Paired Again

For more than four years two oily half-brothers have intermittently engaged the attention of the U. S. public. Their names are Teapot Dome and Elk Hills and their resemblance is close enough to make them almost twins. Teapot Dome, however, resulted from a collaboration between onetime (1921-23) Secretary of the Interior Albert B. Fall and Harry F. Sinclair, oilman; Elk Hills proceeded from an association between Mr. Fall and Edward L. Doheny, also an oilman. So they have constituted two distinct, though parallel cases which in 1923 spread a sticky mess over the Harding Administration and cheered many Democrats with the happy thought that the next President would be chosen from the Democratic party. But with the death of President Harding and the advent of President Coolidge the oil scandals slipped out of the headlines and into the courts and, what with the slowness of legal procedure and the public willingness to trade old sensations for new, Teapot Dome and Elk Hills ceased to agitate the popular mind.

Last February, indeed, even the courts appeared to have finished with the Elk Hills half of the scandal. By a unanimous decision of the U. S. Supreme Court (Feb. 28, 1927) the Doheny lease on the Elk Hills naval oil reserve was declared invalid and the property was restored to the U. S. Government. This decision settled the Government's civil suit to recover the lands leased by Mr. Fall. Meanwhile, on Dec. 16, 1926, the Government's criminal prosecution of Messrs. Fall and Doheny had failed when a jury in the District of Columbia Supreme Court aquitted the accused.

So only the Teapot Dome portion of the oil investigation remained unsettled. The Government's civil suit to recover the property is still pending before the U. S. Supreme Court. The Government's criminal suit against Messrs. Fall and Sinclair is to be tried on Oct. 17 in the District of Columbia Supreme Court. When these two decisions should be reached, it appeared that the Oil Scandals would then become definitely a matter of history.

But last week the Elk Hills half of the combination suddenly took on new life; the Hills-Dome half-brothers became paired again. For though Messrs. Fall and Doheny had been acquitted on a charge of conspiracy, there still remained against them indictments for bribery. Fall-Doheny attorneys had attacked the validity of these indictments after the U. S. Supreme Court's civil suit decision that the transfer of the Elk Hills lease from the Navy Department to the Department of the Interior (1921) had been illegal. The lawyers claimed that, assuming that this transfer was illegal, Mr. Fall had no authority to deal with Mr. Doheny on the leasing question. And in a previous case a federal court had decided that no bribery charge could be brought against an official who was being induced to promise something the performance of which lay outside the duties of his office. (If for instance a U. S. Representative was offered money to help put a bill through the U. S. Senate, he could not be prosecuted for having "sold" his office because he had no official connection with what the Senate might do.) While this ruling may seem to the lay mind technical, theoretical and involved, it was nevertheless one of the reasons why the Government preferred to try Messrs. Fall and Doheny first on the conspiracy charge and let the bribery indictments hold over.

Last week, however, Justice William Hitz of the District of Columbia Supreme Court ruled that the bribery indictments were valid. Justice Hitz ruled that the Harding order transferring the Elk Hills reserve to the Department of the Interior "had the force of law until revoked or declared invalid." He said that "an official act need not be a lawful act to render the official liable but need only be official in form and done under the color of his office." Therefore the bribery indictments held good and Messrs. Fall and Doheny would have to stand trial under them.

Thus it appeared that the entire Elk Hills business would be dredged up again and that the familiar "little brown bag" in which Edward L. Doheny Jr. took to Mr. Fall the $100,000 which Mr. Doheny calls a loan and Government attorneys call a bribe would once more be inspected by a jury. Shocked, irate, lawyers for the defendants protested that Messrs. Fall and Doheny were being tried twice for the same offense. They argued that U. S. Justice had come to a lamentable state when the Government, having failed to get a conviction for conspiracy, could change the cause of action to bribery and thereby secure a new deal with the old deck. But unless they can reverse the Justice Hitz decision on the "double jeopardy" theory, the future will see a Fall-Doheny as well as a Fall-Sinclair criminal trial. The oily half-brothers appeared to have been united again.