Still Unreported: The Pay-off in Bush Air Guard Fix

From the website of good guy journalist Greg Palast:

This week, former Lt. Governor Ben Barnes of Texas 'fessed up to pulling the strings to keep Little George out of the jungle. "I got a young man named George W. Bush into the Texas Air Guard - and I'm ashamed."

THE $23 MILLION PAY-BACK

That’s far from the end of the story. In 1994, George W. Bush was elected governor of Texas by a whisker. By that time, Barnes had left office to become a big time corporate lobbyist. To an influence peddler like Barnes, having damning information on a sitting governor is worth its weight in gold – or, more precisely, there’s a value in keeping the info secret.

Barnes appears to have made lucrative use of his knowledge of our President’s slithering out of the draft as a lever to protect a multi-billion dollar contract for a client. That's the information in a confidential letter buried deep in the files of the US Justice Department that fell into my hands at BBC television.

Here's what happened. Just after Bush's election, Barnes' client GTech Corp., due to allegations of corruption, was about to lose its license to print money: its contract to run the Texas state lottery. Barnes, says the Justice Department document, made a call to the newly elected governor's office and saved GTech's state contract.

The letter said, "Governor Bush ... made a deal with Ben Barnes not to rebid [the GTech lottery contract] because Barnes could confirm that Bush had lied during the '94 campaign."

Click here for the rest.

The media's obsession with "forgerygate" is really just a sideshow, distracting from the fact that Bush had his powerful family pull strings to get him into the fabled "Champaign" Air National Guard unit for rich kids trying to avoid service in Vietnam at Ellington Air Force Base in Houston: Bush couldn't even finish his service commitment, and later lied about it over and over again. The more info that comes out about this, the more undeniable it becomes. Bush is a deserter.

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