10. THE BUSH FAMILY AND ITS CONFLICTS OF INTEREST

Richard Nixon had his brother Donald; Jimmy Carter had his brother Billy, Ronald Reagan had his brother Neil. But, in recent presidential history, no president has had the blatant familial conflicts of interest that George Bush has.

Prescott Bush. Brother. Munenobu Shoji, president of a Japanese real estate firm, reported that his firm and another, both run by a former Japanese crime boss, paid Prescott $200,000 for investment advice. Shoji said he was introduced to Prescott by the president of a firm with connections to an organized-crime syndicate. "I thought of making investments in the United States with the help of Mr. Bush, who is a financial consultant and knows many influential people such as the presidents of South Korea and the Philippines," Shoji said.

Neil Bush. Son. Neil was a director of Silverado Savings and Loan, in Colorado, which was shut down by regulators in December 1988 and is expected to cost taxpayers about $1 billion. Regulators were told to delay closing Silverado until after election day in 1988. In mid-July, 1991, Neil was hired as director of new business development for TransMedia Communications, a cable sports network. When asked, Bill Daniels, the cable TV tycoon who hired Neil, said he will "absolutely" continue to communicate with the president (George Bush) in his battle to stave off re-regulation of the cable industry.

Jeb Bush. Son. Jeb Bush, a Miami real estate developer, knew Leonel Martinez, a Miami builder, as a generous contributor to Bush family causes. Others knew that Martinez imported more than 3 1/2 tons of cocaine and more than 75 tons of marijuana into the United States and was under investigation for more than four murders. Martinez, also a dedicated Reaganite and active supporter of the contras, is now serving 23 years in prison for drug trafficking.

George W. Bush. Son. When Harken Energy Corp. of Grand Prairie, Texas, signed an oil-production sharing agreement with Bahrain, a tiny island off the coast of Saudi Arabia, industry experts marveled over how a virtually anonymous company, with no previous international drilling experience, could land such a potentially valuable concession. Perhaps the experts were not aware that George W. Bush, eldest son of the President, was on Harken's board of directors and a $50,000-a-year "consultant" to the company's chief executive officer. George sold more than 200,000 shares of Harken stock just weeks before Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, on August 2, 1990 but did not report the "insider" stock sale until March of 1991, nearly eight months after the federal deadline for disclosing such transactions.

SSU CENSORED RESEARCHER: DUSTIN HARP

SOURCE: SAN FRANCISCO EXAMINER, 110 Fifth Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94103
DATE: 7/28/91
TITLE: "Crime-linked firms hired Prescott Bush"

SOURCE: SANTA ROSA PRESS DEMOCRAT, 427 Mendocino Ave., Santa Rosa, CA 95401,
DATES: 7/19/91 and 8/6/91
TITLES: "Neil Bush's new boss" and "Son's S&L not closed"

SOURCE: SPIN, 6 West 18th St., 11th Floor, New York, NY 10011,
DATE: 12/3/91
TITLE: "See No Evil"
AUTHOR: Jefferson Morley

SOURCE: THE TEXAS OBSERVER, 307 West 7th St., Austin, TX 78701,
DATES: 7/12/91 and 8/6/91
TITLES: "Oil in the family" and "Global Entanglements"
AUTHOR: David Armstrong

COMMENTS: Author Jefferson Morley said that "the revelation that the President and his son and the nation's top drug policy official have received money from a convicted cocaine trafficker -- and have not returned said campaign contributions -- is worthy of mass media and reportorial follow-up. My article in SPIN received neither."

Journalist David Armstrong notes that "given George W. Bush's involvement in Harken Energy, exposure of the company's more unsavory connections would be unlikely to improve the president's standing in the polls."

The various sources used by Project Censored to compile this nomination about President George Bush, his family, and their questionable conflicts of interest combine to make a point about the media coverage. Indeed, if a person happened to read a variety of sources on this issue, one would have a fairly good insight into how members of the Bush family use the presidency to further their personal goals despite the appearance of serious conflicts of interest. This is asking a lot of even the most concerned "good citizen." It is the media's responsibility to collect all the information about the various intrigues of the Bush family and present it to the American public in the context of the political/economic scene. This, of course, the media has not done.