This morning CBS/Politico are running a very tersely worded and rhetorically loaded little story [HT Drudge] about the oil deal between Hunt Oil and the Regional Government of Kurdistan, consummated in 2007.
It look and reads like they're trying to use it to show the President was somehow negligent in his oversight of the deal, and then insinuate that it has caused problems in the Iraqi oil-sharing agreement process. Side note: they say that the deal "complicated negotiations" for an oil-sharing agreement. And...so what...does that mean? Anything can complicate the process of a negotiation as complex as the Iraqi oil-sharing agreement, but that doesn't necessarily mean those complications are intrinsically wrong, or undesirable. But I digress...
Documents uncovered by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform indicate that the White House probably shouldn’t have been so surprised. Among the many pieces of evidence that the administration knew and approved of the deal:
Read the article for the rest. They cite Commerce and State Department officials as being the ones in the Administration who were all over this one.
-- A Hunt Oil general manager said he met with nine State Department officials and none expressed opposition. -- Five days after the announcement of the deal, a State Department official told Hunt officials about another “good opportunity in Iraq.”
For Immediate Release September 8, 2007 Contact for Hunt Oil Company: Jeanne Phillips (214) 978-8534 Contact for Impulse Energy: Matthew Heysel (403) 681-2887
Three things are immediately curious about this article:
1) The deal between Hunt Oil and the Kurdistan Regional Government was inked back in September of 2007 -- almost 10 months ago -- and announced in a press release from Hunt Oil itself. Yet CBS and Henry Waxman have decided that it's newsworthy today, and are unveiling it as though it was a state secret (pun intended) in July of 2008, nearly ten months later.
2) The article states that the President said that he "know[s] nothing about the deal" -- which prompts me to ask: Isn't that exactly what he should know about the deal unless the State Department found something wrong with it and reported that to him? Unless he wanted to give the appearance of riding roughshod over the State Department or having a direct conflict of interest in the deal itself?
3) There are supposedly 9 people at the State Department who met with representatives of Hunt Oil and apparently shephered this agreement through. Why does Henry Waxman think something was wrong if the State Department (and the Commerce Department) didn't? Why does CBS News think so?
This is only the tip of the tail of this hit piece, I'm sure. We need some deeper blogospheric investigation on this one.
...buffoon of the highest order.