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CNN Live Saturday

Bush Pushes Congress to Take Action on Corporate Wrongdoing

Aired July 13, 2002 - 12:10   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
FREDRICKA WHITFIELD, CNN ANCHOR: President Bush is pushing Congress now to take action in the corporate accounting controversies, and he wants them to do it quickly. He's asked lawmakers to act on his crackdown plan before they go on break next month. CNN White House correspondent Suzanne Malveaux joins us from the White House with more on that. Hi, Suzanne.

SUZANNE MALVEAUX, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Hi, Fredricka. It is a rough week for the president the last couple days -- this is because he tried to deliver a message of hope and optimism, trying to boost the confidence of investigators -- rather, investors -- back into Wall Street and the markets, but he really got a lot of questions about his own business dealings as the director of Harken Energy Group some dozen years ago.

It was this week that he held his first corporate fraud task force meeting trying to get that under way. He also was pushing Congress on the domestic agenda and legislation that has stalled over the last couple of months on homeland security, on economic reform as well as welfare reform, all of these issues. But the president dogged by these questions again of his own business dealings as director of the Harken Energy Group. He says that he did not do anything wrong, but again, there were still more allegations, this time against Vice President Dick Cheney on -- as CEO of Halliburton, oil company, Judicial Watch taking that company and the vice president, suing them, taking them to task. He says that this is a case without merit.

Clearly this White House trying to move forward, to get out of all of this muck. What they're going to be doing this week is he is going to be traveling to Birmingham, Alabama. He is going to go ahead and conduct an economic roundtable. He's not going to focus on the stock market, the decline, but rather some of the other economic indicators, healthy economic indicators like the low interest rates, low inflation, things like that, really trying to get away from some of these allegations -- Fredricka.

WHITFIELD: Well, Suzanne, you mentioned Bush, you mentioned Cheney about their business dealings. Are there other administration officials where the mega-fine glass is about to be brought upon?

MALVEAUX: Well, as a matter of fact, this morning there were reports that Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson -- reports that when he was a director of Providian, a credit card company, between '97 and 2001, that that company paid $400 million to settle. That was related to some allegations of securities fraud and consumer fraud.

Now, we actually spoke with his spokesperson, Mark Corallo (ph) this morning, and he said, look, this is what happened. When he found out that this was going on, when the inquiry began, he decided he wanted to do the right thing. He had no idea that this was happening. He said let's go ahead and push for this settlement of $400 million. He said the reason why he did not disclose this information is that this is something that the Senate Judiciary Committee already was aware of before he was confirmed to his position. He really didn't feel like it was necessary, and he also said that there's really no evidence of wrongdoing.

WHITFIELD: All right. Thanks very much. Suzanne Malveaux from the White House.

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