In 2002, Reid (D-Nev.) paid $10,000 to a pension fund controlled by Clair Haycock, a Las Vegas lubricants distributor and his friend for 50 years. The payment gave the senator full control of a 160-acre parcel in Bullhead City that Reid and the pension fund had jointly owned. Reid’s price for the equivalent of 60 acres of undeveloped desert was less than one-tenth of the value the assessor placed on it at the time.

Six months after the deal closed, Reid introduced legislation to address the plight of lubricants dealers who had their supplies disrupted by the decisions of big oil companies. It was an issue the Haycock family had brought to Reid’s attention in 1994, according to a source familiar with the events.

If Reid were to sell the property for any of the various estimates of its value, his gain on the $10,000 investment could range from $50,000 to $290,000.

It is a potential violation of congressional ethics standards for a member to accept anything of value — including a real estate discount — from a person with interests before Congress.

The man gets land cheap, and then the land is rezoned to make it worth millions. As we posted before (which caught the attention of Rush Limbaugh) the man has been turning deals and getting paid twice for the sale of land through hidden trusts. It is just amazing how gifted Reid is on these deals. Almost too amazing. It seems Bush Derangement Syndrome will make some lay down with theives if they must to try and thwart Bush. Will there be an investigation? Not by our bought and sold media. They are too busy exposing our terrorist defenses to investigate Reid’s quid pro quo.

I noticed a traffic spike coming from massive Google searches to finally determine from a Free Republic post that the Strata-Sphere got a mention on the first segment of Rush Limbaugh today. Perfect for a Friday the 13th! Thanks for the mention Rush, and welcome Rush fans – hope you find the site interesting.

Cheers, AJStrata

Update: I created a category just for the Harry Reid non-story so folks don’t have to go searching for my posts on the subject. Folks may find the posts on Foleygate interesting as well, especially the timeline we put together from blogger research and the occasionally informative media article.

Hugh Hewitt is just ripping up the drive-by media by giving them a “Journalism for Dummies: Shady Land Deals” tutorial on what to look for Reid’s land-scam. One item of note is this question that may now be answered:

When Senator Reid and his wife sold the property to Patrick Lane LLC in which he received an interest in return, did he receive any cash at the same time, or any time that year, in partial consideration for his sale of the land to the partnership?

Well, a link hit the site just now (thanks again Rush) that may have some of the answer to this question, because Patrick Lane LLC must have compensated the Reids for the land it purchased in 2004.:

Reid reported that he sold a piece of property and a 47 percent interest in an adjoining piece of land in January 2004 for a price that he reported as between $1 million and $5 million.

Clark County records indicate that Reid was involved in a sale completed in January 2004 of 4.73 acres on Patrick Lane just west of Fort Apache Road, south of Spring Valley. Records show the buyer was Patrick Lane LLC, whose manager was listed as Jay Brown, an attorney and longtime Reid friend and associate.

Records available Friday did not indicate sales prices. Reid declined through a spokeswoman to detail the transaction or verify the county information.

Reid’s profits from the transaction were reinvested in a Wells Fargo money market fund and in bond offerings, his aide confirmed from his financial report.

Now legally, any additional value from this point on ($400K was the final sale price) would be in Park Lane LLC, not to the Reid’s directly. But interestingly enough, Reid did record how much the property SHOULD be worth since the rezoning that took place only days prior to the sale of the property! Did Harry Reid tip his hand? If he sold it for $400K why list its value for what would be the selling price two years later? Hugh’s complete overview of this rocketing scandal is here, and it doesn’t look too good for Sen Reid. He was not very good at hiding what was going on, and his excuses are even worse. Polipundit noted this comment at Hewitt’s site, which clearly shows why the sale and the second payment of $1.1M is not legal and will not be shoved under the rug.

I only caught a piece of the segment on this, but it sounded like he received his cash back almost immediately. This is a bad fact if so. The IRS has some really awful rules to recharacterize this as a sale transaction if he received a cash distribution that, when looked together with the contribution of the land, is more properly characterized as a sale of the property. These are referred to as the disguised sale rules and reside in IRC Section 707(b) and the regulation thereunder.

Read the whole thing, but it implies a level of ignorance that doesn’t fit with Reid’s history. A US Senator can afford better real estate and tax attorney advice than what the evidence is exposing happened with this deal. Heck, I could get better advice from H&R Block than what we see in this scandal. This was not an innocent mistake. The number of land deals Reid has transacted means he is experienced in this, and knew better. Therefore the “naive innocent” excuse will not hold.

Senate Majority Minority Leader Harry Reid needs to step down from his leadership position right now and undergo a full investigation of his activities. Once again it seems the media is mostly turning a blind eye to what is clearly a probable case of buying influence by kicking back profits to a Senator who pushed legislation and peddled his influence in ways that helped create the profits he recieved. The fact the connection between Reid and the land developer he assisted was covered up in an UNDOCUMENTED (and therefore theoretical) business deal is what makes this look like a story of covering up (instead of whatever lame excuse Reid and Brown are trotting out).

Again it was one of those rare days I was in the car and Rush was on that I learned the so-called business arrangement was ‘undocumented’. Hate to inform all those legal eagles in the Democrat party – but unless it is documented it is not a business or a business arrangement. Without a contract it is nothing.

Look at what Reid did to make his land purchase a windfall of nearly 3/4′s of a million dollars without any documentation (or taxes, speaking of giving tax breaks to the rich):

Nevada land deeds show Reid and his wife first bought the property in January 1998 in a proposed subdivision created partly with federal lands transferred by the Interior Department to private developers.

Reid’s two lots were never owned by the government, but the piece of land joining Reid’s property to the street corner _ a key to the shopping center deal _ came from the government in 1994. [AJStrata: making the property Reid bought valuable IF the land were to be developed, and basically useless otherwise]

…

Around the time of the 1998 sale, Lessman and his company were completing a complicated federal land transfer that also involved an Arizona-based developer named Del Webb Corp.

In the deal, Del Webb and Perma-Bilt purchased environmentally sensitive lands in the Lake Tahoe area, transferred them to the government and then got in exchange several pieces of valuable Las Vegas land.

Lessman was personally involved, writing a March 1997 letter to Interior lobbying for the deal. “This exchange has been through many trials and tribulations … we do not need to create any more stumbling blocks,” Lessman wrote.

For years, Reid also had been encouraging Interior to make land swaps on behalf of Del Webb, where one of his former aides worked.

What is clear is Reid only purchased the land after some initial hurdles were cleared – specifically the land swap where developers bought useless property (“environmentally sensitive” means no development, none) in one state and then traded it in for property someplace else where they could develop. It is only after this first hurdle is passed does Reid make is purchase. But even at this early stage Reid was trading political pressure for donations:

In 1994, Reid wrote a letter with other Nevada lawmakers on behalf of Del Webb, and then met personally with a top federal land official in Nevada. That official claimed in media reports he felt pressured by the senator. Reid denied any pressure.

The next year, Reid collected $18,000 in political donations from Del Webb’s political action committee and employees. Del Webb’s efforts to get federal land dragged on.

Is it far fetched to assume the initial coordination would lead to ideas on how to really cash-in? And not in political donations, but personal wealth!

Clark County intended for the property Reid owned to be used solely for new housing, records show. Just days before Reid sold the parcels to Brown’s company, Brown sought permission in May 2001 to rezone the properties so a shopping center could be built.

Career zoning officials objected, saying the request was “inconsistent” with Clark County’s master development plan. The town board in Spring Valley, where Reid’s property was located, also voted 4-1 to reject the rezoning.

Brown persisted. The Clark County zoning board followed by the Clark County Commission voted to overrule the recommendation and approve commercial zoning. Such votes were common at the time.

So somehow the land that was not available became available – and Reid purchased it. And somehow the land that was zoned residential (and therefore would gain marginal value over time) became rezoned right before Reid ‘sold’ the land to this shell company for what he paid for it! For NO PROFIT. Not even the normal inflation of money. This is right after the zoning came through that would drastically increase its value! One could have said how unfortunate that Reid sold right at the time the value would start shooting up. But he did not sell the land it seems, he simply transferred it in some verbal, mythical business deal. So when the land did sell to a developer, Reid – who clearly sold the land to this company – got a huge (and hidden) windfall.

Are we to believe Reid’s well timed moves and his clear ‘selling’ of his land with zero increase in price at a time the land’s value would begin skyrocketing to business entity without any mention of Reid’s involvement or ownership, and his willingness to cough up $400K worth of real estate without any written agreement of interest in said business, is all innocent?

Update: This news about Reid makes one wonder what kinds of real estate deals is he in on in this area of Nevada, given the fact he is working in opposition to his liberal base.

A large coalition of environmental groups is challenging legislation by Nevada’s two U.S. senators that would create almost 550,000 acres of wilderness in White Pine County but allow private development on other federal land.

The environmentalists say that surrendering 45,000 acres in that county to development in exchange for wilderness protection is a bad deal that a Congress controlled by Democrats would be less likely to approve. The groups want a delay to see whether Democrats succeed in taking control of the House or Senate in the Nov. 7 elections.

The White Pine County bill is one of four pieces of legislation the environmental groups oppose. The others involve similar land-use exchanges in Idaho and Utah.

“All of them have this quid pro quo strategy of giving away public land in one place for protection in another place,” said Janine Blaeloch, director of the Western Lands Project. “If wilderness is going to be protected, it should not happen at the cost of losing the rest of our public lands.”

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D.-Nev., and his Republican colleague, Sen. John Ensign, drafted the White Pine County bill. It would trade federal wilderness protections, which generally prohibit development and restrict most motorized recreation, on some lands for the privatization of other lands.

The bill is modeled after a 1998 bill, the Southern Nevada Public Land Management Act, which set aside land for wilderness and designated other land for sale for private development and other uses.

This deal has all the characteristics of the other one. I wonder if Reid has some verbal business agreements here as well?

“Give you Vegas for just about anything,” seems to be President Bill Clinton’s pitch.

…

What Clinton and his environmental advisors had in mind is still not clear.
It was first reported as the swap of some unidentified federal land worth at least $65 million to Crown Butte Mines Inc. for their promising gold strike just outside Yellowstone in Montana. But it now appears that Clinton may not have had any particular properties at all in mind when — during a vacation visit to Yellowstone in August — he made his electioneering announcement.
In fact, it turns out a federal search team from the Bureau of Land Management wasn’t even organized to look for possible swap sites until 17 days after the announcement. That’s the word from BLM Deputy Director Matt Millenbach.

…

Just how Clinton was even able to pull off the deal, and what promises may have been made, seems part of the mystery. Four of the mining company’s board members resigned shortly after the announcement, complaining they were never even informed negotiations were going on.
So what does the President have to offer in return for a campaign plank built in the Wyoming breeze?
The usual, it appears: richly sought-after and often-claimed development sites around Las Vegas identified by Millenbach as up for trade.
This is apparently the same slice of BLM-owned land near the booming gaming capitol that has already been claimed in part by the Del Webb Corporation in return for farms it and the Nature Conservancy bought this year from embattled growers near a proposed wetland outside Fallon, Nevada.
It’s also apparently the same Las Vegas BLM property the American Land Conservancy refers to in its still on-going swap deal for a 140-acre mansion and estate on Lake Tahoe.
And although the President was just as vague in Arizona about what he had done in Utah, the federally-owned Vegas property also seems to have been part of the carrot offered to trade out coal leases on his newly-proclaimed Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.

Are these connections valid? Was a desparate Clinton trying to do whatever he could to win re-election? Were deals made that would normally be rejected by the liberal base because they meant giving lands to developers and others. As I stated earlier, this deal has produced nearly a billion dollars a year in commercial activity around Las Vegas. The more you dig the stranger (and smellier) this hole deal looks. Where are the super sleuthes from the drive-by media on this??? I am just googling.

Senator McCain backed away from Keating, but the McCain clan hung on to one Keating perk much longer. In 1986, Keating cut McCain’s wife Cindy and father in-law James Hensley into a strip mall he was developing. When the mall sold two years ago, Hensley (the owner of a huge Anheuser-Busch distributorship that is McCain’s Number Two Career Patron) and Cindy McCain made a profit that reportedly fell somewhere between $100,000 and $1 million.

The senator’s Number Seven Career Patron, Del Webb Corporation, has engineered several controversial land swaps with the federal government. The U.S. House passed legislation in 1994 to expand Nevada’s Red Rock National Conservation Area. Part of the land that this bill would have preserved was a parcel that Del Webb wanted for a subdivision. The homebuilder had proposed that the feds swap that land for another parcel Del Webb owned. Exercising his senatorial prerogative, McCain put a “hold” on the bill, providing Del Webb lobbyists time to rally Nevada’s congressional delegation behind an alternative land swap deal that accommodated Del Webb.

Honestly, I do not see a smoking gun here. The Mall Deal could be completely on the up and up, and if reported it is fine. And McCain could have had many reasons put the hold on the bill – one of which could have been a request by his buddy Reid. But the mention of “The Keating Five” cannot bode well for anyone associated with this subject.

When Larry Paulson went to the Las Vegas District Office of the Bureau of Land Management the first week in December and asked to see the case file on Phase 1 of the Del Webb land-swap, he was told the appraisals on the land exchange were “confidential.”

So, on December 8, the former research professor and director of UNLV’s Lake Mead Limnological Research Center, wrote Nevada’s senior U.S. Senator, Harry Reid.

“Can they do that?” asked Paulson, who had visited the BLM office in his role as water consultant for the Nevada Seniors Coalition.

“It doesn’t seem right that we can’t find out what the property is worth,” he wrote. “Is that the way the so called “Olympic” land swap that involves 3,800 acres and the “American Land Conservancy” deal for another 6,002 acres in the southwestern portion of the valley will be handled too?” It is four weeks later now, and if Dr. Paulson has not yet heard from Senator Reid, it may be because Reid doesn’t know quite what to say.

That’s because, Electric Nevada has learned, Nevada’s senior senator is himself a major source of in-state BLM officials’ anxiety that nothing at all should interfere with the Del Webb land swap.

Reid is now, because of his ranking status on the U.S. Senate’s Energy and Natural Resources Committee, the single most powerful Democrat in the Senate when it comes to either natural resource issues or power over the U.S. Department of Interior — of which the BLM is a part.

And, for some reason, the Del Webb land swap is very much something Harry Reid wants to go through.

“The Senator was very clear that Del Webb was to be a priority” for the office, said the source, adding Reid said that Del Webb was “‘to be put on the top of the pile and not have to go to the end of the line.’”

Nevada’s senior senator also told assistant district manager Ryan to “take a personal interest and assist Del Webb in any way possible within the regulations.”

Was this pressure to ‘assist’ with ‘the regulations’ simply an effort to speed along the process? Why were things being closed to the public? Why was there no transparency? Well, some hefty donations were coming in for Reid as he applied the pressure

Del Webb — according to Electric Nevada’s search of Federal Election Commission records — had given Nevada’s senior senator $22,000 in his first Senate re-election bid, in 1992. But it gave him nothing in 1993 or 1994. Yet in July and then November of 1995, the “Del Webb Employee Fund for Better Government” — a PAC – suddenly found occasion to gave Reid a total of $40,000.

And apparently Reid was personally active with Del Webb’s efforts. So is anyone going to believe he lost track of this effort, or did not know when and where the land would become available for purchase? Del Webb traded their land at Tahoe for Federal Land in Nevada, but we are supposed to believe Reid had no contact with the ‘onwer’ of the land he bought??? Just because it went through another set of hands doesn’t make it innocent… It makes it more questionable.

Update: Ed Morrissey does some real impressive digging here and here (h/t Instapundit). More details on the events in 1997 are here.

Update: The more you read about the reporting at the time this deal was being consumated on the Nevada end, the more you realize Reid was into the details for years. More here from 1997 as Del Webb becomes irate their huge campaign donations were made public. I thought that was liberal gospel: donation from large, rich companies had to be made public?

The federal Bureau of Land Management is reviewing a pending Nevada land swap that has drawn criticism because data justifying the deal came from the developer — via its employee who set up shop in a local BLM office.

…

The process was criticized Monday by U.S. Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev. The Senate majority whip said he’d support legislation to end landowners’ direct involvement in the government’s handling of their own deals.

“I’m not saying it’s illegal,” Reid said. “I just don’t like the way it looks.”

But didn’t Reid help push the land swap deal that resulted in his own profit windfall? Yes he did.

The agreement brings to a close more than three years of complex negotiations among the university, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, Del Webb Conservation Holding Company, the U.S. Forest Service and the American Land Conservancy.

…

The agreement is a result of efforts to preserve Lake Tahoe by Nevada U.S. Sen. Harry Reid, who coordinated President Clinton’s 1997 Lake Tahoe Environmental Summit.

“The real winner as a result of this long-awaited agreement is the public,” Reid said. “The Whittell Estate holds some of the most fantastic scenery in the Lake Tahoe Basin. Not only will the people be granted the pleasure of seeing the one-mile shoreline, 147-acre property and the magnificent 16,500-square-foot stone chateau, but the University of Nevada, Reno will be able to use the facility as an environmental research center. As a result, I am confident that the University of Nevada will now get the recognition it has long deserved as being on the forefront of environmental research in the Lake Tahoe Basin.”

Three years of effort! That is a long time and a lot of work. And this deal is not about small amounts of money. This Tahoe deal is generating billions of dollars a year, and much of it going back into Nevada, even though it was related to a swap of Federal land, not state land. And the fact is the Federal government is selling-swapping this land at bargain basement prices, only to have developers and well connected politicians like Reid make the profits. This has been a problem for years – where the profits all show up AFTER the swap.

The report cited a case in which a person obtained 70 acres of federal land in Nevada as part of an unidentified land exchange for $763,000 and on the same day, land records show, sold the property for $4.6 million.

I am seeing plenty of evidence this practice needs to be suspended and audited in detail from top to bottom to see if all these deals are benefiting others like Reid who push for the deals, and then magically get a windfall froom an undocumented business arrangement.

The second scandal brewing is with Senate Minority Leader Reid’s fishy land deals and amazing profit windfalls. The man turned $400K into a cool $1.1M in a land deal he seems to have tried to hide from public scrutiny. Now I am not tarring all Democrats with these acts, unless they try and distract from the proper scrutiny these acts deserve.

Update:Ed Morrissey has done some digging and has made the case that the Reid transaction looks like a payoff in return for Reid assisting ‘the developer’ he bought the land from in getting help from the US Government to make tens of millions of dollars in real estate. The fact Reid is hiding the transaction from We The People while he worked diligently for years to help the developer make his profits is a clear ‘signal’ something is not kosher here. If the Dems are all about ‘signals’ of illegal behavior, Reid is lit up like Time Square at New Years Eve right now. He should step down.