Hunt-ing Season

Ray Hunt and the missus, who kinda know George and Laura Bush just a little, dig?

Yesterday on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives, Dennis Kucinich demanded to know precisely how Dallas-based Hunt Oil Company got that deal to drill for oil in Iraq, which it signed a couple of weeks ago with the Kurdistan Regional Government. Kucinich said the deal “raises questions,” given Hunt Oil CEO Ray Hunt’s ties to President Bush, and “appears to undercut the goal of oil revenue sharing but is predictably consistent with the administration’s attempt to privatize Iraqi oil assets.”
Well, today someone raised some of those questions during a Bush media conference — and the president said, in short, he don’t know nothin’ ’bout no deal between the gummint over yonder and his appointee to the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, not to mention one of his biggest fund-raisers and the main man behind his think tank and library at SMU, Hunt’s alma mater.

“Our embassy also expressed concern about it,” Bush said when asked if it undermined a national oil law. “I knew nothing about the deal.”

“I need to know exactly how it happened,” he added. “To the extent that it does undermine the ability for the government to come up with an oil revenue-sharing plan that unifies the country, obviously I’m — if it undermines that, I’m concerned.”

Sgt. Schultz, the floor is yours. –Robert Wilonsky