On Tuesday, Bush's chief counsel, Alberto Gonzales, would not comment on the substance of the meeting between Shortridge and McNally. He said that there is no known instance of Enron officials asking White House officials for help before the company filed for bankruptcy in December.

But Enron did seek help from the Bush administration prior to the company's bankruptcy filing in December, according to documents released by the White House earlier this year. According to those documents, Lay called Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill on Oct. 28, to advise him that Enron was heading toward bankruptcy. The following day, Lay asked Commerce Secretary Don Evans for help in heading off a downgrading of Enron's credit rating by Wall Street credit rating agencies, which would push the company into bankruptcy. A week later, Enron president Greg Whalley called Treasury Undersecretary Peter Fisher six to eight times, seeking help in getting banks to lend more money to Enron.

The White House also announced in January that Lawrence B. Lindsey, who heads Bush's National Economic Council, had directed a review in October -- before the calls received by O'Neill and Evans -- to see whether an Enron collapse could have a strong impact on the American economy. That admission prompted critics to sound several alarms.

As Jennifer Palmieri, a spokeswoman for the Democratic National Committee, said at the time, "it shows once again that the administration did a lot of thinking about the fact that the company was going to collapse but they did absolutely nothing to make sure that 50,000 Enron employees would not lose their life savings."

It also drew closer attention to the intensely close ties between Enron and the Bush administration. Lindsey had been a paid consultant for Enron, receiving $50,000 in 2000. And he is just one of other top White House and Republican Party official with close Enron ties, including Robert Zoellick, the United States trade representative, who sat on an Enron advisory board in 2000; Karl Rove, the senior White House political strategist, who held more than 1,000 Enron shares before selling them in June 2001; and Marc Racicot, chairman of the Republican National Committee, who worked as an Enron lobbyist last year.

Then there's Enron's close financial ties to the Bush campaign. Enron and its employees gave more than $1 million to Bush's 2000 election campaign, the Republican Party and the Bush Inaugural, and Bush aides used the Enron corporate jet during the post-election fracas in Florida.

White House press secretary Ari Fleischer told reporters this week that he hopes Lieberman does not use the documents turned over to his committee as a "fishing expedition."

"I hope the question from the committee is focused on any prior knowledge about Enron's bankruptcy, and communications with Enron where information about bankruptcy could have been conveyed, and not an open-ended fishing expedition about any contact with anybody at Enron for any reason," Fleischer said.

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