Catastrophe - Dick Morris [82]
On June 23, 2005, the Senate approved an amendment to the Defense Department Authorization bill, S. 2400. The amendment passed on a voice vote by unanimous consent. There is no evidence that Chris Dodd recused himself on the bill, which would help his old partner. Nor did Dodd recuse himself when the full authorization bill, including the special amendment for Sunshine, passed.
Dodd should, at the very least, have recused himself from both those votes. Here he was voting to help his partner in the Irish land deal to the tune of $85 million. But he evidently didn’t see anything wrong with voting for a bill that would benefit Kessinger and possibly Downe.
What are friends for?
So, Dodd’s Irish property dealing weren’t really so transparent, were they?
In 2003, when he bought out Kessinger at a bargain-basement price, Dodd’s Senate personal financial disclosure form, as posted on www.opensecrets.org, did not include the page that provides for details of all transactions, describing all sales and purchases of real property. But that year, for the first time, the “Galway cottage” is listed as a joint asset with his wife. There are no details about the 2003 sale. And the disclosure of the value of the property has stayed consistently the same for the last fifteen years—between $100,000 and $250,000.
It may be the only place in Ireland that didn’t have an increase in value.
When Dodd ran for president, his disclosure form indicated, for the first time, that the value of between $100–$250,000 was based on the value at the time of sale. The form requires the value of the asset at the time filed, not the time reported, but Dodd has ignored that since 2002.
Once again, Dodd had made a great deal. He got someone (whoever…) to pay two-thirds of the expenses while he had full use of the property. And then he bought it for a song.
By the time he purchased the house in Ireland in 1994, he owned the apartment in D.C., with a $180,000 mortgage, as well as his waterfront home in East Haddam, on the bank of the Connecticut River, with mortgages of $148,000 (1985), $46,000 (1987), and $50,000 (1993). So once he bought his one-third interest in the Irish property, Dodd had outstanding mortgage obligations of $433,000—without counting taxes, insurance, upkeep, and so on. And this at a time when his Senate salary was $133,600.
Dodd’s account of the purchase ends on a truly bizarre note, which raises even more questions. Dodd says that he paid Kessinger $127,000 for his share. But then he says that he voluntarily paid even more, giving Kessinger a “gift” of more than $50,000. Why would he do that?
Dodd said he also used his own money to pay off the existing mortgage—including Kessinger’s share—which amounted to a gift to Kessinger of more than $50,000. “Candidly, our thinking was at the time, Jackie and I: Let’s be more conservative on this in case anybody should ever raise a question about whether or not this is somehow an enrichment or taking advantage of the situation.”
Whenever a politician starts a sentence with the word “candidly,” it should raise a bright red flag. Would anyone in his right mind actually voluntarily overpay his share of a mortgage by $50,000? Not likely. Dodd now says he paid Kessinger a total of $177,000 for his two-thirds interest in a house that was appraised at $190,000. You do the math. What a generous guy he is. It sounds kind of crazy, doesn’t it? Unless there was more to the story. We’ll stay tuned.
But—hypothetically speaking—if the Ireland property was originally bought for $160,000 and Dodd owned one third of it, his share would come to about $53,000—pretty close to the extra amount he generously paid to Kessinger. Imagine, still hypothetically, that he didn’t pay a nickel for the house