Claim: Democrats and the Clinton administration received more campaign contributions from Enron and were more accommodating of Enron's lobbying efforts than Republicans and the Bush administration.
Status: False.
Example: [Collected on the Internet, 2002]
SCANDAL IN THE WHITE HOUSE Texas, an energy company, big money, Bush in the White House. This has all the makings of a Republican scandal. Certainly there is a political dimension here. Enron's chairman did meet with the president and the vice president in the Oval Office. Enron gave $420,000 to the president's party over three years. It donated $100,000 to the president's inauguration festivities. The Enron chairman stayed at the White House The taxpayer-supported Export-import Bank subsidized Enron for more than BUT ... the president under whom all this happened wasn't George W. Bush.
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Origins: The debacle that was Enron was years in the making and will probably never be fully unravelled no matter how much time is devoted to investigating it. Enron traded so much money and influence through its lobbying efforts for so many years
Enron's tentacles ran so deep into Washington's political establishment that
And The Hartford Courant noted:
The company also was generous with state and local candidates from both major political parties. Its tentacles were wrapped around high-profile figures in several administrations.
The attempt made in the piece of netlore quoted above to deflect blame from the Bush administration and dump it onto the Clinton White House includes some major inaccuracies, such as the claim that "the Enron chairman stayed at the White House
As well, given the General Accounting Office's investigation into connections between Enron and Vice President Dick Cheney's planning of Bush administration energy policy, "the corporation's access to the administration at its highest levels" apparently continued well after Bill Clinton left the White House. According to USA Today:
The collapsed energy-trading company spent at least
Enron spent nearly three times as much money lobbying the Bush administration in the first half of 2001 as it initially reported.
As for the supposedly shocking monetary figures bandied about ("Enron gave $420,000 to the [Democratic] president's party over three years. It donated $100,000 to the president's inauguration festivities."), those numbers don't come close to matching what was reported about Enron's contributions to
Since 1989, the Houston-based energy broker and its employees have made more than
Nor do they match what The New York Times uncovered:
Enron, Arthur Andersen and Vinson & Elkins, a Houston law firm, are among the most generous contributors to
Last updated: 30 March 2006
Sources: