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Book Excerpt
WASHINGTON, March 8, 2004 — If history is any guide, George W. Bush will not seek to undo the regulations that help shroud so many financial transactions from view. After all, his presidency has been characterized by a zeal for secrecy, an unrelenting push to stem the free flow of information. >>
Book Excerpt
WASHINGTON, March 2, 2004 — In 1981, John Edwards and his wife, Elizabeth, moved from Nashville, Tennessee, to North Carolina, where Edwards was raised. Elizabeth took a job as an attorney at one of Raleigh's leading bankruptcy law firms, while Edwards joined a firm known for its criminal defense work, Tharrington Smith & Hargrove. He was soon asked by Wade Smith, one of the firm's founders and a former chairman of the state Democratic Party, to take on a malpractice case. Edwards turned down several settlement offers, according to The New Yorker, including one for $750,000 made just before the case went to the jury. Ultimately, Edwards won a damage award of $3.7 million for his client, his first million-dollar verdict and a record in North Carolina at the time. The following year, 1985, Edwards won a $6.5 million judgment for a 6-year-old girl who'd suffered brain damage at Pitt Memorial Hospital in Greenville. >>
Book Excerpt
WASHINGTON, February 24, 2004 — John Kerry has made campaign finance reform an issue ever since he first ran for the Senate in 1984. In fact, the Massachusetts Democrat has been such an ardent and outspoken critic of political action committees that he has refused to accept donations from such organizations during all four of his senatorial campaigns. >>
WASHINGTON, February 13, 2004 — Investment companies dominated President George W. Bush's $47 million fourth quarter fundraising, driven by networks of top individual contributors, according to a recent supplement to "The Buying of the President 2004," a book by the Center for Public Integrity detailing the financial interests behind each presidential candidate. >>
WASHINGTON, January 8, 2004 — Enron Corp., the Houston-based energy firm that touched off a financial, legal and political scandal when it declared bankruptcy in December 2001, remains the top career patron of President George W. Bush, whose prolific fundraising in 2003 shattered all previous records for candidates. Enron's employees and political action committee have given more than $600,000 to Bush over the course of his political career, according to a new Center for Public Integrity book, The Buying of the President 2004 (HarperCollins). >>
WASHINGTON, January 8, 2004 — On May 30, 1997, Dick Cheney dispatched a two-page letter to Vice President Al Gore in hopes of staving off new federal regulations that presumably would prove both cumbersome and costly to Halliburton Company, the global oil-field services firm that Cheney had run since 1995. >>
WASHINGTON, June 13, 2003 — If Sen. John F. Kerry sticks with his campaign's legal view that he cannot use his wife's money to run for president, the Democratic candidate could lose as much as $832 million in potential campaign capital, according to a Center for Public Integrity study of recent financial disclosure records. >>
WASHINGTON, May 7, 2003 — Sen. John F. Kerry, D-Mass., whose largest campaign contributor lobbies on behalf of telecommunication interests, pushed the legislative priorities of its clients in the wireless industry on several occasions, a Center for Public Integrity analysis of campaign, lobbying and congressional records has found. >>
WASHINGTON, April 24, 2003 — Despite North Carolina Sen. John Edwards' quick-from-the-gate start raising $7.4 million in campaign cash since Jan. 1, Sen. John Kerry narrowly remains the top fundraiser amongst Democratic presidential contenders. >>
WASHINGTON, March 12, 2003 — As former Vice President Al Gore mulled a White House run late last year, he used a campaign finance loophole to send $100,000 he raised two years ago for the Florida recount to bolster his position in the first two states where presidential candidates test their mettle. >>
WASHINGTON, January 27, 2003 — If Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry were elected to the White House in 2004, he would be America's richest president in more than a century.
Kerry, a democratic presidential candidate, has listed assets worth between $165 and $626 million on his latest financial disclosure forms, and has publicly said that he has not ruled out using some of this wealth to run for president. >>