The Guardian UK reports "George Bush quashed evidence in the insider dealing inquiry he faced a decade ago, it was claimed yesterday, further undermining White House efforts to restore some confidence in Wall Street. A memo has emerged that was sent by lawyers in 1990 that warned executives of the energy firm Harken, for which Mr Bush was a director, against cashing in stock if they had any negative information about the company. Harken was undertaking financial engineering to keep it afloat at the time. A week later the president cashed in $848,000 of shares. The sale triggered an inquiry by the Securities and Exchange Commission which ended in August 1991. No action was taken against the president who claimed to have been unaware of the problems facing the business. The letter from Haynes and Boone was not given to the SEC until a day after the inquiry ended."

A Washington Post headline today summed it up: "Bush Sold Stock After Lawyers' Warning." So, while the Fundraiser-In-Chief stumps the country for Republican candidates and the US continues its W-ar preparations, the nation's capital is reading that Bush had indeed been advised against selling Harken stock while knowing negative information on the company's prospects. The day before receiving the letter, the SEC issued its decision that there was insufficient evidence to recommend an enforcement action against Dubya. Harken did its best to keep it out of the press, citing attorney-client privilege. The SEC decision was issued during Bush the Elder's White House occupancy. As Michael Aguirre, a San Diego securities lawyer said "There was a failure to deal with the most important piece of evidence." Impeach Bush Now!

"Oh what tangled webs! And, oh how they spin within them as they get tangled in earlier 'obfuscations.' The Iraqis? No. The Bush/Cheney team....bad day(s) for the two former corporate homeboys....while a director and paid consultant for Harken Energy Bush had actively participated in the creation of off-the-books accounting gimmicks to hide company debt and raise the company's stock price....Shouldn't the SEC be just a bit curious to see if the Harken/Harvard partnership wasn't simply a smoke and mirrors contrivance, solely designed to create a profit for Harvard on what otherwise would have surely proven to be a very bad investment?....Like Harvard Management, the CEO of Alliance sat on Enron board. And, like Harvard Management, Alliance became the largest institutional shareholder in Enron. And, when Enron started going down the tubes, like Harvard Management, Alliance tired to help out, in that case selling over $300 million in Enron shares to Florida public pension funds."

Boston.com reports: "One week before George W. Bush's now-famous sale of stock in Harken Energy Corp. in 1990, Harken was warned by its lawyers that Bush and other members of the troubled oil company's board faced possible insider trading risks if they unloaded their shares. The warning from Harken's lawyers came in a legal memorandum whose existence has been little noted until now, despite the many years of scrutiny of the Bush transaction. The memo was not received by the Securities and Exchange Commission until the day after the agency decided not to bring insider-trading charges against Bush, documents show. The memo...lay(s) out the potential for insider-trading violations by Bush and other members of the Harken board, and its existence raises questions about how thoroughly the SEC investigated Bush's unloading of $848,000 of his Harken stake to a buyer whose name has not been made public." Appoint a Special Prosecutor for Harken-Enron-Halliburton!

The Center for Public Integrity's mission "is to provide the American people with the findings of our investigations and analyses of public service, government accountability and ethics related issues." In that spirit and as a public service, the Center posted a number of documents related to a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation of Bush for insider trading. Now, new documents are available, including: A partnership agreement between Aeneas Venture Corp., a subsidiary of Harvard Management, and Harken; losses at Harken Marketing, and its partnership with Enron in commodities trading; company proxy statements, showing among other things, that GWB was paid $80K in '87-'88 and that Bush the Elder's campaign was reimbursed by Harken for Bush the Lesser's attendance at board meetings. A full report is also available from this link.

Reuters.com reports: "While...(Mr.) Bush served on Harken Energy Corp.'s board more than 10 years ago, it engaged in complex trades with Enron Corp., a watchdog group said on Tuesday. Enron's relationship with Bush has become a political issue since its collapse in December amid a widening financial scandal. The company was one of Bush's biggest campaign contributors....The documents, released by the Center for Public Integrity, showed that one of Harken's partners in commodities trading was Enron. A June 1990 memo from Harken Marketing, a Harken subsidiary, listed a $363,000 letter of credit with the now bankrupt energy trader....The nonpartisan Center for Public Integrity said other documents showed that Bush was paid $80,000 in 1987-88 to consult for Harken even though he was working full time for his father's presidential campaign....Former Enron Chairman Kenneth Lay was a longtime Bush ally and a generous donor to his political campaigns."

The Toledo Blade editorial board clearly sees the problem with having a "CEO pResident." "It now turns out that Mr. Bush's tenure as a director of Harken Energy Corp. from 1986 to 1993 included an Enron-like deal to bail the company out of financial trouble with assistance from the investment arm of Harvard University....The arrangement apparently was legal under lax accounting rules, but was "transparent" to the point that only Harvard Management and Harken insiders knew what was going on. Outside investors would't have a clue, which is precisely the problem with the illegal deals companies like Enron used to artificially inflate their value to drive up the stock price." Bush's past behavior is indeed an indication of what we should expect from him today; he's slashing budgets for SEC enforcement of anti-corruption regulations so they can't be enforced.

David Teather reports: "George Bush was yesterday laid open to further allegations of hypocrisy in his condemnation of the aggressive business practices of the 1990s when more details of his own dealings were published. Harken Energy, the oil and gas company behind the US president's wealth, used an off balance sheet entity to move poorly performing assets and debts off its books, according to a report which draws comparisons with Enron. The off balance sheet entity, a partnership with the investment arm of Harvard University, was formed in 1990 at a critical time for the company's finances. HarvardWatch, an alumni and student group which monitors the university's investments, likened the venture to those used at the disgraced energy firm Enron to disguise debts before it collapsed. Mr Bush was a director at Harken from 1986 to 1993 and at the time in question was a $100,000 a year consultant. Minutes show that he personally approved the deal."

HarvardWatch.org did the investigative journalism, the heavy lifting that the guys making the big bucks didn't. Drop by and see the actual meeting minutes showing Bush motioned to advance the Harken-Harvard partnership which would briefly keep Harken Energy afloat in an Enron-type, off-the-books, $30 million deal. Find links to coverage by Paul Krugman, the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, Reuters, AP, the Washington Post, and the Guardian.

WashingtonPost.com reports: "When...Bush served as a director of an energy company 12 years ago, he approved the creation of an off-balance-sheet partnership that reduced the company's debts and improved earnings in a transaction similar to those that led to the collapse of Enron Corp....According to the (Wall Street) Journal, Harvard's support of Harken influenced A. Robert Abboud, then head of First City Bancorp, to take over another bank's loans to Harken in 1990 and rescue Harken from default. Abboud had been a prominent supporter of Saddam Hussein's government in Iraq before the Persian Gulf War. Abboud also had ties to President George H.W. Bush, the current president's father."

The Boston Globe reports: "Harvard University's financial relationship with...Bush's former oil company was deeper than previously understood, with the university's management fund creating a separate 'off the books' partnership with Harken Energy Corp. that helped keep afloat the financially troubled company...HarvardWatch...analyzed documents showing that the Harvard fund, an independent entity that manages the university's endowment, formed a partnership in 1990 with Bush's oil firm called the Harken Anadarko Partnership. The partnership effectively removed $20 million of debt from Harken's books, relieving the Texas company's short-term financial problems. About the same time, the Harvard fund invested about $30 million in Harken, which also helped keep the firm afloat....The creation of the partnership was approved in a motion made by Bush, who was on the Harken board of directors and its audit committee." Impeach Bush for his high crimes and misdemeanors!

Among the many corporate scandals of the past year, Tyco stands out for the sheer greed of its executives, led by Dennis Kozlowski, who "systematically created a corporate culture of greed and excess." Yet even at Tyco, executives who received loans that were forgiven paid TAXES on those forgiven loans. In August, Democrats.com demanded to know whether George W. Bush paid taxes on $118,760 worth of forgiven Harken loans (http://democrats.com/harken). So far, no one in Congress or the corporate media has bothered to ask. We demand an investigation!

"Financial irregularities at Harken Energy during Bush's tenure at the Texas oil company have dominated headlines in recent days. But the press has ignored a much bigger scandal: how Harken Energy has benefited from war and terror in Colombia," writes San Donahue in the Asheville Global Report. After holding a series of patronage jobs in Texas courtesy of the Bush family, Rodrigo Villamizar - an old friend of George W. Bush - became director for Columbia's Bureau of Mines and Minerals, which oversees the sale of oil concessions. Villamizar returned the favor by granting Harken a series of oil contracts - along with assistance from Columbia's notorious death squads. "The bulk of the oil contracts were in the Magdalena Valley where military officers, drug traffickers, and cattle ranchers had come together to form right wing paramilitary groups that fought guerillas, assassinated union leaders and human rights activists, and terrorized peasants in order to force them off coveted land."

Researcher Skip Fox writes, "HarkenGate readily breaks down into seven areas focusing on potential illegal or unethical behavior. 1. W. possibly built oil company and interests through favoritism or trading off his father's name 2. Harken's posted of phony financial statements, claiming incoming assets for a subsidiary it bought from itself. 3. W.'s trading of stock based on possible knowledge of potential stock devaluation i.e., insider trading: a. Knowledge of secret State Dept. memo claiming Hussain was ready to attack neighbors. b. Knowledge of Harken's dire straits as one member of a three-member 'Fairness' (auditing) committee. 4. W's Harken stock mysterious buyer. 5. W.'s late filing of stock sales to SEC and variation in story as to reasons. 6. W's request for and acceptance of loans from Harken. 7. Possible favoritism shown to Bush's business 'indiscretions' by SEC through father's influence and/or the possible reward to SEC investigator(s) by W. himself."

"George W. Bush's questionable activities and profits during his years as a director of Harken Energy Corp. (1986-1993) have come under a fair amount of scrutiny from the media. Mr. Bush has thus far avoided responsibility for those activities, thanks to a compromised investigation by the SEC during his father's presidency, as well as Mr. Bush's stubborn refusal to provide details of those deals. But an investigation by Democrats.com has uncovered the possibility that one Harken transaction - the cancellation of an estimated $230,375 in debt in 1993 - may have been structured to help Mr. Bush evade income taxes. Democrats.com therefore calls upon Mr. Bush to release his tax returns for 1993 and 1994, and to provide the other documents required to fully understand this shady deal." So writes Bob Fertik.

Jonathan Chait writes that Bush's Harken Energy "set up an offshore subsidiary in the Cayman Islands to minimize its taxes. [Ari Fleischer said] 'The pResident is concerned about corporations in America who take advantage, set up operations outside of America, in an effort to lower their taxes.' [Republican Senator Charles Grassley said] 'It's not illegal, but it is immoral'. [Both comments were made before the latest Harken revelation.] The White House has been reduced to trying to find some distinction between other companies fleeing to offshore tax havens and what Harken did. And the distinction the administration has come up with is: Harken didn't make any money... Call it the incompetence defense. Harken tried to weasel out of paying its taxes, but it didn't succeed, because it failed to earn a profit. Yes, your honor, we broke into the bank vault, but since we forgot to take the cash with us, we didn't actually steal any money."

AlterNet quotes W's speech on 7-9-02, when he declared: "Corporate officers who benefit from false accounting statements should forfeit all money gained by their fraud." AlterNet offers a challenge for Bush: "Give back the money that you made on that questionable loan from Harken Energy... Bush has never given a satisfactory explanation for late filing. If only for appearances' sake, if he is preaching personal responsibility, a new ethic, if he hopes to lead by example and practice what he preaches, then shouldn't Bush give back any gains he made through that questionable loan? And... shouldn't Vice President Dick Cheney give back any profit he made with CEO of Halliburton when that company was inflating its profits?... Just give it back. The nation is waiting."

After a Cabinet meeting on 7-30-02, Bush condemned corporations that create offshore tax havens. "I think we ought to look at people who are trying to avoid U.S. taxes as a problem," he said. "I think American companies ought to pay taxes here, and be good citizens." But that only increased the focus on Harken's Cayman Island subsidiary. The White House said "Bush had opposed the deal" - to which Tom Daschle replied, "we think that the administration needs to lay the record straight, needs to allow the SEC to open up its records." Meanwhile Ralph Nader "released a report yesterday on Halliburton's use of offshore subsidiaries, citing SEC documents to contend that the number went from nine to 44 during Cheney's tenure. Halliburton spokeswoman Wendy Hall said the purpose was not to save money on taxes." Right - and Bush didn't steal the election -- NOT! We want Halliburton's records too - and a Special Prosecutor!

NY Daily News reports, "Harken Energy Corp. set up an offshore subsidiary in the Cayman Islands tax haven while Bush sat on Harken's board of directors in 1989... The revelation comes as Republican lawmakers are roundly criticizing the practice of U.S. companies setting up offshore subsidiaries, usually to skirt American disclosure laws or corporate income taxes on foreign income. Even White House spokesman Ari Fleischer condemned the tactic yesterday, saying, 'The President is concerned about corporations in America who take advantage, set up operations outside of America, in an effort to lower their taxes'... 'It is reminiscent of Enron,' said Chuck Lewis of the Center for Public Integrity. 'Here is a controversial, on-the-edge company investigated by the feds, sham transactions where they have to restate their earnings and - oh, yeah - they have a Caymans account. What's wrong with this picture? ... What else don't we know?'" We demand a Special Prosecutor!

Salon's Anthony York writes, "Rep. John Conyers, D-MI, stepped up the political attack on the Bush administration when, last weekend, he called for an independent investigation into Bush and Cheney's business dealings before they came to the White House, a call he reiterated Thursday night on CNN's 'Crossfire.' So far, Conyers is standing alone. Democrats have yet to follow the congressman's lead and, in fact, other Democrats have backed away from Conyers' comments, eager to criticize Bush and Cheney's ties to big business, but hesitant to reignite the constant independent investigations that came to define the Clinton years. At least for now. No other Democrats have echoed Conyers' call for an independent investigator to look into Bush's Harken/Rangers deal, but many seem to be testing the waters to see if the public would embrace such investigations." Tell your legislators you want an Independent Counsel for HarkenHalliburtongate!

Reuters reports, "According to a June 15, 1989 letter from Harken President Mikel Faulkner, obtained by the nonpartisan Center for Public Integrity, Bush frequently advised Harken management on 'organizational and strategic matters.' In the letter, Faulkner praised Bush for '... operating decisions at the board level and the personal suggestions and ideas you have shared with me over the past two years on a CEO to CEO basis'... Documents show the two met just two weeks before Harken's controversial sale in 1989 of its Aloha Petroleum subsidiary, a transaction which critics have compared to the accounting irregularities at bankrupt energy trader Enron Corp. The company's initial treatment of the Aloha sale significantly understated the losses Harken first reported for 1989... Bush has denied wrongdoing, saying... 'All I can tell you is, that in the corporate world, sometimes things aren't exactly black and white when it comes to accounting procedures,' he said earlier this month."

"George Soros was quoted yesterday as saying that Harken Energy Corp. purchased a Texas oil company run by George W. Bush in 1986 because 'we were buying political influence.' Soros owned nearly a third of Harken at the time the deal was made...David Corn, the [Nation] magazine's Washington editor, said he happened to run into Soros at a party recently and asked Soros why Harken bought Bush's company. 'I didn't know him,' Corn quoted Soros as saying. 'He was supposed to bring in the Gulf connection. But it didn't come to anything. We were buying political influence. That was it. He was not much of a businessman.'...Soros sold his Harken stock back to the company in 1989, a year before Harken struck a deal with the tiny Persian Gulf nation of Bahrain to drill for oil off its coast. That deal sparked questions about whether Bahrain offered it to Harken in an effort to court favor with Bush's father, who was then president." A Saudi investor and Harvard also had stakes in Harken.

Fortune reports, "We all know what became of George W. Bush, but what became of Harken? A little digging reveals a company that has lost hundreds of millions of dollars over the past half decade...Now a tiny, highly leveraged company, Harken has dozens of operating subsidiaries and a tangle of financial statements...Harken, which is engaged in oil and gas exploration, development, and production in Texas and the Gulf of Mexico, as well as in Colombia, Peru, Panama, and Costa Rica, soldiered on after Bush left...'It was always suspected that something was fishy, but not because of the Bush connection,' says Gheit of Fahnestock. 'That for a small company like Harken to be involved in foreign drilling operations getting concessions from foreign governments, things just didn't add up. A lot of people had suspected that this was a CIA front.'" In Dad's footsteps? Zapata Oil, Bush Sr.'s company with the Liedtke brothers in the '60's, has long been suspected of also having been a CIA front.

Harken Energy was never a great company, and George W. Bush was a failure in the oil business. Still, big-time investors poured millions down the toilet with Bush - and no one will explain why. AS the Boston Globe reports, "The first was billionaire George Soros [who] personally owned about one-third of the company as a result of a business deal that left him with Harken shares... The second was an investor from Saudi Arabia. Then came Harvard... Money from Harvard, beginning in 1986, was crucial, at one point giving the fund one-third control of Harken... What did the investment arm of the nation's most prestigious university see in a troubled little oil company from Texas that justified such attention and a $30 million investment? Harvard Management officials, citing confidentiality and the difficulty of retrieving old documents, refused to release records about the investment or discuss it in any detail." Yet another Bush scrub - we demand an investigation!

Joe Conason reports "So what does it mean that George W Bush signed a letter on April 3, 1990, promising not to sell his Harken stock for six months? And what does it mean that the letter was discovered in the Bush probe files released by the Securities and Exchange Commission? The letter's existence... suggests that Bush knew more than he has acknowledged about the depth of Harken's financial troubles. [The purpose of the letter was to facilitate an IPO.] But the stock offering was blown away a few weeks later -- and a few weeks before Bush sold -- when one of Harken's major bank creditors withdrew its support. If Bush knew that the 'lockout' letter was no longer operative, he must also have known that the company was in terrible condition -- and that its stock was likely to fall when the bad news got out."

AP reports, "Two and a half months before George W. Bush sold his stock in a struggling Texas energy company where he was a director, he signed a ['lockup'] letter promising to hold onto the shares for at least six months, internal company documents show... Bush's lawyers have maintained for more than a decade that he had a pre-existing plan to sell his stock in Harken and other companies to pay a tax bill and a loan debt he owed for his stake in the Texas Rangers... A securities expert said the document calls into question his lawyers' account to the SEC. 'Bush's signing of the April 2, 1990, lockup agreement undercuts his lawyers' explanation for the early sale of his Harken stock,' said Houston attorney Thomas Ajamie. 'If his accountant told him that he needed to sell stock to pay a debt obligation for his interest in the Texas Rangers, it does not make sense that he would subsequently sign an agreement promising not to sell his shares of Harken stock for six months,' Ajamie said."

Slate's Daniel Gross writes, "Bush spokesman Dan Bartlett asserted that [Bush's Harken] loans - which Bush would now like to see banned - were 'totally appropriate' and that, in any case, Bush hadn't profited from them. That depends on what your definition of profit is. Bush used the loans to buy Harken stock. He didn't make much of a profit on the stock because it turned out to be a poor investment. But Bush still received substantial benefits from his Harken loans. The loans - and the way they were unwound - allowed Bush to take financial positions without risk that ordinary investors have to pay for. And the loans were offered on terms that are unavailable to even the best credit risks." Remember, Bill Clinton LOST money on Whitewater - but that didn't stop Republicans from demanding a Special Prosecutor. We demand a Special Prosecutor for Bush!

The Washington Post reports, "Although Bush has maintained over the years that the size of the losses took him by surprise, interviews and internal Harken documents provide a newly detailed picture of how much Bush knew about Harken's financial straits when he sold the stock... 16 days before he sold the stock, Bush was sent the company's 'weekly flash report,' giving 'information provided by subsidiaries regarding estimated historical and projected earnings.' Asked about the document, a White House official said Bush thought the company was going to lose about $9 million in the quarter... SEC investigators knew Bush had seen the flash report but still dropped the case. Bush agreed to be interviewed by the SEC, but the investigators did not take him up on it, provoking skepticism from some government officials about their thoroughness" - and convincing the rest of us that Bushdaddy covered up W's fraud, just as he covered up W's cocaine bust in the 1970s.

Salon's Eric Boehlert writes: "Through the length of Bill Clinton's presidency, the press scrounged for details on the arcane Whitewater controversy. Will it do the same for Harken Energy? Press coverage during Week 2 of the Bush/Harken energy controversy will likely determine whether the uproar surrounding [Bush's] past business dealings continue to dog the White House or simply fade away... As the week ended, more stories were pressing for details about the SEC investigation. But if reporters and editors do not press that inquiry exhaustively -- after spending years chasing a similarly arcane financial transaction known as Whitewater involving President Bill Clinton, a Democrat -- they will have to answer their own questions about hypocrisy." You said it, Eric!

Gene Lyons writes, "To steal a line from that great Imaginary-American Huck Finn: George W. Bush giving a stern speech on business ethics is enough to make a cow laugh. What's next, Bill Clinton on chastity? Mike Tyson on sportsmanship? Tim Hutchinson on family values? If President Junior ever made a honest dollar entirely on his own merit, it'd be fascinating to know when it happened... Harken's scheme was simply a shell game for hiding debt. Think of a married couple pretending to divorce, with the husband 'lending' his wife the money to buy their home for twice its value, then using the make-believe profits as collateral on a loan... And who supervised the subsequent SEC probe of Junior's Harken trades? Why the same Texas lawyer who'd put together the deal that made him a minority owner of the Texas Rangers baseball team... 'I still haven't figured it [the Harken transactions] out completely,' Bush said Monday. Neglected your homework again, Mr. President [sic]?"

Paul Krugman's recent columns exposed Harkengate. Now Bush is trying to lie about it, but Krugman won't let him. "Bush claims that he was 'vetted' by the SEC In fact, the agency's investigation was peculiarly perfunctory. It somehow decided that Mr. Bush's perfectly timed stock sale did not reflect inside information without interviewing him, or any other members of Harken's board. Maybe top officials at the SEC felt they already knew enough about Mr. Bush: his father, the president, had appointed a good friend as SEC chairman. And the general counsel, who would normally make decisions about legal action, had previously been George W. Bush's personal lawyer - he negotiated the purchase of the Texas Rangers. I am not making this up... The bottom line is that in the last week any hopes you might have had that Mr. Bush would make a break from his past and champion desperately needed corporate reform have been dashed. Mr. Bush is not a real reformer; he just plays one on TV." You go, Paul!

AP reports, "It is a stock market whodunit that has withstood a decade of scrutiny. Who bought George W. Bush's problem-plagued oil company stock just before its value dropped?... Federal regulators who examined the deal as a possible insider trade never asked. Bush says he doesn't know and the White House declines to ask the broker... While [broker Ralph] Smith declines to name the purchaser, his difficult-to-read handwritten notes turned over to the SEC in the insider trading probe of Bush supply a clue. The notes for June 9 appear to state that 'Geo Bush will sell 212,010 shares in about 2 weeks.' The June 22 entry on the day of the sale appears to state, 's/212,140 at 4 to Lee for Bush.' Smith declines to say whether the apparent word 'Lee' refers to a person or an entity." Could this be Lee Teng-hui, former President of Taiwan (1988-2000), who ran a huge influence-buying slush fund that was recently exposed in the (still-unreported in the US) "Taiwangate" scandal?

Salon's Anthony York reports "When President [sic] Bush sold more than 200,000 shares in Harken Energy Corp. in June 1990, he said he did not know the company was in bad financial shape. But memos from the company show in great detail that he was apprised of how badly the company's fortunes were failing before he sold his stock -- and that he was warned by company lawyers against selling stock based on insider information."

Spencer Ackerman writes, "More important than whether Bush is guilty of insider trading, his Harken past shows him to be either lazy, or stupid, or both... Having finally happened upon this story, the media is unlikely to let it go now--particularly with Harken stock now trading at just 45 cents and with a hostile opposition party determined to make it a political issue... Trying to argue that Bush broke the law could be futile, but trying to argue that Bush was an utterly incompetent businessman might stick... Bush's experience as a businessman is indeed an important part of his past, but for precisely the opposite reason he has always claimed. At a time when an untrustworthy corporate elite need diligent, persistent oversight from the government, we have as our president [sic] a man who distinguished himself in business by total ignorance of the financial shenanigans happening all around him. Forget Ivan Boesky. Our chief executive may be Mr. Magoo."

Bush's note for $180k plus accrued interest at 5% should have been somewhere in the neighborhood of $230k -- that's what he owed Harken as of 1993. The exact date on which the loan was canceled is unknown, but using a rough estimate from historical stock quotes Harken's stock was selling at approximately $1.25 per share. This means Bush's note was retired using stock that had an approximate fair market value of $130,000 (105,000 shares x $1.25). The bottom line is that Bush owed Harken $230k and settled his debt by giving them back stock worth about $130k. This is a difference in Bush's favor of $100k and would have represented forgiveness of indebtedness, which he would have to have reported as taxable income. Did Bush report this income on his tax return and pay the taxes he owed? We demand an investigation!

"Bush accepted loans totaling $180,375 from Harken Energy Corp. in 1986 and 1988, according to SEC filings. Bush was a director of Harken from 1986 to 1993, after he sold his failed oil and gas exploration concern to the company. He used the loans to buy Harken stock... Bush attacked corporate loans during his speech on Wall Street... The contrast between Bush's record as a business executive and his rhetoric in the face of corporate scandals underscores the challenge his administration faces." Boy, that's the understatement of the millennium!

In 1990, "Bush wanted to pay off the loan he had taken to finance his stake in the Rangers, and the Harken stock was his biggest asset. But Harken stock was thinly traded;" and no one wanted it. Yet, just like magic (!), an anonymous buyer offered to buy Bush's stock. "A dozen years later, it is still not known who bought Mr. Bush's shares, or why the buyer made the offer at that time. Mr. Smith said he would not disclose the buyer's identity except to say that it was an institutional investor... The White House said today that Mr. Bush never knew the identity of the buyer. Mr. Bartlett said it was 'very far fetched' to assume that the buyer was knowingly helping Mr. Bush at a financially convenient moment for him." Yeah right, Dan. So who was the "institutional investor" who turned Bush from an utter business failure to a "success"? Enron? Carlyle? Saudi Arabia? The Bin Laden Group? A Moonie holding? (Rev. Moon paid the Bushparents up to $10 million). We demand an investigation!

"The White House refused to release records of Bush's service on Harken's board. Bush had pointed to those records during a news conference on Monday when asked about his role in the sale of a subsidiary. The transaction later was used by Harken to mask losses. 'You need to look back on the director's minutes,' Bush said. Bartlett said the administration does not have the minutes and does not plan to ask Harken for them....Bartlett also said the White House would not accept a challenge by Senate Majority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) on Sunday to ask the SEC to make public the records of its investigation into whether Bush had engaged in illegal insider trading of Harken stock... 'Those are documents in the possession of an independent regulatory agency,' Bartlett said. 'I'm not in a position to call on them to do that. We've made available every relevant document we have in our possession.'" We demand a Congressional investigation!

GWBush.com writes, "In 1990, I did something that looked A WHOLE LOT like insider trading. Under normal circumstances, I would have been fined a lot of money and suffered other penalties. However, my father--remember him?--happened to be president at the time. Yes, the president does appoint the S.E.C. Chief. And yes, the SEC did look the other way in my case: I was allowed to keep my $850,000 windfall from a VERY timely stock sale. However, the S.E.C. DID NOT--I repeat: DID NOT--'clear' me. They determined that I had in fact broken the law FOUR TIMES. But they did not fine me or apply other penalties. I've been saying for several days now that 'I was cleared by the S.E.C.' It was a lie, but I think enough time has passed without it being reported as a lie that we can safely say the lie never actually took place. Reporters have been repeating my very own words--that I 'was cleared' by the S.E.C., even though I was not. I'm very pleased and I hope we can all move on now..."

In Bush's failed efforts to brush aside the Harken Energy scandal, Bush said the media covered the issue during the 2000 campaign. But nothing could be further from the truth. Several weeks before the 2000 election, MSNBC columnist Eric Alterman sounded the alarm on Bush's Harken Energy scandal. But the scandal was ignored by the corporate media. Alterman's conclusion is prophetic: by ignoring the story, "Perhaps the media is setting Bush up for a fall, the way they did when they were falling in love with Clinton eight years ago. If so, the media are likely to have a helluva lot to do over the next four years. Too bad it's the rest of us who will have to pay the price."

As corrupt corporations fall around us and the nation totters on the brink of economic ruin, Molly Ivins suggest the repugs stop blaming Clinton. Clinton didn't appoint Harvey Pitt, Mr. Unenforcement, nor did he cheat stockholders at Harken and Halliburton. However, although Ken Lay will never be indicted, our brave Attorney General did manage to find twelve whores in New Orleans. Shocking!

"Tom Daschle called Sunday on the Securities and Exchange Commission to release the file of its decade-old investigation into possible insider trading by President [sic] Bush when he was a corporate director of a Texas energy company... The SEC probe, started in 1991, found that Bush had not had inside knowledge at the time of the sale of the size of the losses Harken would report on Aug. 20. But Daschle said Bush should ask the SEC to release the file to the public to prove that he had not sold his shares with the knowledge that the share price was about to plummet. 'We've had different explanations as to what actually occurred,' Daschle said on 'Face the Nation' on CBS. 'I think the best way to resolve all those issues is just allow the SEC to release the file.'" Indeed, the SEC concluded that Bush had not been exonerated.

Scoop writes, "George's oft repeated refrain today was: - I don't know why the SEC material was not filed (note: another change, on Friday it was the lawyer stuffed up); - and but, hey, this is just politics; - and, it is old news anyway; - And, what's more, the SEC cleared me of everything anyway... Scoop is confident that history will record today's press conference as President [sic] George Bush II's denouement. 'There was no malfeance [sic], no attempt to hide anything,' George Bush's equivalent of two immortal phrases from the U.S. political lexicon, 'I did not have sexual relations with that woman', and 'I am not a crook'." Not only is Bush the President [sic], but he keeps making [sics], and he makes us sic!

For the first time in Bush's stolen Presidency, Bush let reporters ask real questions - and, to Bush's horror, they pounced on Bush's Harken Energy scandal. Bush's defense was pathetic. He blamed Dems for playing politics (So much for "changing the tone in DC.") He said he LOST money by selling his stock days before it dropped, because it recovered a year later. (The fact that the Clintons LOST money on Whitewater never stopped the $70 million GOP jihad.) He said Harken's fraudulent sale of its Aloha subsidiary was not "black and white." (Oh yes it was!) He said the Aloha fraud was OK because the SEC declared it illegal and forced Harken to restate its books. (That means it WAS fraud!) He said he was cleared by the SEC over insider trading, which found "there's no there there." (George's DAD appointed the guy who ended the investigation, but he NEVER cleared Bush.) But we can agree with W on one thing - when it comes to Bush, there is DEFINITELY "no there there"!

Matt Miller writes, "Bush's muscular new piety on corporate ethics means the press has the hook that it needs to re-examine his cozy Texas business history. And that means we may finally get beyond fawning accounts of Bush's first-president-with-an-MBA-management style to reminders that, among other remarkable facts, (1) Bush is the first president to have been investigated by the SEC for insider trading, and (2) Bush seems to have received an unusual $12 million gift while governor of Texas that accounts for his fortune... If Democrats who'd made fortunes from Bush-like patterns of crony capitalism were in the White House during a crisis of corporate integrity, does anyone doubt that Richard Scaife would have scrambled the jets months ago and bankrolled mountains of American Spectator exposes? Luckily, this area of inquiry is all so legitimate - no sex, no trumped-up lawsuits, no Linda Tripp (thank goodness) - that the regular media can do it all by themselves!"

Joe Strike asks, "Why is Cokie Roberts repeating the not-quite-true White House line that Bush's suspicious Harken Oil dealings were 'cleared' by the SEC?... 'The SEC eventually closed its investigation of Bush without taking action against him, although The Dallas Morning News has quoted a 1993 letter from the SEC to Bush's lawyer emphasizing that its decision 'must in no way be construed as indicating that (Bush) has been exonerated.''... The historical record strongly suggests that Bush's entire business and political career was built upon the same kind of shady deals and insider connections he now pretends to condemn (would anyone other than the President's son get a free pass from the SEC?); thus the Democrats are performing a public duty -- not indulging in partisan politics -- by raising these issues. NPR is neglecting its journalistic responsibility to its listeners and to our democracy by refusing to dig deep and tackle these critical questions head-on." E-mail morning@npr.org

David Lazarus writes, 'Let's focus on five little words Bush uttered when running for governor of Texas in 1994 -- his defense against charges of insider trading: 'I absolutely had no idea.' Sound familiar? The know-nothing defense has been getting plenty of exercise of late, cited variously by officials of Enron, Arthur Andersen, WorldCom and other companies implicated in the current rash of corporate fraud... 'The know-nothing defense is a public statement of incompetence,' observed Ben Hermalin, acting dean of UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business. 'What you're saying is that you're incompetent as a corporate officer...' Asked later if his stock sale had been related to the company's impending setback, Bush replied, 'I absolutely had no idea and would not have sold it had I known.' In fact, SEC records show that Harken's president had warned board members two months before Bush's sell-off that the company had liquidity problems that would 'drastically affect' operations."

The Baltimore Sun writes that Bush "has proposed a new set of standards for business that would tighten the rules on audits and hold executives more accountable... That's fine, a skeptic might point out: He already got his... He parlayed a failing company into stock in another company that he bailed out of just before it, too, began to fail; he used the proceeds to support his minimal investment in a baseball team that he eventually cashed in for $18 million. Where do we get in line for that kind of work? None of this before ever stuck to him. But Americans are starting to get a better feel for just how rancid the system can be. Pals, connections, inside dope, duplicity and political pull characterize an unsavory corner of the business world -- and [Bush] was very much a part of it. The SEC's chief [was] a friend of his father, and the agency's general counsel, James R. Doty... arranged the sale of the Rangers to Mr. Bush's partnership in 1989. It's only the suckers who get taken."

"According to U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission records, on four separate occasions Gov. George W. Bush disregarded federal statutes by failing to file insider stock trade reports on a timely basis, back-dating one trade by some four months. Moreover, one key trade just a few weeks before Iraq invaded Kuwait -- but reported some eight months late after the Gulf War was over -- netted Bush close to $1 million in profit as he sold stock in Harken Energy, an oil company doing business in the Middle East wherein some of his father's largest contributors also maintained substantial positions… The governor also did not reveal the blatant conflicts of interest involved, since the chairman of the SEC was Richard Breedon, former lawyer with Houston firm Baker [as in Bush consigliere James] "and Botts and deputy counsel to Bush's father when he was vice president. Breedon received his SEC appointment after the elder Bush became president."

"Mysteriously, primary reporters have also ignored what could point to a nexus regarding foreign policy and personal financial interests. [In 1990, the Bush administration signed an agreement with Bahrain that made it the permanent principal allied base in the Middle East]. The military-base deal came after Harken announced its Jan. 30, 1990, joint oil-drilling venture with Bahrain. So President Bush's key contributors and his son George W. were carrying on personal financial business with Bahrain at the same time decisions were being made regarding the possibility of a war in the Gulf." We demand a Congressional investigation of the Harken-Bahrain Connection!

CNN Reports: "Consumer advocate Ralph Nader Friday called on the Securities & Exchange Commission to reopen its investigation into President Bush's 1990 sale of Harken Energy stock, just two months before its value sank under the weight of bad earnings reports… Bush, who was a member of Harken's audit committee, sold the stock for about $848,000. The SEC at the time investigated for possible insider trading law violations but did not charge Bush. 'I think it would be wise for the SEC ... to reopen that investigation in order to get the full facts before the American people,' said Nader…'When President [sic] Bush was asked about this by a reporter earlier this week, he brushed it aside, saying the he had been adequately vetted. That's not a sufficient answer.' Nader said Bush's 1990 stock sale was unethical. 'He engaged in very late filings with the SEC,' Nader said. 'He sold the stock just before some very damaging news was disclosed.'"

A former Securities and Exchange Commission chairman appointed court monitor of WorldCom Inc. on Wednesday was previously responsible for clearing U.S. President George W. Bush of insider trading concerning his involvement in Harken Energy during the lead up to the 1991 Gulf War. Bush's involvement in Harken Energy in 1990 during the presidency of his father resulted just a wrist slapping for George Junior. George Bush had failed to file share sales declarations to the SEC for eight months during a period when his shares tanked. The 1990 investigation into Harken has been receiving considerable coverage in US media in recent days. Interestingly few of the media covering the matter however have yet made the connection between Harken Energy and the father of the World's Most Wanted Terrorist (For more detail see... The GW Bush - Osama Bin Laden Connection) http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0109/S00108.htm