Word: laying
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...Bush told reporters that he had not talked with Enron CEO Kenneth L. Lay about the company's woes. But the White House later acknowledged that Lay, a longtime friend of Bush's, had lobbied Commerce Secretary Don Evans and Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill. Lay called O'Neill to inform him of Enron's shaky finances and to warn that because of the company's key role in energy markets, its collapse could send tremors through the whole economy. Lay compared Enron to Long-Term Capital Management, a big hedge fund whose near collapse in 1998 required a bailout...
...subpoenas, covering the period from 1999 through 2001, are aimed at learning "what the officers knew and what they did about it," said a committee official. The first hearing this year is scheduled for Jan. 24, headed by Connecticut Democrat Joe Lieberman. The first appearance of Enron chairman Lay is scheduled for Feb. 4 before the Senate Commerce Committee...
...Even Dick Cheney is playing ball, sending word Wednesday from his undisclosed ballpark that yes, he'd met with Lay six times during the energy-policy formulations of last spring, but no, the influence-seeking Lay didn't happen to mention to the Vice President or anyone else around that he was chairman of a house of cards...
...Lay, of course, hasn't been charged with anything yet. But in the emerging court of public opinion he's become a radioactive character in a drama tailor-made for a class war. Democrats are poised to gin up every kind of Congressional committee they can think of this spring to very loudly look into the matter of why, on one hand, there are a host of impoverished Enron employees out there who had their non-diversified nest eggs cracked when the company's 401(k) plan was "frozen" during the stock's worst slide - and Lay and Enron executives...
...Bush's exposure to any wrongdoing that gets attributed to Lay and his crowd seems limited. Sure, this White House has been an overt fan of energy deregulation, and certainly Bush didn't see Enron's role in the California crisis quite the way, say, Gray Davis did. And the list of Administration members with Enron connections is long indeed - aside form Lay buddies Bush and Cheney, Karl Rove was a big stockholder, Larry Lindsey and Robert Zoellick were $50,000-a-year board members, Marc Racicot was a lobbyist until Tuesday and Secretary of the Army Thomas White...