Dick Cheney, Crook

Josh Marshall has the goods on Dick Cheney. The New York Times reports:

The Halliburton Company secretly changed its accounting practices when Vice President Dick Cheney was its chief executive, the Securities and Exchange Commission said yesterday as it fined the company $7.5 million and brought actions against two former financial officials.

The commission said the accounting change enabled Halliburton, one of the nation's largest energy services companies, to report annual earnings in 1998 that were 46 percent higher than they would have been had the change not been made. It also allowed the company to report a substantially higher profit in 1999, the commission said.

Given that Halliburton is paying a hefty fine for what can only be described as deliberate fraud, the Times is remarkably gentle in its reporting. So is the SEC. Josh Marshall sez:

The SEC and the even the Times goes to some length to avoid the colloquial term for this sort of behavior: i.e., fraud. The SEC did levy the fine. And it did point the finger of blame at two lower levels Halliburton officials. Yet the SEC, in the words of the Times, "did not detail the extent to which [Cheney] was aware of the change or of the requirement to disclose it to investors." And not surprisingly, in the article, Cheney's lawyer, Terrence O'Donnell is trumpeting the results of the investigation as a clean bill of health for Cheney. ...

So here you have the Vice President of the United States. His company gets caught in about as clear a case of cooking the books to inflate profits as you can imagine during the time he was CEO. (His salary and bonuses are tied to company profits.) And he won't even go to the trouble of denying that he was aware of the wrongdoing.

Can we have some more aggressive reporting on this one?

I second the motion. Cheney, it is now clear, is cut from the same cloth as Dennis Koslowski or Ken Lay. Maybe John Edwards can work this into his stump speech?

Update: Billmon, at the Whiskey Bar, goes into substantial detail on the what and the why of the cooking of the Halliburton books, and why it is highly likely (if not necessarily provable) that Cheney had his hand in it.