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Enron's enablers. $160 million buys a lot of high-octane evil. From the Houston Chronicle:

Plaintiffs' attorneys in the Enron shareholder lawsuit filed papers Tuesday saying Houston law firm Vinson & Elkins helped executives at the company conduct a massive accounting fraud that led to that firm's December 2001 bankruptcy and billions of dollars in investor losses.

V&E was no "mere scrivener, drafting, assembling and presumably even stapling closing documents," for Enron, "oblivious to the import and impact of what its most important and largest client was doing," the filing made in U.S. District Judge Melinda Harmon's court said.

Rather, V&E and Enron were "joined at the hip," with more than 600 firm lawyers having worked on hundreds of transactions over the years, according to the filing made by Bill Lerach, lead lawyer for the investors.

From 1997 to 2001, Enron was one of V&E's largest clients, paying $160 million in legal fees, the filing said.

When the book The History of Conspiracies in Early 21st-Century America is written, it will no doubt include such fascinating facts as that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was a V&E partner not long before he covered up Dubya's 1976 drunk driving arrest. V&E is involved in all sorts of denials, including denying global warming, where V&E partner John L. Howard Jr "led the Bush-Cheney 2000 Transition’s environmental team and assisted in developing President Bush’s energy plan and environmental, natural resource, and energy policies." Need I mention their generous contributions to the usual suspects, including Bush, Cornyn and DeLay?

Lay, Skilling, Cheney and Bush — you have to give them credit for amazing amounts of consistency in their defiance against reality in the stock markets, in Iraq, and in New Orleans. And you have to credit V&E in their ability to enable the most insidious evils to gain such national and international importance.

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