3.24.00
Crooked Coelho

3.23.00
Overdosing On Scandal

3.22.00
Playing Defense; Camelot's End

3.21.00
The Cox Boomlet Begins

he Tony Coelho time bomb may finally have gone off for Vice President Gore. An exhaustive article by Bill Hogan in the March 23 issue of National Journal reveals that Coelho, who chairs Gore's presidential campaign, is currently under criminal investigation for his role as U.S. commissioner general to the 1998 World Exposition in Lisbon, Portugal.

Gore turned heads in Washington when he asked Coelho to lead his presidential bid last May. Everybody agreed that Gore's team needed a shakeup. But Coelho? In 1989, he abandoned a once-promising career in Congress by abruptly resigning amid damaging disclosures about his personal finances. Didn't this spell trouble for Gore?

It sure did. Last October came the news that the State Department's inspector general had written a blistering report on Coelho's tenure in Lisbon. Hogan writes: "Chief among [the charges] was that Coelho had exposed the U.S. government to liability for a $300,000 private loan — a loan, it was later disclosed, that had not yet been repaid. It also turned out that Coelho had leased for himself, at government expense, a four-bedroom, $18,000-a-month waterfront apartment (complete with swimming pool) in Lisbon, and that 'certain records' were destroyed before the government's auditors arrived in Lisbon for an on-site review." There's more, but you get the point.

Now, writes Hogan, the federal probe is trying to determine "whether Coelho used government employees, property, and other resources to advance his own business and financial interests while he was the U.S. commissioner general of Expo '98." Based on the evidence Hogan presents, it sure looks like he did.

An example: Coelho was trying to lure investors for a project of his called LoanNet, a mortgage-processing Internet business, during the height of Expo '98. He invited a couple of his buddies, both K-Street Democrats, to bring their wives to Portugal. Coelho gave them round-trip tickets donated to the government by a private sponsor of the U.S. pavilion at Expo '98, had his government chauffeur pick them up at the airport and take them on a sight-seeing trip, put them up at his luxury apartment, and so on. William Cable and Charles Manatt both say that Coelho didn't mention LoanNet during their Lisbon frolic, but shortly afterward they each kicked in $200,000. (LoanNet went bust early last year.)

Coelho emerges as vengeful as well as crooked. Coelho's lawyer Stanley Brand, writes Hogan, "recently retained a team of private investigators who, among other things, have collected derogatory personal information on at least one federal employee who has been cooperating with the government investigators." Once again, the politics of personal destruction melds seamlessly with the politics of personal protection.

When the initial Coelho revelations were exposed last October, Gore appeared on "Face the Nation" and dismissed the allegations as "inside baseball." But now he's been hit by a pitch. What Gore really needs to do is sit down with the Hogan article and read it carefully. Hold the iced tea.

SELLOUT UPDATE
The House Republicans' latest "budget fact of the day" is that they're spending $18.2 billion more on Medicare than the president wanted. Your Congress at work.

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