“It's striking,” FNC's Brit Hume contended Monday night, how “there is one person whose name almost never comes up” in media reports on corporate corruption “and that is the Treasury Secretary under the Clinton administration, Bob Rubin,” especially since he tried to get the Bush administration to pressure bond rating agencies to prop up Enron's rating, a move which would have benefited Rubin's new employer, Citigroup, which had arranged questionable financing for Enron.
Hume's comments led into a July 29 panel discussion on his Special Report with Brit Hume in which Jeff Birnbaum, Fortune magazine's Washington Bureau Chief, marveled: “It is remarkable, I think, the near deification of Rubin by a lot of elements of the press.”
Hume still wondered: “What accounts for the fact that we discussing this here at this table are probably the first group of journalists on television to do so, and we certainly aren't seeing a lot of it in the newspapers?” Morton Kondracke echoed Birnbaum, pointing to the media's “deification” of Rubin.
Indeed, in the July 29 edition of U.S. News & World Report Gloria Borger ridiculed the attempt by Republicans to blame Bill Clinton for the corporate wrongdoing. Her evidence: Bob Rubin told her so. She wrote: “The blame-Clinton scenario has the appeal of a simple cartoon: Today's corruption began in the 1990s and was shaped, as House Republican campaign chairman Tom Davis puts it, by a ‘culture of dishonesty and situational ethics that flowed directly from the White House, a lack of accountability, dishonesty, evasion, and dissemblance are the true legacies of the Clinton era’ Ipso facto, Clinton did it.”
She then countered: “One small problem: He didn't. 'Blaming Clinton is absolutely ridiculous,' ex-Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin told me.”
Last week, in a column urging the repeal of the tax cut, Washington Post reporter David Broder put Rubin on a pedestal: “As Robert Rubin, the former Clinton administration Treasury Secretary, whose judgment and integrity are praised by Republicans and Democrats alike, has said…” Broder complained about how House Republicans, who are “seeking short-term political gain at the expense of long-term fiscal sanity, have been staging votes to make the tax cuts permanent.”
Back to FNC on July 29, Hume set up the roundtable segment, as taken down by MRC analyst Brad Wilmouth: “It's striking that we are pretty far into this period of discussion about the stock market and whether the economy is sagging or not and all of this and who's to blame, and who's to blame for the corporate scandals. And there is one person whose name almost never comes up, and that is the Treasury Secretary under the Clinton administration, Bob Rubin. Some Republicans on the Hill have been saying that he ought to be called to testify. After all, he importuned the Treasury Department to try to protect Enron's credit rating while all this was happening from his post at Citigroup, where he is chairman of the executive committee or some such exalted title. Democrats, led by Lieberman, are resisting having him testify. Jeff, what about it? Should Bob Rubin be called to testify and explain what he knows about what went on during the Clinton administration and the development of the so-called 'bubble' and the lobbying of the Treasury Department on Enron? Or is that unfair?”
Jeff Birnbaum of Fortune acknowledged media infatuation with Rubin: “No, I think he should be called to testify, and he should be taken to task by some people for his role, to the extent he has one, or that his company has one, Citigroup, with Enron and other loans. And, in fact, they have been, not at Rubin's level. But he also should be asked what he thinks should be done. It is remarkable, I think, the near deification of Rubin by a lot of elements of the press, that he was the person who was able to soothe the markets in a way that Paul O'Neill cannot or will not or does not want to. I think that it would be great just to call Rubin and ask him what is it you would do right now to try to stop the markets from roiling. He may not have any better an answer than Paul O'Neill has.”
Hume jumped in: “Well, the one thing he does say is – and Bill, I want to get your reaction to this before we turn to Mort – – is he says we've got to restore the long-term fiscal health, I think he may have said, of the economy. He's clearly talking about the federal budget, and he's clearly talking about the tax cut.”
Weekly Standard Publisher Bill Kristol then recalled the questionable activities Rubin conducted on behalf of his new employer to prop up Enron: “Yeah, he wants to repeal, I think, as many Democrats do, at least the out years, some of the tax cuts in the out years. But one thing I think they should ask Bob Rubin is why on November 8th he called the Undersecretary of the Treasury, Mr. Fisher, to ask him, to suggest to him that he might want to consider leaning on the debt rating agencies not to downgrade Enron. Now, that's a really serious thing, you know. Ken Lay called the White House to try to get a government bailout for Enron on the grounds that it would be bad for the economy if Enron failed. But that's at least a straightforward thing. Government bailout, yes or no. It's public. It's transparent. Asking the Treasury, suggesting to the Treasury Department that it lean on the debt rating agencies not to accurately reflect the true-”
Hume: “Which are private agencies.”
Kristol confirmed: “Which are private agencies, not to accurately reflect the true status of that debt is precisely the kind of monkeying with the system that has gotten us into this trouble. So it would be worth just asking Mr. Rubin why he felt he should make that call.”
Morton Kondracke of Roll Call: “Yeah, I absolutely agree that he should be called to, on that score, to see what intervention, Citigroup-”
Hume: “What accounts for the fact that we discussing this here at this table are probably the first group of journalists on television to do so, and we certainly aren't seeing a lot of it in the newspapers. Jeff touched on it, but what's your take on that, Mort?”
Kondracke agreed with Birnbaum: “Well, he was deified during the Clinton years as one of the key makers of the world economy. He and Alan Greenspan and Larry Summers, his successor as Treasury Secretary. And things were going along swimmingly, you know, it was a bubble, but we didn't call it a bubble while it was going on, and he was a big hero. And he has managed to avoid anybody's holding him responsible for it…”
(This update courtesy of the Media Research Center.)
