Bush's Lawyer Comes Back

Steve Soto connects some speculative dots and it is . . . interesting.

Our ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Robert W. Jordan, "submitted his resignation about two months ago for personal reasons" and "has been making farewell calls on Saudi officials this month." Two months ago was pretty soon after Novak published his outing of Plame. What do those two things have to do with one another?

Well, Mr. Jordan isn't a career diplomat. In fact, this was his very first gig in the foreign service. Not a bad start, huh? Before that, he was a lawyer in Dallas. George W. Bush's lawyer, as a matter of fact, including defending him in the probe of insider trading allegations involving the funny business with his Harken stock.

Remember the Harken mess? Bush had a failed energy company called Arbusto, which got bailed out by an oil company called Spectrum which then went under itself in a couple of years and got bailed out by Harken Energy. In acknowledgement of his demonstrated expertise in successfully managing energy companies, Harken gave Bush a metric crapload of stock to come sit on their board of directors, stock which he turned around and sold for better than 800 large. And very conveniently for a member of the firm's audit committee, just before the stock plunged. Yet somehow, the sitting president's son (or more accurately, his lawyer, Robert Jordan) got the SEC to close the case even while they said it did not exonerate him. Go figure.

Jordan also was a founding partner of the law firm Baker Botts LLP (yes, as in James Baker), which helped run the Bush effort during the Florida recount and is defending the Saudi royal family against the 9/11 survivors' lawsuit. So, a couple of weeks after the Novak column appears, Jordan submits his resignation (and nobody's been nominated to replace him) and gets ready to return to the United States. I can think of one reason Bush might want his lawyer back stateside.