This story is very old. It has been rewarmed and served up a number of times. Surely by now it is putrid.And believe me, I know putrid!
Posted on 07/08/2002 6:59:55 PM PDT by Recovering_Democrat
They're trying to portray George W. Bush as a corrupt corporate CEO.
Despite intense efforts, Democrats in recent weeks have had little success in their effort to inflict political damage on George W. Bush by tying him to corrupt corporate CEOs. Now they're trying another approach, accusing Bush of being a corrupt corporate CEO.
On Tuesday, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman discussed Bush's 1989 sale of stock in Harken Energy, a company which had bought Bush's oil and gas company and placed Bush on the Harken board of directors. In 1989, Harken was struggling financially. "Only a few weeks before bad news that could not be concealed caused Harken's shares to tumble," Krugman wrote, "Mr. Bush sold off two-thirds of his stake, for $848,000. Just for the record, that's about four times bigger than the sale that has Martha Stewart in hot water. Oddly, though the law requires prompt disclosure of insider sales, he neglected to inform the Securities and Exchange Commission about this transaction until 34 weeks had passed. An internal SEC memorandum concluded that he had broken the law, but no charges were filed. This, everyone insists, had nothing to do with the fact that his father was president."
Thursday morning, the Washington Post followed up on Krugman's column with a story headlined "Memo Cited Bush's Late SEC Filings; White House Dismisses Suggestions of Wrongdoing in Bush's Time in Oil Business." Reporter Mike Allen wrote that "Bush's brushes with the SEC have new resonance now that he is preparing to respond to the wave of accounting scandals by proposing tough restrictions on corporate officials during an address on Wall Street next week." The SEC memo that had been cited by Krugman, Allen wrote, was not a new revelation but had in fact been part of a large amount of information published by the Center for Public Integrity, which posted the SEC memo on its web site in October, 2000 (much of the Center's research was done in collaboration with the now-defunct Talk magazine, which published a story on Bush's finances). The SEC memo, in Allen's words, "attracted little attention."
While it is perhaps news to Krugman and Allen, in fact the Harken story has attracted quite a lot of attention over the years. Political opponents of the first President Bush tried to use it to tarnish the White House. George W. Bush's political adversaries in Texas tried to make it an issue in his campaigns for governor. They tried again when he ran for president.
And now, they are trying yet again. "Democrats sense in the corporate scandals an issue that might finally dent Mr. Bush's approval ratings," the New York Times reported Wednesday. "They are making a case that Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, during their time in the corporate world, would not have been able to live up to the policies they are advocating now." Indeed, talking points released Tuesday by the Democratic National Committee said, "If it's corporate penalties the president prefers, perhaps he should take a look in the mirror."
But the problem for the president's opponents is that the charges, at least as far as Harken Energy is concerned, have simply never amounted to much. In 1999, I examined Bush's business career in some detail for an article in The American Spectator magazine. Bush's sale of Harken stock was part of that story, and I spoke to a former Harken director and a former Bush partner, as well as to William McLucas, who headed enforcement at the SEC at the time of the sale (McLucas is still in the news today, having been retained by WorldCom to investigate its accounting scandal). All the evidence available at the time — and all that is available now — suggested that Bush did not, as Krugman implies, engage in insider trading or other wrongdoing. This is what I wrote about the transaction in the June 1999 issue of The American Spectator:
[Bush's] largest single asset was the chunk of Harken stock he had received in the merger. Through the first half of 1990, the stock price was quite consistent, moving between $4 and $5 a share. In June 1990, Bush sold two-thirds of his stake — 212,000 shares — at $4 for a total price of $848,000. At the time of the sale, Harken was moving into a period of financial difficulties. In the months following Bush's sale, the company announced a quarterly loss and the stock price went into a long, slow decline; by the end of 1990, it was $1.25 a share. Since Bush was not only a member of the board of directors but was also on a committee assigned to study Harken's financial situation, his decision to sell a few weeks before the slide began led to accusations that he used insider knowledge to get out when the getting was good.
Bush denies any wrongdoing and has often said he was unaware of the difficulties within Harken. "He thought he was selling into good news," spokeswoman Karen Hughes told TAS, adding that if Bush had waited to sell the stock he could have earned considerably more than he got. That would, however, have required his waiting at least a year; it was not until June 1991 that Harken got back up to $4 a share. By September 1991 it briefly hit $8 a share.
In 1991 the Securities and Exchange Commission investigated the sale and took no action against Bush or anyone else. "I don't remember a lot about it, other than there wasn't a lot about it," says William McLucas, who was the SEC enforcement chief at the time. "The facts just didn't support any judgment that this was something that would result in a serious enforcement proceeding." Nevertheless, Democrats brought the issue up in 1992, as President [George H.W.] Bush was running for re-election; it became part of several news stories recounting alleged business improprieties by Bush family members. Texas governor Ann Richards revived the story during the 1994 gubernatorial campaign and also suggested, without evidence, that President Bush had rigged the SEC investigation, which commission officials denied.
As far as Bush's reporting the sale late to the SEC, it is not precisely clear what happened. Hughes told me in April 1999 that Bush believed he reported the sale earlier than SEC records indicated; she suggested the forms might have been lost, either inside Harken or the SEC. But whatever the reason, the fact that the report was filed late is not particularly damning in the absence of any underlying wrongdoing that a late filing might have been intended to conceal. And the SEC did not find anything that suggested such wrongdoing.
Since the president began his political career, there have been a number of meticulous examinations of the Harken sale, first in Texas newspapers, then in the Washington Post, the New York Times, and other national publications. None have come up with evidence that Bush did anything wrong in the Harken matter. Now, there will undoubtedly be more investigations of the same material. Democrats can hope, but it's unlikely they'll find what they're looking for.
There's just no joy in the 'Rats holes tonight--it'll backfire on them, just like everything else. :-)
Over all York has done a creditable job of reporting on this story during the past couple of years or so. However he has the above facts wrong. He is talking about close of trading day prices and not prices within a trading day.... Harken hit $4+ a share in numerous trading day highs throughout much of the remainder of 1990 even though the close was under $4. The last day it closed at $4 or above in 1990 was on 30 Aug. Then the next time it closed at $4 or above was on 27 Feb 91.....
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This story is very old. It has been rewarmed and served up a number of times. Surely by now it is putrid.And believe me, I know putrid!
Save a dead horse, beat a democrat.
Republican Congressmen (Dan Burton, Bob Dornan...) used Clinton scandals to raise money for themselves in similiar fashion.
You are so right...can you spell teflon?
I hope Bush doesn't take your advice.
So far every attack has hurt the Dems.
Bush looks like a statsman and the Dems look partisan.
The Dems keep pointing their fingers at Bush, and people are not buying it.
Bush should keep pointing his fingers at the problems that people care about.
Have some faith in the electorate...they are smarter than you give them credit.
Today seemed like an all out attack day by the Dems.
The Rats attacking Bush's wallstreet solutions,and bringing back a 3 time loser scandal.
Jesse Jackson talks about a vast right wing conspiracy.
Thompson booed at the AIDS conference.
The loony left is back...I'm a happy man.
The Dems don't have a clue.
Ummm...well, not to nitpick, but...isn't that pretty much the drill these days? I mean, the whole Whitewater fiasco and Hillary's futures trading happened long before those two clowns hit Washington, yet both were subjects of considerable discussion and accusation during the Clinton presidency. Moaning about the tactic being used against President Bush is pretty childish, innit?
There are a number of reasons I'm not a party conservative. This continual poor-us-look-we're-victims-of-the-liberals crap is the biggest one. Like virtually all political groups, responsibility for most of the Republican Party's problems falls squarely on the party itself. What problems they didn't create themselves, they nurse along as if their political lives depended on it. The rest of the problems are created or perpetuated jointly with the other political whores across the aisle.
With GWB, if there's nothing there, there's nothing there. Good for him if he managed to clean up in the market. If there's an irregularity, and the SEC was laying down on the job (HORRORS! Imagine that!), then it ought to be looked at.
Horse crap. The Whitewater crimes had NOT BEEN INVESTIGATED AND VETTED BY ANY LAW ENFORCEMENT AGENCY when I42 and his witchy wife seized power. OTOH, this Harken garbage is old news the media is treating like fresh fish.
Geez...keep up with the program...LOL...
FBI Raids Hillary's Warehouse in Whitewater Déjà Vu
An excerpt:
The FBI raid may also be a sign that the reported no prosecution deal for the Clintons, demanded by Democrat leaders as the price for President Bush getting some of his legislative agenda implemented, is beginning to unravel - since Democrats seem to have kept little if any of their part of the bargain. (See: Bush Insider Claims Clinton Deal Torpedoed Pardongate)
Well, so much for intelligent discourse.
The Whitewater crimes had NOT BEEN INVESTIGATED AND VETTED BY ANY LAW ENFORCEMENT AGENCY when I42 and his witchy wife seized power.
Hm. I never did get around to reading the final report of the investigation - was any actual criminal conduct found?
OTOH, this Harken garbage is old news the media is treating like fresh fish.
You know as well as I do that the media are a bunch of self-serving whores who are mainly interested in selling papers or pumping their ratings, and scandal sells, especially when there's already a big hullabaloo over corporate malfeasance.
I think you'll find that although the Texas media apparently looked at it quite a bit, it's a pretty new story to the national media.
And frankly, whether or not it's been investigated, or if it's old or new isn't germane. A lot of the crap that is dug up on politicians isn't exactly current news, but seems to get a great deal of play anyway.
Regards,
Snidely
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