Posted on 01/26/2004 11:25:39 AM PST by Pharmboy
HOUSTON (AP) - In the annals of embarrassing presidential relatives, Neil Bush is no Billy Carter or Roger Clinton. But his messy divorce has produced some eye-opening disclosures. Among them: He had sex with women who showed up uninvited at his hotel rooms in Asia; he had an affair and may have fathered a child out of wedlock; and he stands to make millions from businesses in which he has little expertise - including a computer-chip company managed in part by the son of former Chinese president Jiang Zemin.
It seems certain opportunities tend to present themselves when your name is Neil Bush.
For his part, Bush defended the fees he has received for consulting jobs. But he gave little insight into whether the women who offered him sex in Hong Kong and Taiwan were perhaps paid by mysterious benefactors.
In a deposition taken last March and reviewed by The Associated Press, Bush told the attorney for his wife of 23 years, Sharon, that the women did not ask him for money and he did not pay them anything.
Asked how he knew what to do when he opened his door and saw a woman standing there, the 48-year-old Bush replied: "Whatever happened, happened."
"It's a pretty remarkable thing for a man just to go to a hotel room door and open it and have a woman standing there and have sex with her," said the attorney, Marshall Davis Brown.
"It was very unusual," Bush replied.
Sharon Bush also accused Neil of fathering a child with the woman he now plans to marry. The woman's ex-husband has filed a defamation lawsuit, and DNA testing has been requested.
The titillating details have made barely a splash in Texas, where loyalty to the president runs deep. University of Texas government professor Bruce Buchanan said he doubts Neil Bush's shenanigans will become political fodder in the 2004 election.
"There are lots of examples of presidents with troubled siblings and it never seemed to have that much of an impact," he said.
Jimmy Carter's beer-swilling brother, Billy, wrote a book called "Redneck Power" and accepted money from the government of Libya. Bill Clinton's half-brother, Roger, was jailed for a year for dealing cocaine. Richard Nixon's kid brother Donald took $205,000 from Howard Hughes in the hopes of opening a fast-food chain selling Nixonburgers.
It is not the first time Neil Bush has caused his family some trouble. At the end of his father's presidency, Neil was among a group of defendants who agreed to pay $49.5 million to settle a negligence lawsuit over the $1 billion collapse of the savings and loan he directed in Colorado.
Bush denied wrongdoing and was not charged in the grand jury investigation, but the U.S. Office of Thrift Supervision found Bush's conduct "involved significant conflicts of interest and constituted multiple breaches" of his fiduciary duties.
Bush has gone on to reap profits from other ventures. In the deposition, he said he hoped to receive an estimated $2 million for acting as a consultant to Grace Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp., co-founded by Jiang Zemin's eldest son.
"Now, you have absolutely no educational background in semiconductors, do you Mr. Bush?" Brown asked.
"That's correct," said Bush, who holds an MBA from Tulane University.
Bush recently told the AP he has "not received one penny of compensation" from Grace Semiconductor because he never did the consulting. He did not respond to a request for comment on his divorce proceedings.
Bush has focused most of his energy on Ignite Inc., an Austin-based educational software startup. So far, he has raised $23 million from investors, including Winston Wong, the other founder of Grace Semiconductor.
"Let's face the reality," Bush told the AP in 2002. "I probably have access to people who probably wouldn't meet with a development-stage company, but I feel I'm held to a higher standard."
Bush's tax returns, obtained by the AP, showed $357,000 in income from Ignite and at least $798,218 from three transactions involving the stock of Kopin Corp., a small U.S. high-tech company where he had previously been a consultant.
There is no evidence he has tried to enlist help from the president for any of his ventures. Bush spokesman Taylor Gross said the White House had no comment.
Still, said Rice University political science professor Bob Stein, "there is a family pattern here where the Bush sons - Jeb, Neil and George - have benefited tremendously by their connections through their father."
Currying favor with a relative of the president can "start to smell bad," said Steven Weiss, communications director for the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan group that tracks money in politics.
Rex John, who has known Neil Bush since his Denver days, said he has never known Neil Bush to use his family connections to obtain business opportunities.
"I'm sure it has opened many doors for him, but it wasn't Neil out there trying to get them open," John said. "Neil would never do anything like that. That's not his style."
After Neil Bush severed his 23-year marriage to Sharon in May, he proposed last month in France to Maria Andrews, a former volunteer for former first lady Barbara Bush.
Sharon Bush's lawyer in the defamation case, David Berg, allowed the AP to review the deposition but said he did not have a copy of Sharon Bush's testimony. He would not make her available for an interview.
Sharon Bush, 51, alleged her ex-husband could have fathered Andrews' 3-year-old son. That prompted Andrews' former husband to file a defamation lawsuit against Sharon Bush. Neil Bush submitted a tissue sample for analysis.
In the meantime, he has been ordered to pay $1,500 a month in child support for two of his children, Pierce, 17 and Ashley, 14. The couple's oldest child, Lauren, is 19.
He was a correspondent for GMA giving reports. What difference do the particulars make?
You said the Reagan kids didn't get doors opened for them due to who their father was. They most certainly did.
I'm not putting it down. Just pointing it out.
Aside from some forums that are dedicated to religion,FR is the only chat room I watch and to which I contribute.I have never seen anything,positive or negative on the religious forums about the family.
Every political discussion that even tangentially touches on the Kennedy's here evokes a spate of responses full of vitriol,scorn and sarcasm.
I have come to wonder if many posters are conservative or just anti anything that does not agree with their preconceived notions of what is/was or should be.
If someone could link me with material that supports the contention of most on this forum;that is,the Kennedy's are held up as national icons,heroes and are coddled and spared rough treatment by the media and the public,I would appreciate it.
Likewise anything on FR that gives them the benefit of the doubt.In case I'm not clear,I am talking about responses to articles,not the articles themselves,unless they are total puff pieces,which few are but if they are I am happy to look at those too. Thanks.
I never said $1500 was lavish (though it does seem roughly appropriate), but the concept of "fair and equitable support" should not be a function of a person's income, except perhaps if a person's income is too low. His income should be immaterial as long as he has "enough". The child support payment of someone making $1M should be identical to that of someone making $75k, not more and not less. It is a pernicious kind of socialism that asserts that a child effectively owns a percentage of their parent's assets, and is fraught with moral hazards. Yet I see many people advocating this as though it is "right" or a good idea.
At this point, it is no longer about the "needs" of a child, as a children have roughly the same needs on average regardless of the income of their parents. One can make a similar argument about alimony. It is blatantly obvious in many of these cases that the nominal stated reason for the specifics of the judgment are a load of crap; the details of the action speak far louder than the nominal pronouncements regarding the theoretical justifications.
Are you that poor, or hate your ex and kids that much?
Huh? I've never been in the position of ever needing to pay child support, alimony, or any other similar obligation. Financially I've been all over the map, though dirt poor for three-fourths of my life. This isn't personal for me at all; I'm merely pointing out that many of the presumptions about support obligations I see come up in these discussions are patently absurd and arguably immoral.
My point is that from my observations Freepers seem rabidly anti Kennedy,and I think it redirects the discussions and takes focus off of the facts in the articles and leads the discussion away from the issues posed by the article.
I do think comparing Clinton's brother and brothers-in-law is more related.
The fact that teddy wasn't run out of office is proof alone that he was "coddled." Trent Lott was run out of office on far less and so were other non-dems. Not only was Lott not coddled, he was unfairly villified. Afterall, we still have a former kkk member -- a demoncrat -- still in the Senate. My point is the Republicans and Conservatives are not given passes like the kennedys and all dems.
I do not mean this to be rude, but -- as far as your requesting proof -- sorry, a few posts cannot educate anyone in the same way a lifetime of even casual observation would.
By the way, did you watch the State of the Union? Did you admire and approve of how teddy acted? Quite becoming for a statesman, no? If ANY non-dem or non-kennedy had pulled that childish and rude behavior, well it would have been on every leading newscast....
Oh please. He made over a million dollars in shady penny stocks and fishy "consulting" jobs, and he can't provide $750 per month for each child who bears his name? Give me a f**king break.
Yes, there are injustices in the family-court world, like the guys who have to pay child support even when DNA proves it's not their kid, but this is not one of them.
-ccm
He doesn't *quite* fit the bill for the Insider Fraud list, at least not yet; but I'm sure he'll manage to get on somebody's list or other before long. LOL.
Wowzer! So weary, after only 27 days?
You either have an abnormally low pain threshold, or there's something about you that simply screams "attack me!"
I dunno, maybe it's your profile page...
Definitely the latter. A cyber "Kick Me Hard!" sign.
The Alamo Hotel has several memories for me. I was at Fire Station 1 at 5th and Trinity during the early eighties, when downtown Austin was very rough. Punches Lounge, where you went when you were too burned out to be a Bandito anymore, was still running. Anyway, the Alamo Hotel had become a by the week or by the hour place, quite a comedown from it's proud beginnings. The Willie Nelson-Merle Haggard music video, "Pancho and Lefty" filmed the sequence where they filmed the line "the poets tell how Pancho fell, Lefty's livin' in a cheap hotel, the desert's quiet and Cleveland's cold" at the Alamo Hotel. Nelson was out front, and Haggard was up in the room. We hosed down the streets to make it look like it was raining. We refused to hose down the cars, as they were antiques, so the producer did that himself (later it turned out the water swelled the doors on one of the woodies to the point they wouldn't close). Anyway, the hotel used to have a drug store and a liquor store inside, and the original signs were still up. If you see the video, it pans across the sign and shows the original text: "Alamo Hotel: Drugs, Liquor".
Woman + wearing high heels + wall = ?
All I can say is, didn't work for me.
Heh, heh; what is this an election year or somethin'???
The titillating details have made barely a splash in Texas...
Well Ms. Easton, sweetheart, you gotta go some to make a splash in Texas. The, er, material you AP writers produce is barely worth scrapin' off our boots....
FGS
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