Revisited: John McCain, one of The Keating Five corruption scandal of 1989

[seafan]

For the younger voters who may not be aware of this scandal involving Mr. Straight Talk Express...

Mr. McCain would rather no one be reminded of this. We will not comply.

The Keating Five scandal from 1989 implicated five senators in another corruption probe. Democrats Dennis DeConcini of Arizona, Donald Riegle of Michigan, John Glenn of Ohio and Alan Cranston of California, and Republican John McCain of Arizona, were accused of strong-arming federal officials to back off their investigation of Charles Keating, former chairman of the Lincoln Savings and Loan association. In exchange, the senators reportedly received close to $1.3 million in campaign contributions.

The Senate Ethics Committee concluded that Glenn and McCain's involvement in the scheme was minimal and dropped the charges against them. In August 1991, the committee ruled that the other three senators had acted improperly in interfering with the Federal Home Loan Banking Board's investigation.

DeConcini and Riegle did not run for re-election in 1994 and were succeeded by Republican Sens. John Kyl and Spencer Abraham.

John McCain: Straight Shooter?

By Mollie Dickenson
January 29, 2000

The 63-year-old senator admitted that "there have been times when I have probably been influenced" by campaign (donations). Many listeners found the frankness refreshing and assumed he was talking about the cause celebre of the 1980s when McCain was one of the notorious Keating Five, named after convicted savings-and-loan executive Charles Keating.
In the presidential campaign, McCain had confided that his intervention with bank regulators on Keating's behalf was the worst mistake of his adult life, one that caused him as much anguish as spending five years in a North Vietnamese prisoner-of-war camp. The Arizona Republican said the incident taught him that "the appearance of impropriety" can be as damaging as actual wrongdoing.

But little did his listeners in Claremont know that McCain had just written letters to the Federal Communications Commission on behalf of Paxson Communications, a major campaign contributor. Literally on the eve of the Claremont appearance, McCain was pressing the FCC to rule on Paxson's proposed purchase of a Pittsburgh TV station.
When The Boston Globe disclosed the Paxson intervention a few weeks after the Claremont summit, McCain handled the disclosure with aplomb, even chutzpah. The chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee argued that he had done nothing wrong and that the suspicion falling on him only reinforced his argument for campaign finance reform.

"We're all tainted," McCain said. "We're all under suspicion as long as Washington is awash in special interest money."

He soon released documents showing that he had intervened for many others, including other large campaign contributors.

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The five senators -- McCain and Democrats Don Riegle, Dennis DeConcini, Alan Cranston and John Glenn -- claimed they were simply performing a constituent service, raising Keating's objection that unreasonable regulators were hurting his Lincoln Continental Savings and Loan. The senators met with federal banking officials twice, but stopped all efforts when told the case was going to the Justice Department.

Despite the garden-variety quality of the Keating Five episode, it exploded into a major scandal when it was disclosed that the senators had received large campaign donations from Keating.
The Keating Five came under a damaging ethics investigation, with McCain and Glenn drawing the lightest reprimands, only a finding that they had shown poor judgment. McCain also agreed to pay back tens of thousands of dollars in personal and campaign largesse from Keating.

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It's time to clean out this nest of leeches from OUR government, regardless of party affiliation.