Just so we’re clear, Bill Clinton, 14 years before he was elected president, made a one-time investment in a land deal called Whitewater. The investment was financed by bank loans, which were repaid with interest. Clinton lost money on the venture and was completely cleared of wrongdoing. This business “scandal” necessitated three independent counsels to launch a seven-year investigation that cost taxpayers over $70 million, not to mention multiple congressional hearings and countless hours of breathless media coverage.
Dick “Go F— Yourself” Cheney, meanwhile, looks an awful lot like a corporate criminal that’s getting off scot-free, despite having committed his crimes immediately before taking office.
The Halliburton Company secretly changed its accounting practices when Vice President Dick Cheney was its chief executive, the Securities and Exchange Commission said yesterday as it fined the company $7.5 million and brought actions against two former financial officials.
The commission said the accounting change enabled Halliburton, one of the nation’s largest energy services companies, to report annual earnings in 1998 that were 46 percent higher than they would have been had the change not been made. It also allowed the company to report a substantially higher profit in 1999, the commission said.
And yet, there are no Capitol Hill hearings, no Justice Department investigations, or even calls for an independent counsel. The national press, which demanded an outside investigator for Whitewater, seems passively disinterested now.
The likely defense for Cheney is that he was only the company’s CEO; he should hardly be expected to know about little things such as the corporate revenue that paid his salary. In fact, it’s likely Cheney would prefer we all forget quotes such as the one The Gadflyer’s Paul Waldman mentioned yesterday:
[L]et’s recall what the Vice President once said in a promotional video for accounting outlaws Arthur Andersen, the geniuses behind the Enron debacle and President Bush’s own Harken Energy:
“I get good advice, if you will, from their people based upon how we’re doing business and how we’re operating — over and above just the sort of normal by-the-books auditing arrangement.”
Cheney got one thing right; there was nothing “normal” nor “by-the-book” about the way his company did its accounting.
But, while this may be the likely defense, it isn’t. In fact, crazy though it may sound, Cheney’s lawyers aren’t offering any defense at all.
A lawyer for Mr. Cheney, Terrence O’Donnell, said the vice president’s “conduct as C.E.O. of Halliburton was proper in all respects,” adding that the S.E.C. “investigated this matter very, very thoroughly and did not find any responsibility for nondisclosure at the board level or the C.E.O. level.”
Mr. O’Donnell, a partner at Williams & Connolly in Washington, declined to answer a question as to whether Mr. Cheney had been aware of the effect of the accounting change on the company’s profits.
Declined to answer? That’s the only question that really matters here and Cheney’s legal team doesn’t feel like answering it?
So here you have the Vice President of the United States. His company gets caught in about as clear a case of cooking the books to inflate profits as you can imagine during the time he was CEO. (His salary and bonuses are tied to company profits.) And he won’t even go to the trouble of denying that he was aware of the wrongdoing.
Can we have some more aggressive reporting on this one?
Apparently not.