tax returns."

Kranz has yet to call for the release of the Daschles' returns that would reveal a combined income estimated at $6 million.

I’m Linda, Fly Me
(Tom Daschle: Ambitions grounded by his wife’s baggage)
laweekly | 01/17/2003 | by Doug Ireland

The real reason Tom Daschle didn’t run for president.

The national press corps didn’t bother to tell you why Tom Daschle, the Democrats’
Senate leader, decided at the 11th hour not to run for president: In the end, he calculated
that he couldn’t survive scrutiny of his persistent service to the clients of his wife. Linda
Daschle has been one of the airline industry’s top lobbyists for two decades — when she
wasn’t busy running the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which explains why,
just 11 days after the 9/11 attacks, her husband rushed through the Democratic Senate,
which he controlled, the $15 billion bailout for the airline industry, a notorious taxpayer
rip-off.

Right after then-Congressman Tom Daschle dumped his first wife for a younger, prettier
one, the former Miss Kansas Linda Daschle went to work as chief lobbyist for the Air
Transport Association the airline industry’s main lobby; she then became the senior vice
president of the American Association of Airport Executives; and these days hangs her
hat at the pricey top Washington law/lobby shop Baker, Donelson, Bearman & Caldwell,
headed by former GOP Senate leader and ex–Reagan chief of staff Howard Baker —
where she peddles influence on behalf of a long list of lucrative aviation clients.

The clients for whom Linda lobbied brought more than $5.86 million into Baker,
Donelson in one three-year period, including Northwest Airlines ($870,000 from 1997
through 2001) and American Airlines ($1.26 million in fees). Northwest was already
teetering on the edge of bankruptcy even before 9/11. American, which has had six fatal
crashes since 1994 (not counting 9/11) and has been repeatedly fined by the FAA for a
skein of safety violations, had the reputation as the most unsafe major U.S. carrier.

Yet these two clients of Linda Daschle’s got nearly $1 billion from the airline bailout her
husband pushed into law — thanks to which Northwest (which was the second largest
contributor to Senator Daschle’s 1998 campaign, and which scooped up $404 million in
government cash) actually posted a $19 million profit in the third quarter after the
twin-towers attacks. And, as the lone senator to vote against the bailout, Illinois GOPer
Peter Fitzgerald, decried, “The only people who got bailed out were the shareholders.

The 1 million airline employees were left twisting in the wind.” So much for the populist
noises that occasionally come from Senator Daschle’s mouth. The Daschles also made
sure that the bailout exempted American (which has consistently lobbied against tougher
airline safety standards) and other carriers with lousy safety records from any real liability
to lawsuits from the families of 9/11 victims. Moreover, the General Accounting Office
found that the airline industry’s representations to Congress to secure the bailout
overstated its anticipated losses from 9/11 by as much as $5 billion.

Before 9/11, Senator Daschle pushed through the sleazy deal in the backrooms of Capitol
Hill that forced the FAA to buy defective baggage scanners from one of Linda’s other
clients, L-3 International (from which Linda’s firm raked in $440,000 in the ’97–’01
period). Under a provision Linda’s husband had slipped into the 2000 budget for the U.S.
Department of Transportation (DOT), the FAA was required to buy one of L-3’s scanners
for every one it purchased from the company’s competitors. The L-3 scanners were found
to be substandard by DOT’s inspector general; FAA tests of the scanners showed high
failure rates; and most have not yet been installed because of their defects (the one at the
Dallas–Fort Worth airport — another of Linda’s clients — leaked radiation), which is a
major reason DOT says it won’t be able to screen all luggage for explosives for years to
come.

In one of those corporate-coddling moves for which the Clinton administration became
infamous, President Bubba appointed Linda Daschle deputy administrator of the FAA,
putting her in charge of regulating her once-and-future clients; and she wound up running
the agency as acting administrator. This, of course, significantly boosted the Daschle
family income by hyping the amount Linda could charge her clients when she left
government service. She didn’t wait long to cash in. Example: While running the FAA,
she awarded Loral Space Technologies (a major Democratic contributor that figured in
the ’96 campaign-finance scandals) a nearly $1 billion contract from the federal
government; after Linda passed through the revolving door to Baker, Donelson, Loral
paid the lobby shop $740,000 in 2000-2001 for Linda’s services. When the FAA was
pondering making mandatory a criminal-background check for all airport employees,
Linda, who was then running the agency, vigorously opposed this common-sense move
— echoing the position of the airline-industry lobby that had previously employed her.

A particularly odiferous episode involved charges that the senator and his wife had tried
to sabotage safety inspections of an air-charter firm owned by Murl Bellew, a Daschle
family friend who taught Tom how to fly. The scandal erupted and triggered an official
investigation when a Bellew small plane chartered by the Indian Health Service crashed
in North Dakota, killing the pilot and three doctors en route to an Indian-reservation
clinic.

Forest Service inspectors had been arguing that Bellew’s firm should be banned from
getting government contracts because the operation had been unsafe for years. Senator
Daschle obligingly pushed legislation taking the Forest Service out of the business of
inspecting small-plane carriers, and senior FAA bureaucrats said Linda had also tried to
submarine a proposal to train Forest Service inspectors to conduct FAA investigations.
An FAA inspector reported a cover-up: Documents showing the Daschles’ assiduous
efforts to minimize inspections of Bellew’s planes were shredded by FAA officials under
Linda’s thumb. While an I.G. report failed to find Linda guilty of any lawbreaking,
there’s an old saying in Washington: The scandal isn’t what’s illegal, the real scandal is
what’s legal.

It’s a sign of how lazy, blinkered and source-coddling the Beltway’s national press corps
is when one considers that none of all this made the dissections of the senator’s
presidential withdrawal — even though a tough piece by the Washington Monthly’s
Stephanie Mencimer in the January 2002 issue laying out much of it was still on
newsstands. As she observed, “It doesn’t take Lee Atwater to see how Mrs. Daschle’s
professional life might play out in a nasty re-election or presidential campaign: ‘Sen.
Daschle’s wife lobbyist for nation’s most dangerous airline,’ or ‘majority leader’s wife
lobbied to make airlines less safe.’”

Linda Daschle has tried to pooh-pooh her obvious conflicts of interest as an influence
peddler, telling The New York Times last August that the staff members she lobbies “are
pretty junior and may or may not know who I am” — a mind-boggling, risible assertion.
But her senator/leader husband has always refused to make public his and his wife’s tax
returns, despite repeated press requests. As a presidential candidate, Tom Daschle could
not have avoided giving the press a look at those returns — which would have spelled out
just how much cash Linda brings in from her clients.

And that, children, was the ticking time bomb that would inevitably have exploded if the
senator had sought the White House — and is the bottom-line reason he chose not to run.

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