DeConcini says Keating Five is fair game

Former U.S. Sen. Dennis DeConcini told PolitickerAZ.com Monday that he thinks Sen. John McCain's involvement in the Keating Five scandal of the late '80s and early '90s is fair game as an issue in the presidential contest between the senator from Arizona and Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.).

The Obama campaign released an Internet video Monday that revisits the scandal, during which five U.S. senators - including DeConcini and McCain - were investigated by the Senate for interjecting themselves into a federal inquiry into the activities of Charles Keating, the financier and "junk bond king" who was jailed for defrauding investors in connection with the collapse of one of his companies, Lincoln Savings & Loan.

The senators had received thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars from Keating in campaign contributions, and DeConcini was officially sanctioned as having acted inappropriately by calling two meetings between federal investigators and the Keating Five, in what was seen as an exercise in pressuring the feds to drop their investigation of Keating's activities.

McCain was cleared of impropriety, but the Senate concluded that he had excercised "poor judgment" through his involvement, which included taking trips at Keating's expense and attending the two meetings. McCain has called the affair "the worst mistake of my life."

DeConcini, who said he hadn't seen the full video, said, "The question that should be raised is that McCain's big issue here is that he shouldn't have been at that meeting with the regulators that first time because he had a conflict. He took these three trips that he didn't report and his wife invested $350,000 with Keating," DeConcini said.

"You can criticize rest of us," he said, "but none of us had traveled with or invested with [Keating]."

To DeConcini, McCain was let off the hook too easily, due to the fact that McCain was a member of the U.S. House at the time of the meetings and the Senate concluded it didn't have jurisdiction to look into his unreported trips with Keating.

"That to me is the real issue," DeConcini said. "I don't know if the Obama campaign is going to raise that or not. If they called me to ask my advice, I'd tell them they should."

Bad blood has existed between DeConcini and McCain since the Senate proceedings, with DeConcini contending that McCain's involvement should have been more scrutinized, especially the business relationship that existed between Cindy McCain, the senator's wife, and Keating. DeConcini also believes McCain leaked a confidential report from the Senate investigative committee that damaged DeConcini. 

From a political standpoint, though, DeConcini thinks the McCain campaign is simply reaping what it sowed.

"Palin started it yesterday, and [the Obama campaign] is just coming back at them," DeConcini said, referring to the comment Alaska governor and Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin made yesterday that Obama was not fit for the presidency because he "pal[s] around with terrorists." Palin was commenting on the relationship between Obama and Bill Ayers, the former member of the Weathermen who was involved in bombings of federal buildings in the 1960s.

"If McCain is raising the Weathermen," said DeConcini, "and he's raising Pastor Wright" - Obama's former pastor whose incendiary remarks caused a firestorm of controversy earlier in the campaign - "if he's raising 'this guy is different,' those are a can of worms. Then there's McCain and Pastor Hagee " - the evangelical leader whose support McCain sought and then repudiated after Hagee's own incendiary remarks came to light - "and McCain has all these lobbyists who are his campaign managers - that's your can of worms."

DeConcini continued, "Once you start down that path it's hard for anyone to win. Obama's said 'we won't throw the first punch but we'll throw the last.' Is it opening a can of worms? Sure. But you can't just take it the way Kerry or Dukakis did," he said, referring to past Democratic presidential candidates who were criticized for not responding to attacks against them quickly or forcefully enough.

The McCain campaign originally said it wanted to comment on DeConcini's remarks, but follow-up calls were not returned.