At any given time, it’s hard to say what agenda is being played out by whom in the FCC-Portals fiasco.
Let’s take a look at the players and their roles.
The Justice Department recently decided to investigate, among other things, the illegal $1-million kickback Tennessee developer Franklin Haney is suspected of paying lobbyist and former Clinton-Gore ’96 campaign manager Peter Knight for helping clinch a 20-year, $400 million government lease to house the FCC in the Portals.
House telecommunications subcommittee Chairman Billy Tauzin (R-La.) asked Attorney General Janet Reno last November to launch a criminal investigation of the FCC-Portals lease.
For the Justice Department, investigations of Clintonites have become a full-time job. Was DOJ’s decision to include the FCC-Portals matter in its larger campaign-finance probe driven by lack of resources or because it really believes there’s something there?
For Tauzin, who has spent lots of time on the road with House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Texas) flacking for tax reform, it was only a matter of writing a letter to Attorney General Janet Reno.
The House Commerce Committee, which Tauzin would like to assume from Rep. Tom Bliley (R-Va.) one day soon, is doing most of the heavy lifting on the FCC-Portals probe. Committee investigators believe they have a smoking gun-the $1-million check from Haney to Knight-and want due credit if they can nail one or more of the participants.
Tauzin’s camp believes the full committee’s probe was stuck in the mud before Justice agreed to investigate the FCC-Portals lease. That may or may not be the case. But in the weeks since Haney and Knight thumbed their noses at the committee by dodging detailed questions, there has been nothing except cryptic teasers about impending subpoenas. Granted, Bliley is consumed in legislation to reform the multigovernment international satellite cartel. But that still leaves Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas), chairman of the oversight and investigations subcommittee, to hold court.
And so here’s the GOP-led Congress beating its chest about the $14 million taxpayers will have paid in rent by July for an empty Portals building. But the same Congress refuses to give the FCC the $40 million it needs to move year after year.
Then there are the conspiracy theories surrounding all the vice president’s men-Knight, Haney and former FCC Chairman Reed Hundt. All three men are friends of Al Gore and the vice president is tangled up in the Democratic fund-raising scandal. But does that translate into a sweetheart deal on the FCC-Portals lease? Gore and his pals deny any wrongdoing.
The irony, of course, is that Gore and all the vice president’s men are no match for the communications lawyers and lobbyists who reside in and around current FCC headquarters in the chic downtown district. That’s why talks on relocating and consolidating the decentralized FCC have gone nowhere for the past decade.
GSA, the government’s leasing agent, is perhaps the most curious of the actors. Al Gore’s reinventing government brigade may have overlooked GSA.
