Chuck Hagel Held To A Different Standard Than Bush Nominees

The vote on Chuck Hagel is delayed because a bunch of Republicans want to know where he got money from “foreign sources.”

But as a Democratic official pointed out on Wednesday that this appears to be a new standard. Bush-era nominees for Cabinet positions, in fact, often had ties to foreign companies that didn’t hold up their confirmations.

In particular, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul O’Neill, and Henry Paulson all had connections to foreign entities that paid them. Chevron, on whose board Rice sat, even named an oil tanker after her. Yet these nominees weren’t asked to make the same kind of disclosures that are being demanded of Hagel…

As of 2000, according to CBS News, Donald Rumsfeld served on the board of ABB Asea Brown Boveri Ltd, an electric power industry giant which was formed from a merger of Swedish and Swiss companies. According to ABB’s website: “ABB Asea Brown Boveri, was the result of a merger between Asea AB of Sweden and BBC Brown Boveri Ltd. of Baden, Switzerland in 1988. The merged entity became the world’s leading supplier in the $50 billion electric power industry. At that time ABB controlled as much as a third of Europe’s business and more than 20 percent of the world market. “

Henry Paulson, the former Treasury Secretary and Goldman Sachs CEO, also had dealings with foreign companies during his work at Goldman Sachs, especially in China.

By: Alan

Alan Colmes is the publisher of Liberaland.