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Pastimes : THE SLIGHTLY MODERATED BOXING RING -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bill who wrote (17310)	7/12/2002 3:59:59 PM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 21057

They found NOTHING improper and closed the case. Where does it say that? <They investigated the entire transaction and found no basis to conclude that Bush did anything illegal. That's called exoneration. Case closed. And where does it say that? It doesn't. It only says they opted not to take action. There are lots of possibilities here. If you wanted to find out what it really means, and I've done a lot of such investigations, there are several avenues to pursue. The first thing I would look at is what the disposition options were, what other letters might they have written, and that would narrow down what this one means. They may have another choice of language that is a hair more favorable, or less favorable. Or this one might cover all non-actions. Another thing to look at would be who signed it. Agencies delegate the authority to sign such things to certain levels of management. Generally, bureaucrats, particularly at SEC, aren't political and they follow prescribed procedures. It's possible that the staff may have thought they had a case but were pressured or overridden by the politicos. Some officials with delegated authority will accede to this and sign it and others won't. What they will do instead is tell the boss if he wants to overrule the staff, he'll have to sign it himself. If it was signed by a higher level than would normally sign it, that's a pretty good indicator of pressure. I would also look at the budget situation at the time. SEC has historically been severely underfunded. You would need a sense of their resource allocation at the time and the resources expended on this case. The SEC has a system of tracking resource expenditures by case and type of case. You would also have to look at where SEC was in the budget cycle and who was on the appropriations committee at that time. Those are just a couple of things I would look at before even thinking about determining just what the actual disposition of the case was. You can believe anything you want. You can conclude anything you want. But you can't state as a fact that "they found nothing improper." You simply don't have the evidence to support that.