Corporate Crime

Dr. Lie-enstien Implodes in Washington

Memo to Bill Frist: shut-down the 2008 presidential campaign office.

From the lyin' Leader's home state paper, the Tennessean:

Senate records show Frist had been notified for years that he continued to own HCA stock in his blind trusts, contradicting public statements he made in the past about the distance the trusts put between him and his assets.

"Right now, I don't know if I own HCA because it's a qualified blind trust," Frist told the National Journal in September 2002.

A few months earlier, on May 16, his trustees informed him that one of his trusts had received HCA stock worth as much as $500,000 and another one had gotten HCA stock worth as much as $1 million, Senate records show.

In January 2003, after Frist took over as the top Senate Republican, he told cable news network CNBC the same thing in answering a question about his HCA holdings.

"As far as I know, I own no HCA stock," Frist said then.

Yet in December 2002, after the family partnership was liquidated, Frist had been notified that HCA stock worth $15,000-$50,000 was put into another trust.

"Mr. Frist keeps lying," said Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a liberal watchdog group that has filed a Senate Ethics Committee complaint about Frist's HCA holdings and will submit a revised one today. "He's killing his own political career. Nobody else has to do a thing to him, because he's just imploding."