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September 25, 2005
Order Up One Ankle Bracelet, Men's
Since Martha Stewart was prosecuted and went to jail for doing basically the same thing, it would follow that Senator Bill Frist's perp walk should be coming any day now. Seems that among Doc Frist's powers, beyond being able to diagnose brain-dead people as scentient from 1000 miles away, is the ability to magically dump stock just before it tanks.
Precisely a month later, after the stock was sold, its price tumbled 9 percent when executives in the company -- HCA Inc., which was founded by Frist's father and on whose board Frist's brother serves -- disclosed that hospital admissions of insured patients were lower than expected, depressing profits in the second quarter.
The timing thus raised questions about whether Frist had somehow traded on information he obtained in advance from the company. "Frist has been in the Senate for many years now, and the conflict is not new," said Melanie Sloan, executive director of the watchdog group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. "Why did he decide to sell it then? Why not years ago? What's changed? Did he know that the stock was about to take a fall?"
Gee, a Republican involved in a financial scandal? Say it ain't so! (The old DC maxim, for anyone who hasn't heard it, is that Republican scandals usually involve money, while Democratic scandals usually involve sex.)
The SEC has taken a pretty staunch interest in Doc Frist's miraculous powers of precognition. And where there's smoke, it turns out there's some fire.
Blind trusts are designed to keep an arm’s-length distance between federal officials and their investments, to avoid conflicts of interest. But documents show that Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist knew quite a bit about his accounts from nearly two dozen letters from the trust administrators.
Frist, R-Tenn., received regular updates of transfers of assets to his blind trusts and sales of assets. He also was able to initiate a stock sale of a hospital chain founded by his family with perfect timing. Shortly after the sale this summer, the stock price dived... Documents on file with the Senate show the trustees for Frist and his immediate family wrote the senator nearly two dozen times between 2001 and July 2005.
This is a man who wants to be your president, folks. The $64,000 question is, will Frist get the same treatment that Martha Stewart got? Given that Martha routinely gave money to Democrats, while Frist (like those in charge of deciding who gets prosecuted for securities violations) is a Republican, I somehow doubt it. Ken Lay's not in prison, why should Frist go? Right?
A full and complete investigation is called for; and if the facts end up as they appear -- that Frist's family violated rules of blind trusts and tipped him off to news that would drive the stock down -- Frist ought to end up wearing the electronic ankle bracelet underneath his prison jumper that Martha had to. Bill Frist sentenced to jail time? It's a good thing.
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