Across Federal Spectrum
President Bush joshes with Allan B. Hubbard at a fundraiser in Indianapolis. Hubbard, a Bush Pioneer and chemical industry executive, attended Harvard Business School with Bush.
(Kelly Wilkinson -- Indianapolis Star)
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The Bush Pioneers, who agree to raise a minimum of $100,000 each for the Bush campaign, are well-connected
throughout the Bush administration. Here are some examples of the subtle interaction of political fundraising and public policy.
Hunt Oil Co.
Bush Pioneer Jose Fourquet played a pivotal role in the financing of a massive Peruvian natural gas project that benefited Hunt Oil Co., whose chairman, Ray L. Hunt, signed up to be a Pioneer and is a longtime ally of the president.
The Camisea Natural Gas Project is set to extract fossil fuel from one of the world's most pristine tropical rain forests and pipe it over the Andes toward Lima and the coast, where it will end up at a depot near a marine sanctuary. Hunt is one of several participants in the project. His company hired Halliburton's Kellogg Brown & Root to design a $1 billion export terminal on the coast.
Fourquet, the Treasury Department's U.S. representative to the Inter-American Development Bank, rebuffed the official written and oral recommendation from other U.S. officials to vote "no" on the project. Instead, he abstained on $135 million in financing for the project, allowing it to proceed. Opposition from the United States, a primary funder of the IDB bank, would have jeopardized the deal.
In a strongly worded memo sent before the vote, the U.S. Agency for International Development told the Treasury Department that federal law required Fourquet to cast a "no" vote because environmental reviews were deficient. In addition, others on a federal interagency task force urged opposition.
A separate proposal for financing from the Export-Import Bank of the United States fell short over environmental concerns. April H. Foley, a Bush appointee and the Ex-Im Bank board member who cast the deciding "no" vote, said the president questioned her about it afterward. She told Friends of the Earth campaign director Jon Sohn, that President Bush brought it up during an overnight stay at Camp David. Bush asked her to explain her vote to national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, who was involved in providing direction to Fourquet in how to vote.
Foley declined to discuss her vote.
The Camisea project also encountered fierce opposition from worldwide environmental groups and some members of Congress, who predicted the massive extraction and pipeline project would destroy the rain forest in the Southeastern Amazon and endanger its indigenous people. Environmental groups issued reports recently saying their worst fears are coming true -- indigenous people coming down with illnesses, a massive fish kill in Paracas Bay.
Media releases from the Bush campaign do not say whether Hunt formally reached Pioneer status, but court documents list Hunt as being given Pioneer Solicitor Tracking No. 1002. The Bush campaign has stopped answering questions about who was in the program.
Hunt has declined repeated requests for information about the bank's vote or his campaign contributions. Federal records show he has given nearly $100,000 to Republican causes in the past four years, including individual donations to the Bush campaign.
