There'll be no more White House sleepovers, if indicted Bush crony Kenneth Lay decides to tell all.
Now that former Enron chairman Kenneth Lay has been indicted for his role in the company's downfall (the specific charges are to be unsealed Thursday), the question that needs to be asked is: Will he turn against the Bushes?
Lay recently told the New York Times that it was a "tougher decision not to indict me than to indict me." Indeed, for the Bush administration, Lay's indictment is the perfect Machiavellian political move. Once the presumably humbled, handcuffed Lay has been paraded in front of the news media, Justice Department prosecutors are likely to give statements to the press saying, in effect, that they're going after all of the Enron miscreants -- even the ones who are friends of President Bush and his father.
But what if Lay responds with his own Machiavellian move? Others crossed by George W. Bush have decided to speak out rather than stand by quietly. Paul O'Neill did so after he was forced out as treasury secretary. The Bush administration's chief of counterterrorism, Richard Clarke, also emerged as a critic. Both men wrote bestselling books and got a measure of revenge. Lay could do the same. And while his brigade of lawyers would obviously advise him to keep quiet, Lay could choose to ignore them. He doesn't have much to lose.
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Lay could dish the dirt on several important topics: the Karl Rove-brokered push that resulted in Enron paying Christian conservative turned super-lobbyist Ralph Reed $300,000; Lay's dealings with secretary of state turned super-lobbyist James Baker; why Enron hired Ed Gillespie, the man who now heads the Republican National Committee; the reason for Lay's decision to allow the Bushes to use Enron's fleet of airplanes as their own; what happened in those meetings with Dick Cheney and his energy task force; and what really happened with the California energy crisis.
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http://salon.com/opinion/feature/2004/07/08/kenneth_lay/index.html