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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Scumbria who wrote (272490)	7/10/2002 8:10:20 AM
From: John Carragher	Respond to of 769670

REVIEW & OUTLOOK The Harken Ploy The White House press corps, ever vigilant, tore after President Bush on Monday with a barrage of questions about his 1990 sale of stock in Texas-based Harken Energy Corp. Our only question is: Where were they when we needed them? We took our own very close look at the Harken story back in 1999, scrutiny that made us none too popular with the Bush campaign. What we found is some interesting Saudi connections on the finance side, but on the corporate ethics side absolutely zero. The same goes for every other reporter who's looked at this over the years, and there have been many. Mr. Bush joined Harken as a director in 1986, and in 1990 he sold 212,000 Harken shares, at $4 each, to finance his stake in the Texas Rangers baseball team. He filed an "intent to sell" form with the SEC and cleared the sale with Harken's general counsel. The stock tanked days later, before climbing back to $8 per share 14 months after that. Following a report in this newspaper that Mr. Bush failed to report the transaction on time, the SEC opened an investigation. Mr. Bush had indeed failed to file a timely transaction report -- that failure was blamed on Harken's lawyers -- but in October 1993 the SEC cleared him of any illegal conduct. It's especially amusing now to see Democrats whooping it up about Harken. Two words: Bill Clinton. Or for that matter: Al Gore. A look at Mr. Gore's tax returns under "supplemental income" will show a $20,000 annual royalty payment from the Union Zinc company, which has earned Mr. Gore more than $450,000 over 25 years. The man responsible for that payment was Armand Hammer, the late chairman of Occidental Petroleum and an influence peddler of the highest magnitude. All of this was disclosed back during the Presidential campaign, in particular on these pages. Having watched the various Clinton improprieties emerge post-election, we took pains to explore the background of each candidate. While a putative scandal is always open to fresh disclosures, what excited the press pack this week was already known when voters cast their ballots. An informed election, it seems to us, wipes the slate clean. Updated July 10, 2002