Were Mr. Mineta's Favors for Trimble Navigation Unethical or Illegal? Both!

Yesterday I sent an email message to numerous Federal Highway Administration staff members that described former Transportation Secretary Mineta's problematic connection to Trimble Navigation. My message linked to my four white papers that lay out the details of this connection in great detail.

(In the event you're a newcomer to this blog, I discovered Mr. Mineta's apparent shenanigans related to Trimble Navigation in reviewing the Public Financial Disclosure Reports of several high-level USDOT officials I suspected of collaborating with Mr. Shuster in the Traffic.com scandal.)

I sent a copy of this message to a long-time friend of mine (I'll call him "Bill," not his real name), a conservative who regularly comments on our nation's transportation policies and who has close philosophical ties to the Mineta and Peters regimes. Over the past two years I've sent him many details about the Traffic.com scandal, and he regularly responds that he found the information interesting or applauds me for making an impact. However, while I think he accepts the fact that former Cong. Bud Shuster is a big-time crook, he has (so far) refused to believe that Mineta or Jackson have collaborated with Shuster in this scandal.

This was Bill's response to my forwarded message yesterday:

Thanks, Jerry. I note that you do not accuse Mr. Mineta of any illegal or unethical practices. Or do you?

Regards,
Bill

My reply:

Bill,

I'm not a lawyer, of course, I'm an engineer. However, according to Jack [not his real name, the Chairman of a DC-based government corruption watchdog organization], who is a lawyer, it's very possible that Mr. Mineta violated the federal Ethics in Government Act that requires senior federal officials, including sitting Cabinet members, to fully disclose details of their financial transactions while in government service.

Clearly, Mr. Mineta failed to disclose how many Trimble Navigation stock options he cashed in just after he became Commerce Secretary. I think he did so deliberately (and fraudulently), because he knew that things wouldn't look right if he were to publicly disclose that a company gave him a whole lot more stock options than he should have received by company policy just before assuming a Cabinet position in which he would have a major influence over federal policies that would impact that company.

Jack sent me a bunch of information related to a violation of the Ethics in Government Act by Ronald Blackley, who was Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy's Chief of Staff during the Clinton Administration. Blackley was convicted of failing to disclose $22K of income from an agri-business company, and was sentenced to two years in prison, as I recall.

I believe that Mr. Mineta almost certainly received stock options worth many times that amount of money, and that he favored numerous policies and initiatives designed to benefit Trimble Navigation while both Commerce and Transportation Secretary. E9-1-1 is one of the most obvious ones he championed when he became Transportation Secretary. One FHWA insider and a long-time friend of mine told me -- unprompted -- that shortly after Mr. Mineta became Transportation Secretary the word came down to JPO [the Intelligent Transportation Systems Joint Program Office] that they had to divert $7 million of their existing funding into this new initiative. This person told me that everyone was scratching their heads about why the USDOT should be leading a communication initiative, not a transportation initiative, that logically should have been spearheaded by the FCC and not the USDOT. In hindsight, I think that USDOT led it because their leader at the time (Mineta) was doing a favor as payback for a company that gave him a whole lot of extra stock options under the table.

So, yes, I believe that he violated the Ethics in Government Act in a big way, which is a felony. I don't know how you feel about this, but I don't think that our federal government's top leaders should be "bought and paid for" by special interests in this way. I think it's reprehensible behavior.

The only question I have is whether the authorities, including the SEC and the OIG, have sufficient integrity and independence to get to the bottom of this matter. The SEC surely could, if they wanted to.

[snip]

Jerry