Word: tobacco
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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KENNETH STARR Whitewater prober investigating Clinton while serving tobacco firm investigated by Clinton...
They worked elbow to elbow inside the aging San Francisco federal building, agents from the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and U.S. postal inspectors. They crunched and recrunched scraps of data through a massive parallel-processing computer borrowed from the Pentagon, sifting through school lists, driver's-license registries, lists of people who had checked certain books out of libraries in California and the Middle West. "It was just an incredibly complicated jigsaw puzzle," says a former FBI agent who worked on the case...
...many years, the tobacco industry shared its wealth fairly evenly between Democrats and Republicans. Not anymore. Tobacco has chosen sides in a spectacular way. Without apology, it is now one of the biggest G.O.P. benefactors, and only a blip for the Democrats. The reason, a tobacco lobbyist says, is Bill Clinton. The President tried to tax tobacco to fund his health-care plan, and is backing increased authority by the Food and Drug Administration to regulate tobacco...
...result, tobacco interests have flooded the G.O.P. with campaign funds. The two largest givers of soft money to the Republicans are the two largest tobacco companies, Philip Morris and RJR Nabisco. All told, tobacco companies ponied up a record $4.1 million in 1995, 78% to Republicans, according to Common Cause. No longer able to argue that smoking is not unhealthy, the industry relies on ideology: Republican laissez-faire offers the best hope for its survival...
Lobbying groups such as the Tobacco Institute, headed by media-shy Samuel Chilcote Jr., 58, want most of all to buy silence from the government. And so far, they have. Republican leaders have made it clear there will be no anti-tobacco legislation this year. But the industry also appears to have got some active lobbying. The G.O.P. speaker of the Arizona house has complained that Haley Barbour once called and asked him to allow a vote on pro-tobacco legislation. The speaker refused, but Big Tobacco is still giving...