Word: richardsons
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...came crashing to the ground last week. No one was bleeding so heavily as the FBI and its director, Louis Freeh, whose top agent recanted some of his testimony against the 60-year-old Los Alamos engineer. But there was rubble everywhere you looked. Energy Secretary Bill Richardson, whose department had ignored security lapses at Los Alamos for years, was walking around in a daze. Rescue workers were still searching for Attorney General Janet Reno and her deputy, Eric Holder, who were trying to explain why they had suddenly agreed to drop 58 of 59 charges against a man once...
Then, on March 6, 1999, the New York Times disclosed the FBI probe without mentioning Lee's name. The next day, FBI agents rushed to his home to "sweat him" before he clammed up completely. A confused Lee owned up to nothing, and on March 8 Richardson fired him for unrelated security violations turned up during the W-88 investigation. His name was leaked to the press, and he became known as a "suspected Chinese spy." He still had not been charged...
...Bill Richardson's troubles, history may remember this as the year the secretary of energy got a very big promotion. Richardson announced Friday the administration's intention to dun the Strategic Petroleum Reserve for 30 million barrels of crude oil, and while the professed reason is to head off a heating-oil shortage this winter, Bill Clinton may have just created a new version of Alan Greenspan...
...move's immediate lesson is that when it comes to political expediency, Al Gore has nothing on his boss. Richardson denied any intended benefit for the aspiring veep, and indeed, not only does the decision positively dwarf Gore's Thursday proposal for "several" 5-million-barrel swaps, any benefits for goosing heating-oil stockpiles are unlikely to show up until well after the election. So the administration's it-was-Bill's-idea announcement, with Al Gore nowhere in sight, may help protect the veep against George W. Bush. But it doesn't make the precedent any less shocking...
...push up demand. The idea of tapping the reserve in the current climate has been around since last winter (when Gore, by the way, resisted the idea, calling it futile and short-term). Where was the administration then? Well, all summer Gore, as now, was bashing Big Oil, and Richardson, as now, was begging OPEC nations to boost production. Both men have now resorted to more practical means, and in the process discarded one more principle - the separation, whenever possible, of government from the markets - in favor of political concerns...