An Enron Link to Energy Policy?

By Adam Zagorin

Reverberations from the $60 billion collapse of energy giant Enron are spreading to the White House. Enron CEO Kenneth Lay, Bush's biggest donor, has many ties to Bush officials. Economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey and trade negotiator Robert Zoellick were once on the Enron payroll, and others, like political adviser Karl Rove, held sizable chunks of Enron stock. Now questions are being raised about the role Lay may have had in the energy task force overseen by Vice President Dick Cheney, which deliberated in secret and made policy proposals seen as friendly to industry. Representative Henry Waxman, a California Democrat, has just written Cheney to ask whether his panel was "influenced by unreliable data or opinions provided by Enron." Meanwhile, the General Accounting Office, a nonpartisan investigative arm of Congress, is pressing its long-standing (and so far denied) request for task-force records. Comptroller General David Walker, who runs the GAO, tells TIME that pending energy legislation and congressional inquiries into Enron make it imperative that Cheney produce the material. If Cheney refuses to budge, Walker says, the GAO may take the issue to court.

--By Adam Zagorin