CIA director withheld information about JFK assassination

[Octafish]

52. POLITICO as the fountainhead is interesting, too.

Politico founder Robert Allbritton is son of the late Riggs Bank boss Joe Allbritton of Houston. The elder Mr. Albritton was a close associate of George H.W. Bush.

Who funds and runs the Politico?

A longtime Reaganite is the president and CEO of the Politico. Are we supposed to believe that to be irrelevant to its political coverage?

GLENN GREENWALD
Salon.com, May 4, 2007

EXCERPT...

UPDATE: The Politico‘s primary (perhaps sole) funding source is the Allbritton Company, of which Frederick Ryan is an employee. The Allbritton family’s leader, Joe, was CEO of Riggs Bank when Riggs pleaded guilty to a series of illegal financial transactions with right-wing Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and his brutal military that took place throughout the 1990s and into 2001.

Although Allbritton himself was never charged with knowledge of those illegal transactions, he maintained what appears to be a close personal and business relationship with the right-wing dictator (h/t Jonathan Schwarz):

When Joe L. Allbritton was chief executive of Riggs Bank, he received personal gifts from Augusto Pinochet and wanted the former Chilean dictator to visit the Allbritton horse farm in Virginia, according to drafts of letters from 1996 and 1997.
The drafts were found in the bank’s investigation of the relationship between Allbritton and Pinochet, whose government murdered or tortured an estimated 3,000 political opponents over 17 years. . . .

The two draft letters and memos do not show that Allbritton was aware of any illegal actions by the bank or its officers, but they indicate that Allbritton had a personal relationship with Pinochet and knew details of his business dealings at Riggs, according to sources who have read the documents. . . .

Since July, Riggs’s internal investigators have discovered that Pinochet’s relationship to Riggs was both deeper and longer than previously known, according to sources familiar with their findings. Since the July Senate hearing, Riggs has found photographs of Allbritton and Pinochet together and internal correspondence and letters to Pinochet and senior Chilean military officials that indicate Allbritton was personally involved in courting the former dictator as a Riggs client. . . .

“I am also grateful for our thriving personal friendship which you have demonstrated through your gracious hospitality and stalwart support of the Riggs,” Allbritton wrote in a draft dated November 1997, a year when Riggs was expanding its relationship with both Pinochet and the Chilean military. “I thank you for the marvelous gifts to both Barbie and myself, including the history books which I found fascinating.”

“Barbie” is Allbritton’s wife, Barbara, who was a director of Riggs Bank until early 2004,when she and her husband resigned as directors.

In the 1996 draft, Allbritton expressed his “profound thanks” for a reception Pinochet threw for Allbritton at a Chilean military academy where the men watched an equestrian demonstration by cadets. In his draft, Allbritton invited Pinochet and his wife, Lucia, to the Allbritton horse farm in Middleburg, Va. Allbritton also thanked Pinochet for “the superb cuff links you presented to me.”

SOURCE: http://www.salon.com/2007/05/04/politico_funding/

Riggs Bank was colorful, Compay Hermana.