"If Ya Don't Know, Now Ya Know"

The Tennessean reports that Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist knew what the deal was even though he claimed earlier that he was in the dark:

Before: "I had no information about HCA or its performance that was not publicly available when I directed the trustees to sell the stock," Frist said Monday, referring to the sale by administrators of his blind trusts.
"My only objective in selling the stock was to eliminate the appearance of a conflict of interest," Frist's statement said.


Now: Records filed with the Senate show that trusts held for Frist and his children received as much as $2.3 million in HCA stock between January 2001, when Frist established blind trusts in an attempt to minimize conflicts of interest, and last June, when he ordered his trustees to sell all the stock he had left in the company.

Most of the HCA stock was transferred into the blind trusts once family partnerships set up to manage substantial wealth that Frist's parents left to relatives were dissolved, a Frist adviser said. Frist's parents died in 1998, but their estate wasn't settled through probate until 2001. The stock owned in the partnerships was distributed over the next couple of years.


Meanwhile, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay has a dubious honor: the lawyer representing him gave more money to Democrats then the lawyer who's prosecuting him.