Good Friends and Bad Memory

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The Senate finds a few more questions to ask Edwin Meese

The Senate confirmation of Presidential Counsellor Edwin Meese as Attorney General has suddenly shifted from a near certainty to an increasingly close call. Republican Strom Thurmond, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, had closed the heated hearings two weeks ago after four days of testimony. But last week he reluctantly agreed to Democratic demands that Meese answer more questions before the committee voted on his nomination. "The longer the issue accelerates, the better and better his chances of being defeated become," said Meese's chief opponent, Ohio Democrat Howard Metzenbaum.

Why reopen the hearings? The key was a revelation in the Washington Post that Meese had failed to tell the committee about a $15,000 interest-free loan made in December 1980 to his wife Ursula by Edwin W. Thomas, a longtime California friend of the couple's. Meese had also failed to include the loan in his 1981 financial-disclosure statement, which was supposed to cover any large assets or indebtedness of anyone in his family. After the Post sought an explanation from him to include in its story revealing the loan, Meese hurriedly wrote a letter of apology to the Judiciary Committee saying, "I sincerely regret the oversight."

The Meese letter said that his wife had used the loan to buy stock for their children early in 1981 in Biotech Capital Corp., a firm headed by a colleague of Meese and Thomas' from California. But Meese also failed to list the stock holding, as required, in his 1981 financial-disclosure statement. He told the Judiciary Committee that his wife sold the stock on May 13, 1983, at a loss of $3,000 and repaid the loan at about the same time. Since the interest rate on a personal loan for the period was about 16%, the lack of interest charged over the 30 months was in effect a gift of more than $3,000.

In isolation, Meese's omission of the loan could have been considered as merely another example of his shaky memory. But the real problem for Meese was that the newly revealed loan seemed to be part of a pattern in which individuals who helped Meese financially landed federal jobs. Thomas, who had been assistant Cabinet secretary in California when Reagan was Governor, was appointed a deputy to Meese in the White House in January 1981 at a salary of $59,500. Thomas left the Meese staff in 1982 to become a regional administrator of the General Services Administration in San Francisco, a $69,600 Government post. His wife Gretchen was appointed on Sept. 5, 1982, to a $30,402 federal job with the Merit Systems Protection Board. They join a lengthening list of Meese benefactors who got appointive jobs from the Reagan Administration. They include:

> John McKean, a California accountant, who lent $60,000 to Meese in 1981 and demanded no interest payments for more than 20 months. McKean was appointed a part-time member of the Postal Service board of governors on July 31, 1981, and is now the board's chairman.

> Thomas Barrack, a California real estate developer, who found a buyer for Meese's California house in the summer of 1982, lent $70,000 to a prospective purchaser and then forgave the loan. Barrack was appointed Deputy Under Secretary of the Interior in December 1982.