Trump should try new defense on Cuba scandal: Why pick on me? Cheney pulled this kind of sh*t too
Throughout history, there have always been prominent people who assume that certain laws shouldn’t and don’t apply to them. Americans aren’t different in this regard. Whether it’s ignoring conventions against torture, violating anti-trust statutes, or evading trade embargos, a few heavyweights figure they just aren’t included in prohibitions supposedly meant for everybody. And since they are rarely punished beyond a tsk-tsk or laughable fine for their violations, who can argue that their view of being above it all is inaccurate?
Now that Kurt Eichenwald has exposed Donald Trump in regards to the Cuban embargo, it’s worth recalling that another powerful Republican violated U.S. embargos, too. And he had absolutely no regrets about it. That fellow is Dick Cheney, the former vice president, who as CEO of Halliburton didn’t like the sanctions against Iran and Libya and other nations. And he got around them through sketchy shenanigans that violated the spirit and sometimes the letter of those laws.
During Cheney's tenure at Haliburton, for example, the company carried out business with Azerbaijan, Indonesia, Iraq, Libya, Iran, and Nigeria even though the U.S. had imposed sanctions on them. Cheney lobbied fiercely for eliminating the sanctions, even as his company quietly did business with them. Some of this business was clearly illegal, and Halliburton was fined for it. Other business was merely shady.
In July 2000, the same month Cheney picked himself to be the GOP’s vice presidential nominee, he was asked whether Halliburton or its subsidaries were trying to do business illegally with Iraq. He denied this, noting that as CEO, he had imposed a policy of having nothing to do with Iraq. This claim was an outright fabrication. Halliburton subsidiaries sold more than $73 million in oil-production parts to Iraq under sanction. In 2000, Cheney’s last year at Halliburton, his compensation at the company was $20 million, after taxes.