This story just keeps getting better. Two weeks ago, Time magazine obtained an internal Pentagon email that said “action” on Halliburton’s no-bid, multibillion-dollar contract was “coordinated” with Cheney’s office. Dems, of course, went apoplectic.
The White House response was fairly simple. An administration official told CNN, for example, that given the subject, the email was sent “as a courtesy” to alert the White House “of a public announcement” about a deal that had already been reached. The word “coordinated,” the administration argued, doesn’t mean what it sounds like here.
That was two weeks ago. The story faded behind coverage of Reagan’s death, but it’s back today, better than ever. Surprise, surprise, the initial White House reply to the controversy appears to be completely wrong.
As the government prepared for war in Iraq in the fall of 2002, a senior political appointee in the Defense Department chose oil services giant Halliburton Co. to secretly plan how to repair Iraqi oil fields, and then briefed Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff and other White House officials about the sole-source contract before it was granted.
Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.) said the new details about the $1.8 million contract, disclosed last week in a Pentagon briefing for congressional staff members, raise new questions about whether the vice president or his office played any role in decisions to give what became billions of dollars worth of government business to Halliburton, where Cheney was chief executive from 1995 to 2000.
This is a big, brand-new headache for Cheney. First the line was that the VP’s office didn’t know anything about the deal. Then the line was that they knew about the deal, but only after the contracts had been signed. Now there’s evidence Cheney’s office was briefed about the deal before the contracts were official. What’s next?
The new revelations also explained that Doug Feith’s office briefed Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Cheney’s top aide, among others at the White House, about contracting with Halliburton for Iraq reconstruction work.
As Waxman noted, that’s not what the White House was saying before.
In a letter to Cheney yesterday, Waxman said the circumstances “appear to contradict your assertions that you were not informed about the Halliburton contracts.”
“They also seem to contradict the Administration’s repeated assertions that political appointees were not involved in the award of contracts to Halliburton,” wrote Waxman, senior Democrat on the House Government Reform Committee and one of the sharpest critics of the government’s ties to Halliburton.
And in case Halliburton’s day hadn’t already taken a turn for the worse, the Wall Street Journal reported that the company is now under investigation by the SEC for a Nigerian bribery scandal that’s been ongoing for a few months.
Halliburton Co. said the Securities and Exchange Commission has opened a formal investigation into more than $100 million in payments that a joint venture involving its Kellogg Brown & Root subsidiary made in the building of a huge Nigerian natural-gas complex.
About $5 million of those payments are believed to have ended up in an account controlled by the former chairman of KBR, Albert J. “Jack” Stanley, who recently retired.
Halliburton said Friday it hasn’t found any evidence that the account was for company business. “Halliburton never authorized any accounts or any transfers,” said Wendy Hall, a company spokeswoman.
The U.S. Justice Department and authorities in France and Nigeria are looking into the payments, which date to the 1990s. In France, the investigation has focused on up to $180 million in payments made by the joint venture to Tristar, a Gibraltar company controlled by Jeffrey Tesler. French officials are trying to determine whether the payments were a legitimate business cost or whether the money was intended for bribes.
This soirée may even lead French officials investigating the scandal to subpoena Dick Cheney directly, since the massive international bribery scheme started while he was CEO of Halliburton. I wonder if the SEC will do the same?
No wonder MoveOn is focusing its latest ad campaign on exposing the Halliburton-Bush administration connections. The timing couldn’t be better.