Reid Offers To Disclose His Land Deal ... Five Years Late
Harry Reid, stung by the AP's exposure of his complicated land deals with a lobbyist he helped make rich through his personal interventions in Congress, has told the Senate Ethics Committee that he will file amended disclosure statements that would reveal his business relationships for the first time. Reid claims the amendment would be "technical":
The Senate Democratic leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, said his office contacted the Senate ethics committee on Wednesday and offered to correct his financial disclosure statements if they misrepresented his ties to a land deal in his home state in which his family made a profit of about $700,000.
In a statement, Mr. Reid did not acknowledge errors in the disclosure forms but said he was ready to make a “technical correction” if the ethics committee determined that adjustments were needed. ...
In 2001, the timeline showed, ownership of the land was transferred to a holding company, Patrick Lane LLC, named for a street near the properties, as part of effort to rezone the area for development of a shopping center. Mr. Reid became a partner in the holding company. After the rezoning was approved, the land was sold for $1.6 million, with $1.1 million directed to Mr. Reid as his share, a return of about $700,000 on the investment.
The senator’s financial disclosure statements during the period show that he never reported that the land had been transferred to the holding company, leaving the impression that he continued to own the land directly instead of through a partnership with Mr. Brown and others.
Congressional ethics specialists said the omission was at least a technical violation of the disclosure rules, which are intended to identify a lawmaker’s business partners and potential conflicts of interest. Spokesmen for the Senate ethics committee did not return phone calls Wednesday night.
Reid's avoidance of disclosure hid two aspects of his business relationships. The first was his association with Jay Brown, who has a history of being involved in scandal. The NY Times describes him as "a prominent Las Vegas lawyer," but they never get around to mentioning his involvement in a federal bribery case in Las Vegas. Nor do they mention Brown's work as a lobbyist, as the AP did, nor do they follow up on the AP's report of connections between Brown and organized crime.
The other part Reid wanted to keep secret was the financial ties between himself and Harvey Whittemore. The AP story reported that Reid bought the parcel from "a developer who was benefiting from a government land swap that Reid supported," a perfect description of Whittemore in 1998 when Reid purchased the land. For the next seven years, Reid would work to ease Whittemore's difficulties in developing the Coyote Springs project by forcing the government to swap its right-of-way for less valuable land owned by Whittemore; he tried to get the government to literally give away more of its land to Whittemore, although he would not succeed; and in the end, he pressed federal regulators to lift a endangered-species restriction on Whittemore's Coyote Springs real estate. All of this helped give Whittemore an opportunity to make tens of millions on residential and commercial development in the former test range site.
Disclosing those partnerships, the latter of which the NYT doesn't even bother to mention from the AP report, would have exposed Reid's machinations for Coyote Springs as financially beneficial to himself through his partnership with Whittemore and Brown. Reid has no choice but to amend the disclosures, but by now it's far too late; Congress agreed to almost everything Whittemore needed already, pushed by Reid in a blatantly corrupt manner. And now we know the payoff: a real-estate "investment" that garnered a 175% return in six years.
Disclosures now are pointless. The Ethics panel needs to order a full investigation not just into the $700,000 profit, but all of Reid's business partners and any legislation or intervention with federal regulators Reid pushed on their behalf.
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