President Negroponte?

Posted by Mary Mancini on May 24, 2006 under Uncategorized |

My drive home from work was ruined tonight by a story on Marketplace. According to Dawn Kopecki author of a recent Business Week article, President Bush has given John Negroponte, the intelligence czar, the authority to “exempt any publicly traded corporation that is working on national defense issues or national security issues from the reporting and accounting requirements under the 1934 Securities and Exchange Act“, which is “the rules and regulations that require companies to keep accurate records, acurate books, accurate accounting . . . and then disclose those projects and that information to investors.”

Kopecki pointed out the significance of the date the memo was signed - May 5. She said, “it is the day that Porter Goss stepped down from the CIA. It’s also six days before USA Today published its story that three major telephone companies had turned over massive amounts of customer calling records to the federal government, that the NSA was using to data-mine and look for patterns and, basically, spy on.”

Marketplace host Kai Ryssdal, bless him, remarked on the significance of the date and the memo: “Now, if you play this out, conceivably what this rule now means is that AT&T and Bell South and Verizon, who have these government contracts — it’s been reported in the papers — have these government contracts to sell customer data to the government, they may never have to report that income or how the finances of that program worked.”

Kopecki agreed and added, “The White House, when I asked them point-blank whether or not any company, including those telephone companies, had been given this waiver, they said no comment. Negroponte’s office hasn’t called me back since I sent them my questions two days ago. We really don’t know, and I believe, and what securities attorneys have told us, is we may never know because it doesn’t require anyone to disclose it to anyone outside the Senate and House intelligence committees.”

Take a look at the memo President Bush sent to Negroponte [.pdf]. Read the article in Business Week.

President Bush is covering his tracks.