Word: puerto
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...story of Espy's role in the Puerto Rico issue, which TIME has assembled from dozens of interviews and documents, emerges at a time when the White House has been struggling to refute allegations that Tyson enjoys undue influence with Clinton and his staff. As Arkansas' Governor, Clinton had close ties with Tyson, the state's largest employer. Several company executives helped finance Clinton's many campaigns. Tyson general counsel Jim Blair guided Hillary Clinton's fabulously successful commodities trades. Tyson was also the second largest contributor to a $220,000 fund Clinton used to pursue his Arkansas political agenda...
...poultry industry from his days as a Mississippi Congressman. The Justice Department and Congress are currently investigating Espy's association with Tyson, prompted by accusations that he accepted plane trips and football tickets from the chicken producer. (He later reimbursed the company.) The Agriculture Secretary's intervention in the Puerto Rican matter offers a vivid example of how Tyson benefits from its historic connections to Clinton. The case illustrates that such influence is best wielded subtly, and better still when third parties can front as the ones seeking favors and getting them...
...broiler group serves as the trade association for the poultry industry as a whole, but Tyson dominates the council since dues are paid according to company size. To get action on the Puerto Rican problem, a Tyson executive called George Watts, president of the Broiler Council, who in turn called Espy's chief of staff and the acting Assistant Agriculture Secretary. Since USDA rules don't require the importer's name on consumer-size packages, Watts urged the department to assert the primacy of federal law. Just nine days after Clinton's Inauguration, when the Administration had barely appointed enough...
...Tyson wasn't satisfied with that. Having pressured Puerto Rico to ditch the labeling requirement, the chicken giant struck for more. The Broiler Council began an attempt to craft new regulations even more favorable to the mainland producers. At a Feb. 18 meeting in San Juan attended by Puerto Rican officials and poultry-industry representatives, Tyson momentarily dropped the pretense that the industry group was doing the lobbying. While the Broiler Council had requested the session, records reviewed by TIME show clearly that it was a Tyson vice president, Mike Morrison, who described in detail the many rules Tyson wanted...
With whom, though? The talks took a strange turn, in which the chicken industry became the mouthpiece of the U.S. government. While USDA officials had the responsibility to bargain with Puerto Rico, as the earlier court order contemplated, the Broiler Council took over instead. USDA staffers in San Juan say their bosses in Washington told them to back off. "Face it," says a career USDA official who has dealt with the poultry industry for two decades. "On something like this we're not going to accept anything the Broiler Council doesn't want and they're not going to accept...