Word: peanuts
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...special counsel" is assigned to probe those peanut loans...
Attorney General Griffin Bell had argued for months that his own people in the Justice Department could objectively investigate the loans, upwards of $4.6 million, made by Bert Lance's Atlanta bank to the Carter peanut warehouse in Plains, Ga. It was a hard argument to sustain. Not only was Bell a Democrat, of course, but he was an old friend of the Carters' and of Lance. Faced with increasing criticism, Bell last week finally decided to put the probe into other hands. His choice was highly qualified: Paul Jerome Curran, 45, who not only is a Republican...
Republicans in Congress, who had been complaining about the dawdling pace of the peanut probe all along, immediately protested Bell's action, saying that he had not gone far enough to free the special counsel from possible Justice Department interference. Republican Presidential Hopeful Robert Dole called the special counsel role "a perversion of the whole concept of an impartial investigation." Said Senate Minority Leader Howard Baker, who is also expected to declare for the presidency: "It is not proper for the Administration to be dragged kicking and screaming into this investigation...
Curran will be able to use FBI and Justice Department personnel, and he has plans to form a small staff of his own. He has authority to pursue all questions about the peanut loans. At one point, the company was $500,000 behind in its payments. Implicit in the investigation is the question of whether any of the loan money was illegally used in Carter's campaign in 1976. The investigation will certainly entail a detailed look at the tangled affairs of Billy Carter, who operated the family business while his brother was running for the White House...
...interviewed him at length and then printed such a story. Hayes had good reason to be groping for an explanation: the Post had quoted him as saying that he and Billy Carter had deliberately falsified records concerning loans from the National Bank of Georgia to the family's peanut warehouse in Plains...