Fox host tells guest mentioning McCain role in Keating Five scandal to 'pipe down'
Nick Juliano
Published: Thursday September 25, 2008

'Cut his mike,' producer suggests
The Keating Five scandal, and John McCain's role in it, has received relatively little mention in presidential campaign coverage, and at least one Fox News host seems dedicated to keeping it that way.

Appearing Thursday morning on Fox & Friends, radio host Mike Papatino tried to remind viewers about McCain's intervention with federal regulators on behalf of real estate mogul Charles Keating, who was trying to avoid regulations of a savings and loan he owned during the S&L crisis of the 1980s.

F&F's Steve Doocy told Papatonio to "pipe down," called him "rude" and demanded he "cut it out." A show producer could be overheard saying "cut his mike."

As Papatonio tries one last time to explain the details of the Keating Five scandal, Doocy again cuts him off.

"This is not the History Channel," he says.

Papatonio's apparent crime was interrupting fellow guest Michael Reagan, the conservative (Not Conservative,NeoConservative-WM)radio host, who was arguing that it would be unfair to judge McCain based on his actions 20 years ago.

"It has everything to do with what's happening today," Papatonio said before being told to pipe down.

Regardless of whether Papatonio was being rude, preserving an orderly debate certainly could not have been Doocy's goal in silencing the guest. Not two minutes before his admonition that Papatonio was "being rude," Doocy repeatedly interrupted his guest to deliver talking points that might as well have been written by the McCain campaign.

At least three times Doocy interrupted Papatonio as he argued that McCain's political gambit to "suspend" his campaign and delay Friday's debate was more a response to his flagging poll numbers than an attempt to fix the economic crisis. Doocy wasn't buying it.

"If Barack Obama wants to do so much for the economy, why doesn't he go to his day job and work in the us senate?" he asked Reagan, cutting off Papatino's argument.

Fox news telling idiots just what they want to hear 24 hours a day!

http://groups.google.com/group/misc.invest.stocks/browse_thread/thread/f6deb10c6201b2da/d7f987ec6c2b2a25?lnk=raot


Do you believe that a man should have to suffer for a crime he didn't commit? It must sting to know that the Democrats involved in the Keating Five were all guilty while the lone Republican was found completely innocent.

Let's also look fondly back on what a DEMOCRAT Lawyer had to say about John McCain and the Keating Five...the same Democrat Lawyer who defended Bill Clinton in court...the same Democrat Lawyer who investigated and prosecuted the Keating Five.



Notice that the Lawyer suggested that McCain be cut out of the Keating Five (making it the Keating Four), but guess what? The democrats couldn't have four democrats under investigation while they let the lone Republican go scott free. (His innocence didn't matter, the "R" after his name did") So he was tried and run through the mud only to be found innocent, when they knew before the trial that they had no evidence of wrong doing by McCain.

Warmachine and Lynann, you should both be feeling a little sting right now. That's pride. You don't want to admit you are wrong. I won't even ask you to, but I hope your decency can overcome your pride and let you drop this topic.

that horse was beat to death almost 20 years ago

So you're saying that he wasn't involved, that he wasn't all the time on the private jet of Mr.Keating.

Guilty, Not Guilty...It shows his judgement to be questionable at best. Not unlike his aides having to force him to stay away from that female lobbyist.

My Candidate is Dr.Paul, until otherwise announced, you'll find no corruption charges in his history period.

Don't you find it odd that the Fox host didn't even want to have a little conversation about it? If he's so innocent, then why not have that discussion?

sounds to me like they cut the dude's mike for trying to hog the conversation and shout down the other guest

(a typical spin tactic)

Because it's a non-issue? Keeping a show on the air costs money, they don't have to waste their time talking about a non-issue that nobody but the most partisan of people would care about. Should they spend an hour talking about Obama's Muslim faith? Why not? I mean, I know he isn't a Muslim, but shouldn't they talk about it anyways? Get a grip man. Obviously your pride trumps your decency. If you want to try to besmirch the reputation of an honest man, then go right to it, it just shows the kind of person you are.

Or that he's trusting. As the Senate committee found, McCain ending the relationship as soon as he realized there could be illegal activity. He did nothing illegal himself. So even though he was found innocent, they found no evidence to suggest he was guilty, you will still consider him guilty? How can you think that is fair in the least? You need to let go of the hate and try to think clearly.

You know nothing about me to make decisions about my pride or my decency. I would consider staying on topic and not trying to spin it to be about me.
If it's a nonissue, then why not have the discourse, why freak out and try to cut the mans mic? Why not prove that it's a nonissue and get it out of the way, by the by, this same "news" organization regularly brings up Obama's faith and has lengthy discussions about it, ad Nausem.

Aren't these the same "news" organizations that spent 6 months talking about Anna Nicole, while we have troops in harms way, tell me that was profitable?

I thought so, you want to talk about decency, lets talk about the easily proven railroading of the POW/MIA's that McCain orchestrated.

Once again, if it's so easily provable that Johnny boy is such a good and honest person, then it shouldn't have been that hard to demonstrate it, but they didn't do that, they went to screaming over the guy and the cutting of the mic, shouldn't that at the very least spark some sort of discourse about why Fox would do that?

You want to blindly follow someone and their ideaology, fine, but I'm not going to do that, I'm going to look at everything the candidates have done and see where that leads, if anyone else doesn't want to do that fine, but I won't be a cultist to partisan politics.

I'm not a fan of McCain. I don't like the guy at all, he's too liberal for me. But I do like the truth. Sorry if the truth hurts. Sorry if you think that someone who is accused of a crime should be found guilty and punished regardless of the evidence. Sorry about that man. Maybe you will one day live in the fascist paradise which you dream of...maybe...

hahaha digging up 20 year old dirt sounds like desperation

this turnip has already had all the blood squeezed out of it years ago

The Keating Five
Dan Nowicki, Bill Muller
The Arizona Republic
Mar. 1, 2007 10:41 AM

CHAPTER VII: THE KEATING FIVE

As a war hero and U.S. senator, John McCain has been chronicled in pictures.

There are grainy mug shots of a young McCain, printed in U.S. newspapers after his jet was shot down over North Vietnam. There are black-and-white images of his return, grinning and waving.





In happier times, there is McCain holding his newborn daughter while his wife, Cindy, smiles from her hospital bed.

But it is an innocent vacation picture that carries the reminder of the scandal that threatened his political career.

In the picture, taken in the Bahamas, McCain is seated on a bandstand while wearing an outrageous straw party hat. Next to him on the dais sits Charles Keating III, son of developer Charles H Keating Jr.

McCain calls the Keating scandal "my asterisk." Over the years, his opponents have failed to turn it into a period.

It all started in March 1987. Charles H Keating Jr., the flamboyant developer and anti-porn crusader, needed help. The government was poised to seize Lincoln Savings and Loan, a freewheeling subsidiary of Keating's American Continental Corp.

As federal auditors examined Lincoln, Keating was not content to wait and hope for the best. He had spread a lot of money around Washington, and it was time to call in his chits.

One of his first stops was Sen. Dennis DeConcini, D-Ariz.

The state's senior senator was one of Keating's most loyal friends in Congress, and for good reason. Keating had given thousands of dollars to DeConcini's campaigns. At one point, DeConcini even pushed Keating for ambassador to the Bahamas, where Keating owned a luxurious vacation home.

Now Keating had a job for DeConcini. He wanted him to organize a meeting with regulators to deliver a message: Get off Lincoln's back. Eventually, DeConcini would set up a meeting with five senators and the regulators. One of them was McCain.

McCain already knew Keating well. His ties to the home builder dated to 1981, when the two men met at a Navy League dinner where McCain spoke.

After the speech, Keating walked up to McCain and told him that he, too, was a Navy flier and that he greatly respected McCain's war record. He met McCain's wife and family. The two men became friends.

Charlie Keating always took care of his friends, especially those in politics. McCain was no exception.

In 1982, during McCain's first run for the House, Keating held a fund-raiser for him, collecting more than $11,000 from 40 employees of American Continental Corp. McCain would spend more than $550,000 to win the primary and the general election.

In 1983, as McCain contemplated his House re-election, Keating hosted a $1,000-a-plate dinner for him, even though McCain had no serious competition. When McCain pushed for the Senate in 1986, Keating was there with more than $50,000.

By 1987, McCain had received about $112,000 in political contributions from Keating and his associates.

McCain also had carried a little water for Keating in Washington. While in the House, McCain, along with a majority of representatives, co-sponsored a resolution to delay new regulations designed to curb risky investments by thrifts such as Lincoln. (Oh, looky, blocking regulations over risky investments, sound familiar??-WM)


Reluctant participant
Despite his history with Keating, McCain was hesitant about intervening. At that point, he had been in the Senate only three months. DeConcini wanted McCain to fly to San Francisco with him and talk to the regulators. McCain refused.

Keating would not be dissuaded.

On March 24 at 9:30 a.m., Keating went to DeConcini's office and asked him if the meeting with the regulators was on. DeConcini told Keating that McCain was nervous.

"McCain's a wimp," Keating replied, according to the book Trust Me, by Michael Binstein and Charles Bowden. "We'll go talk to him."

Keating had other business on Capitol Hill and did not reach McCain's office until 1:30. A DeConcini staffer already had told McCain about the "wimp" insult.

When he arrived, Keating presented McCain with a laundry list of demands for the regulators.

McCain told Keating that he would attend the meeting and find out whether Keating was getting treated fairly but that was all.

The first meeting, on April 2, 1987, in DeConcini's office, included Ed Gray, chairman of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, as well as four senators: DeConcini, McCain, Alan Cranston, D-Calif., and John Glenn, D-Ohio.

(Years later, McCain recalled that DeConcini started the meeting with a reference to "our friend at Lincoln." McCain characterized it as "an unfortunate choice of words, which Gray would remember and repeat publicly many times.")

For Keating, the meeting was a bust. Gray told the senators that as head of the loan board, he worried about the big picture. He didn't have any specific information about Lincoln. Bank regulators in San Francisco would be versed in that, not him. Gray offered to set up a meeting between the senators and the San Francisco regulators.

The second meeting was April 9. The same four senators attended, along with Sen. Don Riegle, D-Mich. Also at the meeting were William Black, then deputy director of the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corp., James Cirona, president of the Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco, and Michael Patriarca, director of agency functions at the FSLIC.

In an interview with The Republic, Black said the meeting was a show of force by Keating, who wanted the senators to pressure the regulators into dropping their case against Lincoln. The thrift was in trouble for violating "direct investment" rules, which prohibited S&Ls from taking large ownership positions in various ventures.

"The Senate is a really small club, like the cliche goes," Black said. "And you really did have one-twentieth of the Senate in one room, called by one guy, who was the biggest crook in the S&L debacle."

Black said the senators could have accomplished their goal "if they had simply had us show up and see this incredible room and said, 'Hi. Charles Keating asked us to meet with you. 'Bye.'"

McCain previously had refused DeConcini's request to meet with the Lincoln auditors themselves. In Worth the Fighting For, McCain wrote that he remained "a little troubled" at the prospect, "but since the chairman of the bank board didn't seem to have a problem with the idea, maybe a discussion with the regulators wouldn't be as problematic as I had earlier thought."

McCain concedes that he failed to sense that Gray and the thrift examiners felt threatened by the senators' meddling.


'Always Hamlet'
The five senators, including McCain, seemed like a united front to Black.

"They presented themselves as a group," Black said, "and DeConcini is the dad, who's going to take the primary speaking role. Both meetings are in his office, and in both cases it's we want this, with no one going, 'What do you mean we, kemo sabe?'"

According to nearly verbatim notes taken by Black, McCain started the second meeting with a careful comment.

"One of our jobs as elected officials is to help constituents in a proper fashion," McCain said. "ACC (American Continental Corp.) is a big employer and important to the local economy. I wouldn't want any special favors for them. . . .

"I don't want any part of our conversation to be improper."

Black said the comment had the opposite effect for the regulators. It made them nervous about what might really be going on.

"McCain was the weirdest," Black said. "They were all different in their own way. McCain was always Hamlet . . . wringing his hands about what to do."

Glenn, a former astronaut and the first American to orbit the Earth, was not as tactful.

"To be blunt, you should charge them or get off their backs," he told the regulators. "If things are bad there, get to them. Their view is that they took a failing business and put it back on its feet. It's now viable and profitable. They took it off the endangered species list. Why has the exam dragged on and on and on?"

DeConcini added: "What's wrong with this if they're willing to clean up their act?"

Cirona, the banking official, told the senators that it was "very unusual" to hold a meeting to discuss a particular company.

DeConcini shot back: "It's very unusual for us to have a company that could be put out of business by its regulators." (Gee, isn't that what the Health Department would do to a poorly run, nasty resturant?-WM)

The meeting went on. McCain was quiet. DeConcini carried the ball. The regulators told the senators that Lincoln was in trouble. The thrift, Cirona said, was a "ticking time bomb."

Then Patriarca made a stunning comment, according to transcripts released later.

"We're sending a criminal referral to the Department of Justice," he said. "Not maybe, we're sending one. This is an extraordinarily serious matter. It involves a whole range of imprudent actions. I can't tell you strongly enough how serious this is. This is not a profitable institution."

The statement made DeConcini back off a little.

"The criminality surprises me," he said. "We're not interested in discussing those issues. Our premise was that we had a viable institution concerned that it was being overregulated."

"What can we say to Lincoln?" Glenn asked.

"Nothing," Black responded, "with regard to the criminal referral. They haven't and won't be told by us that we're making one."

"You haven't told them?" Glenn asked.

"No," said Black. "Justice would skin us alive if we did. Those referrals are very confidential. We can't prosecute anyone ourselves. All we can do is refer it to Justice."

After the meeting, McCain was done with Keating.

"Again, I was troubled by the appearance of the meeting," McCain said later. "I stated I didn't want any special favors from them. I only wanted them (Lincoln Savings) to be fairly treated."

Black doesn't completely buy that argument. If McCain was concerned about Keating asking him to do things that were improper, why go to either meeting at all?

Black said McCain probably went because Keating was close to being the political godfather of Arizona and McCain still had plenty of ambition.

"Keating was incredibly powerful," Black said. "And incredibly useful."

McCain's reservations aside, Keating accomplished his goal. He had bought some time, though the price was very high.


Short-lived reprieve
A month later, the San Francisco regulators finished a yearlong audit and recommended that Lincoln be seized. But the report was virtually ignored because of politics on the bank board.

Gray was being replaced as chairman by Danny Wall, who was more sympathetic to Keating.

The audit, which described Lincoln as a thrift reeling out of control, sat on a shelf.

In September 1987, the investigation was taken away from the San Francisco office, away from Black and Patriarca. In May 1988, it was transferred to Washington, where Lincoln would get a new audit.

It was a win for Keating. A battle, not the war.

Back in San Francisco, Black was fuming.

"Clearly, we were shot in the back," he would say later.

Despite the reprieve, Keating's businesses continued to spiral downward, taking the five senators with him. Together, the five had accepted more than $300,000 in contributions from Keating, and their critics added a new term to the American lexicon: "The Keating Five."

The Keating Five became synonymous for the kind of political influence that money can buy. As the S&L failure deepened, the sheer magnitude of the losses hit the press. Billions of dollars had been squandered. The five senators were linked as the gang who shilled for an S&L bandit.

S&L "trading cards" came out. The Keating Five card showed Charles Keating holding up his hand, with a senator's head adorning each finger. McCain was on Keating's pinkie.

As the investigation dragged through 1988, McCain dodged the hardest blows. Most landed on DeConcini, who had arranged the meetings and had other close ties to Keating, including $50 million in loans from Keating to DeConcini's aides.

But McCain made a critical error.

He had adopted the blanket defense that Keating was a constituent and that he had every right to ask his senators for help. In attending the meetings, McCain said, he simply wanted to make sure that Keating was treated like any other constituent.

Keating was no ordinary constituent to McCain.

On Oct. 8, 1989, The Arizona Republic revealed that McCain's wife and her father had invested $359,100 in a Keating shopping center in April 1986, a year before McCain met with the regulators.

The paper also reported that the McCains, sometimes accompanied by their daughter and baby-sitter, had made at least nine trips at Keating's expense, sometimes aboard the American Continental jet. Three of the trips were made during vacations to Keating's opulent Bahamas retreat at Cat Cay.

McCain also did not pay Keating for some of the trips until years after they were taken, after he learned that Keating was in trouble over Lincoln. Total cost: $13,433.

When the story broke, McCain did nothing to help himself.

"You're a liar," McCain said when a Republic reporter asked him about the business relationship between his wife and Keating.

"That's the spouse's involvement, you idiot," McCain said later in the same conversation. "You do understand English, don't you?"

He also belittled reporters when they asked about his wife's ties to Keating.

"It's up to you to find that out, kids."

The paper ran the story.

In his 2002 book, McCain confesses to "ridiculously immature behavior" during that particular interview and adds that The Republic reporters' "persistence in questioning me about the matter provoked me to rage."

"I don't know how (The Republic journalists) would have reported the story had I been more civil and understanding or just more of a professional during the interview," McCain wrote. (Oh, looky some of the infamous McCain anger management issues)

At a news conference after the story ran, McCain was a changed man. He stood calmly for 90 minutes and answered every question.

On the shopping center, his defense was simple. The deal did not involve him. The shares in the shopping center had been bought by a partnership set up between McCain's wife and her father. (The couple also had a prenuptial agreement that separated Cindy McCain's finances and dealings from his.)

But McCain also had to explain his trips with Keating and why he didn't pay Keating back right away.

On that score, McCain admitted he had fouled up. He said he should have reimbursed Keating immediately, not waited several years. His staff said it was an oversight, but it looked bad, McCain jetting around with Keating, then going to bat for him with the federal regulators.

"I was in a hell of a mess," McCain later would write.

Meanwhile, Lincoln continued to founder.

In April 1989, two years after the Keating Five meetings, the government seized Lincoln, which declared bankruptcy. In September 1990, Keating was booked into Los Angeles County Jail, charged with 42 counts of fraud. His bond was set at $5 million.

During Keating's trial, the prosecution produced a parade of elderly investors who had lost their life's savings by investing in American Continental junk bonds.


Verdict: 'Poor judgment'
In November 1990, the Senate Ethics Committee convened to decide what punishment, if any, should be doled out to the Keating Five.

Robert Bennett, who would later represent President Bill Clinton in the Paula Jones case, was the special counsel for the committee. In his opening remarks, he slammed DeConcini but went lightly on McCain, the lone Republican ensnared with four Democrats.

"In the case of Senator McCain, there is very substantial evidence that he thought he had an understanding with Senator DeConcini's office that certain matters would not be gone into at the meeting with (bank board) Chairman (Ed) Gray," Bennett said.

"Moreover, there is substantial evidence that, as a result of Senator McCain's refusal to do certain things, he had a fallout with Mr. Keating."

Among the Keating Five, McCain took the most direct contributions from Keating. But the investigation found that he was the least culpable, along with Glenn. McCain attended the meetings but did nothing afterward to stop Lincoln's death spiral.

Lincoln was the most expensive failure in the national S&L scandal. Taxpayers lost more than $2 billion on the bailout. McCain also looked good in contrast to DeConcini, who continued to defend Keating until fall 1989, when federal regulators filed a $1.1 billion civil racketeering and fraud suit against Keating, accusing him of siphoning Lincoln's deposits to his family and into political campaigns.

In January 1993, a federal jury convicted him of 73 counts of wire and bankruptcy fraud in the collapse of American Continental and Lincoln. Keating was sentenced to 12 years and seven months in prison but served just 50 months before the conviction was overturned on a technicality. In 1999, at age 75, he pleaded guilty to four counts of fraud. He was sentenced to time served.

In the end, McCain received only a mild rebuke from the Ethics Committee for exercising "poor judgment" for intervening with the federal regulators on behalf of Keating. Still, he felt tarred by the affair.

"The appearance of it was wrong," McCain said. "It's a wrong appearance when a group of senators appear in a meeting with a group of regulators because it conveys the impression of undue and improper influence. And it was the wrong thing to do."

McCain noted that Bennett, the independent counsel, recommended that McCain and Glenn be dropped from the investigation.

"For the first time in history, the Ethics Committee overruled the recommendation of the independent counsel," McCain said. For his part, DeConcini is critical of McCain's role in the affair. The two senators never were particularly cozy, and the stress of the public scrutiny worsened their relations.

In his memoir Senator Dennis DeConcini: From the Center of the Aisle, he praises the decision to keep McCain on the hook.

"It became clear to me, and it was later confirmed by Ethics Committee members, that Bennett was attempting to dismiss the charges against McCain, and in order to appear nonpartisan, he included Glenn in this effort," DeConcini wrote with co-author Jack August. "Thanks to the three Democrats on the committee and perhaps with the help of Senator (Jesse) Helms (R-N.C.), however, the charges remained in place for all the senators under investigation. So all of us had to attend the 23-day public hearing, which was indeed a trial, before the six-member Senate Ethics Committee."

In the book, DeConcini reiterates his allegation that McCain leaked to the media "sensitive information" about certain closed proceedings in order to hurt DeConcini, Riegle and Cranston. It's a fairly serious charge. The Boston Globe revisited the Keating Five leaks in 2000. The story paraphrased a congressional investigator, Clark B. Hall, as personally concluding that "McCain was one of the principal leakers." The newspaper also reported that McCain, under oath, had denied involvement with the leaks. ( perjury...isn't that neat.-WM)

McCain owns up to his mistake this way:

"I was judged eventually, after three years, of using, quote, poor judgment, and I agree with that assessment."

If McCain himself calls this "My Asterik" then it should be open for discussion if we are to consider him for the most powerful position in the Nation.

There hasn't been any problem combing over Obama, to the point of ridiculousness, but they can't talk about the Keating 5?

Ludicrous.

sure it's fair

but it's ALREADY been dredged up over and over. and McCains enemies have wrangled for angles and have never come up with more than
"I was judged eventually, after three years, of using, quote, poor judgment, and I agree with that assessment."

and trying to bring it up again is just an exercise in futility

Lets be clear, I didn't post this because of McCains involvement, I posted this because of Fox news treatment of someone who wanted to bring it up.

To be fair, it does involve some of the exact problems that we are facing now, with greedy government folks having moved to deregulate the market, which has had a hand in leading us where we are now.

What pushed it into this is someone choosing to make it about decency/pride, if McCain had simply chosen to stay of the plane, taking the vacations, playing hoity toity for Mr.Keating to get campaign funds, then this wouldn't even be a problem, McCains judgement, not mine.

To say I have no right to talk about it, violates my rights, to say that if I continue to talk about it, then I'm prideful is flat out baloney.