Posted on 11/12/2002 11:13:02 PM PST by JohnHuang2
ASHINGTON, Nov. 12 — In a parting shot at Democrats today, Senator Fred D. Thompson released documents detailing how one of Al Gore's top presidential campaign officials, Johnny Hayes, was paid to do consulting work for Enron during the 2000 campaign. Mr. Hayes was hired to help the company resolve a costly dispute with a federal agency and also to lobby federal energy regulators.
Mr. Hayes, who was Mr. Gore's national finance chairman in the 2000 campaign, was paid $100,000 by a prominent law firm, Wyatt, Tarrant & Combs, that had been hired to resolve a dispute between Enron and the Tennessee Valley Authority, according to the managing partner at the firm. The dispute was settled late in 2000 after Enron agreed to pay more than $200 million.
The firm had also been hired by Enron to obtain "better communication" with a commissioner at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, Linda Breathitt, whose father was a lawyer at the firm, according to documents written by a former partner at the firm that were also released by Mr. Thompson, a Tennessee Republican who is retiring this year.
Enron had close relations with President Bush and other top Republicans, and the documents illustrate how the company strove during the 2000 elections to play both sides of the fence by fostering close links to senior Democratic party officials. Enron had long been a major financial backer of Mr. Bush, a relationship Democrats have used to try to damage the Bush administration.
But Enron, apparently concerned two years ago that Mr. Gore might win the election, set out on an aggressive tack to also cultivate people close to him and other Democratic officials. Mr. Hayes, who did not return a phone call seeking comment today, also worked for Enron after Mr. Gore was defeated.
Mr. Thompson released the documents during a Senate Governmental Affairs Committee hearing today in part because he said he was concerned that Democrats on the panel were trying to paint Republican appointees to the energy commission in an unfair light.
"Selective indignation is not going to work," Mr. Thompson said. The panel's chairman, until next year, is Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut, who is seen as a possible presidential candidate in 2004. Mr. Lieberman denied any effort to "get Republicans and protect the Democrats."
Details of Mr. Hayes's work for Enron have been reported by The Chattanooga Times Free Press.
In an interview this afternoon, the managing partner at Wyatt, Tarrant & Combs, Kevin Hable, confirmed that the firm paid Mr. Hayes $100,000 in March 2001 for work Mr. Hayes performed the year before on behalf of Enron.
Mr. Hable said that lawyers on the executive committee of the law firm were not told that Mr. Hayes had been retained to do the work until January 2001. The only person at the firm who knew about the deal with Mr. Hayes before that date, he said, was Charles W. Bone, who he said had sought to arrange a $325,000 payment to Mr. Hayes. The executive committee, Mr. Hable added, also did not know Mr. Bone was lobbying the energy commission until 2001. Mr. Bone, who left the law firm late last year, did not return a phone call seeking comment.
At the hearing today, Mr. Thompson noted that Ms. Breathitt's father, Edward T. Breathitt, the former governor of Kentucky, had been a lawyer at the Wyatt law firm at the same time that Mr. Bone and Mr. Hayes were in contact with Ms. Breathitt.
Under questioning by Mr. Thompson at the hearing, Ms. Breathitt, a Democrat appointed to the energy commission by President Bill Clinton in 1997, testified that her contacts with Enron officials were proper. Her father, she said, was paid by the Wyatt firm only a fixed salary that did not increase based on new business. Mr. Breathitt has since retired from the firm.
Ms. Breathitt added that many of the positions she had taken at the commission were adverse to Enron. "I have been the most reticent, least philosophically attuned to where Enron was going, in my opinion," Ms. Breathitt said.
The energy commission chairman, Patrick Wood III, who was appointed by Mr. Bush last year, said after the hearing that he believed that the harsh questioning of Ms. Breathitt had been unfair.
For his part, Mr. Thompson also emphasized that he was not asserting that Ms. Breathitt had done anything improper, only that he was trying to show how easy it was to draw negative inferences in such situations.
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