RELEASE THE DOCUMENTSPresident Bush – and the Republican Party – are in real trouble because of the stock market meltdown and the sure-to-follow economic slowdown, which threaten our control of the House this November.
But what imperils his presidency even more is his refusal to release all the documents relating to his Harken Energy stock sale back in 1990. He says that deal has been “vetted” and “nothing found.” OK, so why not take away a Democratic and media target – these so-far unreleased documents still sitting under lock and key inside the SEC – and get the focus off himself and back on the macro-problems of Wall Street?
Similarly, why doesn’t Vice President Dick Cheney open his Energy Task Force papers and show the world he, too, has nothing to hide?
We conservatives are begging the President and Vice President to take these issues away from the Democrats and the so-called ‘mainstream media’ by releasing all the documents and thus putting these issues in the rear-view mirror.
Instead, the Bush Administration has gone into total lockdown and behaves like a police state. In the past week we have the Feds ‘forcibly detaining’ a National Review reporter, Joel Mowbrey, inside the State Department for reporting on ‘easy’ visas obtained in Saudi Arabia, and federal agents running around Capitol Hill questioning elected members of the House and Senate about leaks from within the Bush Administration of Iraq war plans.
Why all the secrecy – especially from a Republican administration that should believe – unlike the grifter Clintons – in openness and honesty?
Let us examine what may be behind this politically damaging ‘stonewall’:
1) Harken Energy. G.W. Bush says he has “nothing to hide.” But he refuses to release those SEC documents and he won’t release Harken Energy board meeting minutes either. Furthermore, the broker who arranged the private sale of Bush’s stock still refuses – 11 years later – to name the buyer. Why?
2) Public records now show that in January 1990 Bahrain awarded Harken a potentially huge deal to drill there. Harken – and G.W. Bush – had never before drilled anywhere outside the USA. And, amazingly, Harken beat out Amoco for this contract.
DC insiders now are speculating that this contract was in fact a way to ingratiate Bahrain with then-President George Bush. And some even suspect that the June 1990 sale of Bush’s Harken stock to the still-secret buyer may have been yet another way for someone – Bahraini perhaps – to further make the Bush family happy.
What a scam that would have been! Award a contract, thus boosting the stock price, then buy the stock privately as a ‘backdoor payment.’
The 1991 SEC investigation of G.W. Bush was deemed “inconclusive.” Then why not release those documents and get rid of this news story?
3) Cheney’s Energy Task Force is now in federal court trying to suppress the minutes and meeting notes of its 2001 meetings. Why? What is to hide? Why are our fellow conservatives behaving like Hillary did during her Health Care Task Force back in 1993?
Why not make all these papers public and thus deprive our political enemies of the ammo to attack us?
Knowledgeable insiders have suspected that Enron and Halliburton had undue influence over the Cheney Task Force and may even have been working on a pre-9-11 pipeline deal with the Taliban to build a pipeline through Afghanistan.
Perhaps the Bush/Cheney Team is afraid that this revelation in the post-September 11 and post-Enron environment would have devastating political consequences.
But hiding and stonewalling almost always fail. It is always better to release everything and move on.
The Bush Administration is in real trouble. Some of these problems - Wall Street’s accounting frauds - are beyond their control.
But their own ‘secrecy’ and paranoid behavior are causing deep concern – even among their staunchest supporters. Many conservatives are beginning to wonder, “What are Bush and Cheney hiding?”
