(Later Received Campaign Contribution
from Felon Keating)

[Reprinted from the December, 1991 edition of The Nevadan]

In November, 1991, Nevada Senator Harry Reid helped sell a softer deal for his longtime chum Alan Cranston to Republicans on the U.S. Senate's Ethics Committee, according to the L.A. Times. Problem was, as soon as Cranston has the deal in hand, he welched on it, enraging senators from both sides of the aisle.

Background: Then-Asst. Democratic Majority Leader Cranston had intervened with federal regulators on behalf of Lincoln Savings & Loan owner Charles Keating, just at the same time as Keating was paying him a million dollars for a bogus 'get out the vote' campaign and extending Cranston a $300,000 personal line of credit. Thus, the California senator for the past two years has been the primary subject of the ethics panel's deliberations. But the committee's three Democrats and three Republicans had been deadlocked, with the Democrats (including Nevada's Richard Bryan) wanting weaker punishment and the Republicans wanting stronger.

Reid, searving as Cranston's personal representative to the committee, is reported by the L.A. Times to have argued to Republicans that a censure motion would have been "cruel" because of the 77-year-old California senator's supposed 'terminal cancer' and announced 1992 retirement. Eventually Reid won the assent of GOP members and the ethics committee proceeded, fashioning a plan substituting a severe reprimand for a censure motion and, via a parliamentary ploy, making a censure motion difficult for any senator to introduce. Reid then sent word back to the committee that Cranston would accept the findings.

However, as soon as the censure motion had been blocked and the committee had reported on the Senate floor its weaker findings that he had engaged in "improper and repugnant" conduct, Cranston stood and, in what committee vice chairman Warren Rudman, R-NH, called "arrogant" and "unrepentant" remarks, denied every judgment from the committee that he had earlier agreed to submit to. What he'd done in accepting the Keating payoffs, said Cranston, was "no different" from what other senators were doing.

1998 Notes:

Cranston, still not at all 'terminal,' at last report was serving as Chairman of the Gorbachev Foundation of the United States and its offshoot, the State of the World Forum, and working with Gorby for 'world peace' and 'nuclear disarmament.'

During Harry Reid's 1992 senate re-election campaign, Republican operatives going over Reid's list of campaign contribution donors found the name of the infamous Charles Keating himself. When that fact was made public, Reid hastened to return the money.

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