US Defends Handling of Enron Project
Last Updated: 6:03 PM ET 1/18/2002
WASHINGTON, Jan 18, 2002 (AP Online via COMTEX) -- The White House did some digging into old Clinton administration files on Friday to make the case that it was appropriate for Vice President Dick Cheney to help campaign supporters at Enron collect a $64 million debt from India.
Three of President Clinton's commerce secretaries - Ron Brown, Mickey Kantor and William Daley - also advocated for the Dabhol energy project that Enron, General Electric and Bechtel Corp. undertook in India, White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said.
President Bush himself would have been within bounds to raise the issue during his Nov. 9 meeting with Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, had advisers not scrapped the agenda item because it "did not rise to the president's level," Fleischer said.
The spokesman said Bush is always "looking out to protect America's jobs and taxpayers' money." He noted, for example, that Bush has talked to China about purchasing a Boeing aircraft.
"I don't see any problem with that," Fleischer said.
But ethics watchdogs in the White House counsel's office did see a problem if economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey should advocate for the project.
Enron was looking for help in pushing the Maharashtra State Electricity Board to settle the $64 million debt Enron claimed for building a giant power plant in Dabhol, India, a project dating to 1992 and insured by the taxpayer-funded Overseas Private Investment Corp.
Lindsey, who previously earned $50,000 as an Enron consultant, received an ethics ruling from White House lawyers last year advising him to have "no direct involvement in the Dabhol plant as a result of his previous holdings with Enron," Fleischer said.
The White House defended its handling of the long-running Dobhal case after The New York Daily News reported on government e-mails it obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.
Those e-mails revealed publicly for the first time that Cheney "mentioned Enron" in his June 27 meeting with Sonia Gandhi, president of India's opposition Congress Party.
Fleischer confirmed on Friday that Cheney asked Gandhi "about the status of the project."
The Cheney-Gandhi meeting took place three days after Cheney and now-embattled Enron chairman Kenneth L. Lay saw each other at the American Enterprise Institute World Forum in Beaver Creek, Colo., where the topic was energy.
Commerce Secretary Don Evans has said that he and Lay spoke about recovering Enron's losses in Dabhol.
Lay and Enron gave Bush nearly $114,000 for his presidential campaign.
Defending the actions by Evans and Cheney, Fleischer said, "I don't think you could say that they were influenced by the contributions that were given to the Bush campaign. It was done because they thought it was in America's national interest to do it."
He pointed to evidence that Clinton administration officials did the same thing. Among the documents that Bush officials retrieved was a Jan. 5, 1995, letter that then-Commerce Secretary Brown wrote to India's minister of Commerce before traveling to India. Brown asked his Indian counterpart to facilitate "financial closing" of the Dabhol power project "in time to be celebrated during my visit."
Brown wrote that resolving the Dobhal matter was in the interests of India and U.S. investors.
By SANDRA SOBIERAJ Associated Press Writer
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