Because not publicized, you are led to believe that they and their depraved ways do not exist.

Neil Bush

Neil Bush's Divorce In Spotlight

The Bush family has made headlines for decades; the political dynasty has produced two presidents and a governor. Now, they are making headlines of a different kind.

The president's brother Neil has recently divorced his wife of 22 years and for the first time, she's speaking out. KHOU reporter Anna Werner sat down with Sharon Bush last week for an exclusive interview.

Sharon Bush unsuccessfully went back to court last week, seeking to reopen her divorce case on the basis the settlement was unfair. She asked that the judge reconsider the amount she is due. He declined to do so.

With tears in her eyes, Sharon Bush, 51, says she never imagined she would be getting a divorce. “It was totally out of the blue,” she says.

The divorce not only separated her from her husband, whom she called "the most exciting, wonderful man I've ever met,” but also alienated her but from her extended family, the rest of the Bushes.

She is left with memories - good ones like Christmases at the White House and summers at the family compound in Maine and painful ones like the collapse of the Silverado Savings and Loan in the '80s for which some people blamed Neil Bush.

Sharon Bush recalls, “I heard it on the news, oh, "Neil Bush is being sued for $50 million." And I heard it in my car and I thought, 'My God, that's my husband.”

The lawsuit was eventually settled, but by then Sharon's marriage was on the rocks. She said she received an email from her husband saying, he wasn't sure they should remain married.

“And I, after 22 years was stunned," she says. "I said, ‘You're firing me?’ I said, ‘What do you mean, you're firing me?’ He said, ‘No, I just don't love you.’”

Neil Bush admitted there was another woman, a former volunteer in Barbara Bush's office, and love notes to the other woman on Neil Bush's stationery figured in the divorce proceedings.

Neil Bush declined to be interviewed by Werner, but in a court deposition, he said: "Our marriage has been broken. It's loveless. And there's nothing left to it. And there hasn't been for a long, long time."

In the deposition videotape, he says, “I had had sexual intercourse with perhaps three or four, I don't remember the exact number, women, at different times.”

Sharon Bush says, “I was stunned. I'm still stunned.”

Then she says came another shock in divorce court, her settlement. Although she agreed to it, she now claims she was pressured into signing it.

It requires her and her children to move out of their longtime home so it can be sold. Of what's left after lawyers and bills are paid, Sharon gets 75 percent. She also is getting alimony, about $30,000 a year, but that ends after four years when all her children are 18.

Sharon says that what she really wanted for her children was a little more time. In a letter, she says, she appealed to George Sr., whom she affectionately called "Gampy," for help, asking him to help her stay in the house with the children for just another four years.

"It would give me the opportunity to raise my children in the house that they have grown accustomed to and lived in for the last 10 years," she says.

George Sr. declined to comment to the CBS affiliate. But Sharon says in an email back to her, the former president said that he couldn't go against Neil's wishes, and the court had already ordered that the house be sold to pay the couple's debts.

He wrote, "I do believe the kids would happily adjust to a new house, even if it is not as grand as the one you are now living in." He also told her to "forget the past with Neil…find a job, and look to the future not the past."

He is helping provide her another house, but only to stay in while her children are still living with her. In five years, she'll have to pay the bills herself or move.

So this stay-at-home mom is preparing to look for a job. The former teacher says, “Not in my wildest dreams would I have imagined it, or I would have prepared myself more.”

Neil Bush again would not comment to the CBS affiliate, but in e-mails last year to his wife, he expressed concern for her welfare, saying, "My goal continues to be to work with you to get you settled."

His attorney describes that settlement as both "fair and generous."But Sharon Bush's attorneys say bills and legal fees may consume much of her savings. All in all, she says, it's not what she expected out of a life lived with the Bush family.

She says, “I thought for sure, I mean, I believed the family values, and I lived the family values."

Some lawyers told CBS News that some of the terms of the agreement are more favorable than required by Texas law, including the child support being paid by Neil Bush: $1,500 a month for the two minor children until they turn 18.

Suit claims Sharon Bush spread paternity rumors
By
CLAUDIA FELDMAN
Houston Chronicle
Sept. 4, 2003, 10:34AM

An anguished dad, desperate to stop speculation about the paternity of his toddler son, Wednesday sued a former member of President Bush's family for defamation.

"This has been a nightmare," said Robert Andrews, the ex-husband of the woman now dating presidential son and brother Neil Bush. "The allegations have been so nasty and so false I feel I must answer. My patience is used up."

The lawsuit, filed in state District Court on behalf of 2-year-old Thomas Alexander Andrews, said Sharon Bush has suggested to reporters, friends, even fast-food restaurant employees that Neil Bush, not Andrews, is the child's biological father.

The Bushes had been married 23 years when they signed a mediated divorce agreement in April. Andrews and his ex-wife, Maria, had been married 14 years when they divorced in October. Neil Bush and Maria Andrews met several years ago, when she was working as a volunteer for former first lady Barbara Bush.

Dale Jefferson, Robert Andrews' attorney, says his client is worried not only about gossip but about Sharon Bush writing a book about the Bush family and including defamatory statements about the boy.

Andrews, president and CEO of Andrews Technologies, decided to sue when he learned his son was the subject of gossip in a Memorial-area smoothie shop, Jefferson said.

"Sharon and Robert had two meetings," Jefferson said. "And in those meetings, Sharon told him face to face, `Alex is not your child.' Robert told her to leave the kids out of it and to leave Maria out of it, too." (The Andrewses have two other children.)

Robert Andrews is seeking a minimum of $850,000 in damages, legal fees, a written public apology and a lien on all book advances or royalties.

Sharon Bush, when told about the lawsuit Wednesday morning, said she did not defame anyone.

"I did not start that (paternity) rumor. It was started by people who have seen the baby, not me," she said.

She referred further questions to lawyer David Berg.

Berg said he had not seen the lawsuit, but had been contacted about it.

"The irony is lost on no one," he said. "She is being sued for $850,000, and that is the exact amount she paid for the house today."

During and after the divorce, the Bushes fought bitterly over the home they shared for 10 years. Neil wanted to sell it; she has been trying to raise the money to buy him out and closed on the deal Wednesday, Berg said.

Neil Bush has not discussed the divorce and related legal action. Until Wednesday, neither had Maria Andrews, who is in Paris with her children. Through her attorney, Laura Spalding, Maria Andrews said that she understands her ex-husband's feelings, but wonders if a lawsuit is in the children's best interests.

Andrews said he had no plans to participate in a paternity test. "I don't want to dignify the comments in that fashion," he said.

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This is the hottest and most explosive story behind the scenes in Washington in terms of how it could affect the Bush administration.

Ambassador Joseph Wilson has been turning up the heat in this situation. He revealed on Friday August 29 in a symposium in Washington the person in the Bush administration, who had leaked it out to the Washington Post that Wilson’s wife is a CIA agent of 26 years. As a consequence of this leak, her entire team of overseas assets were liquidated.

The leaker, it turns out, was none other than the notorious Karl H. Rove, Bush’s so-called White House advisor. Ambassador Wilson identified him as Karl Roverer, with the umlaut over the “o.”

According to reliable sources, as well as our own Al Martin Raw.com investigation, Karl Rove is, in fact, the grandson of Karl Heinz Roverer, the gauleiter of Mecklenburg, who was also a partner and senior engineer of Roverer Sud-Deutche Ingenieurbüro AG. They built Birchenau, the concentration camp in Nazi Germany.

So Karl Rove has been identified as the leaker responsible for the deaths of more than 70 CIA assets overseas (See previous story “Will the Real Chemical Ali Please Stand Up? The Curious Case of Ambassador Joseph Wilson)

When Ambassador Wilson was asked how he knew it was Rove, he had documents in his possession identifying Rove as the leaker from a secret investigation of the State Department’s Internal; Security Unit. It was a from a small clique, four Clinton holdovers in that department of the State Department that were sympathetic to what had happened to Wilson.

These investigations could not have possibly been made without at least the tacit acquiescence of Secretary of State Colin Powell.

Wilson has announced that he will have his private attorneys petition the Department of Justice demanding that Roverer a/k/a Karl Rove be prosecuted under the 1982 Intelligence Identity Protection Act . This law specifically supposed to prevent what has happened in this case and that is the Bush administration attempting to retaliate against a senior government official who tells the truth about that administration by revealing the identities of intelligence members within their own families.

This is a law that was specifically designed to prevent this from happening. It is a law that was proffered by the Democrats in 1982 that the Republicans fought and could not defeat. The law carries an automatic mandatory 10 years to life imprisonment as punishment.

And where would Rove go? Karl Rove, it should be noted, is a dual citizen of the United States and Germany. Because of his position he has special diplomatic status. The idea is that if its absolutely necessary he could go to Switzerland where he couldn’t be extradited.

The law specifically states in this case (and this depends on how much Secretary of State Colin Powell is prepared to get involved, if he signs a formal complaint from the State Department, then the Attorney General has no choice but to prosecute. He is required to prosecute, even if he doesn’t want to do so.

This is very explosive and what makes it so explosive is that this Intelligence Identity Act, if it can be proved, and Rove can be successfully prosecuted and if Rove reveals that the president George Bush told him to institute this leak, then the President's automatic shield of immunity is removed and the president himself can be prosecuted for murder if any deaths of any US intelligence agents or assets resulted from the leak. This is the only legal statute that has this provision.

The Bush Administration is exerting enormous pressure on Colin Powell because he is the real linchpin. They are exerting pressure on him NOT to proceed to file a formal complaint with the Department of Justice.

Wilson’s problem is that he has no greater legal standing than that of a private citizen. The Department of Justice, unbeknownst to anybody, has had a lot of communications with Wilson’s attorney and they’re claiming that Wilson has no special status, that he's just an everyday citizen, so that any demand he would make for prosecution would carry no more weight than a private citizen or OFU.

(OFU is George Bush Senior’s term to describe the average American citizen. It stands for “One Fodder Unit.”)

Wilson is saying, however, that when Rove leaked this out, he was still formally employed by the State Department. Wilson, it should be remembered, was the former ambassador during the Clinton Regime, was formally rehired, and he received a paycheck from the Department of State. When these leaks took place he still had another three weeks left on his contract. Therefore he was still a United States Ambassador and that apparently is also a key legal point.

When this goes before the US Court of Appeals in Washington and if the court agrees that Wilson was a formal ambassador at the time, then Colin Powell can not refuse to formally petition the Department of Justice for the prosecution of Karl Rove and to open an investigation into the president’s and vice president’s role in the affair.

Was Rove really the source of the leak? The investigation held thus far by the State Department’s Internal Security (ISD) has stated that Rove did indeed leak the information out about the Ambassador’s wife, CIA agent Valerie Wilson, to the Washington Post. Apparently they have an affidavit from the reporter he leaked it to.

The way the Bush Regime is trying to quash it is to slow it way down by exerting so much pressure against Pro-Bush Media. Please note that you have not heard one word about this on CNN or MSNBC or Fox News And not one word about this on ABC, CBS, or NBC.

If there is no public attention, there will be no steam behind it. Some of the congressmen are trying to push this into higher quarters. They’re trying to get Howard Dean to talk about it since he’s getting so much press coverage

It’s been said that Dean is himself frightened to start talking about it because it would diminish the press coverage he’s been getting. The Bush Administration has let it be known to the Democratic National Committee that any Democrat who tries to push this will find press coverage severely limited.

When the Democratic presidential selection process filters out (since there are now nine declared Democrats) and when there is one Democrat that everyone is behind, who’s going to be the contender, then they won’t be so frightened.

But this is a story, which should be more widely known, since the treatment of Ambassador Wilson and his family (not to mention the US intelligence assets who were liquidated overseas) is certainly one of the most egregious abuses of power yet perpetrated by the Bush administration.

Yet. However, who knows what they might do tomorrow?

It is the day after -- Happy McLabor Day in the Land of Bushonomics.

As reported by CNN --

* 9 million unemployed in the US, and increase of 6 million since election of Bush-Cheney

* 4 million high paying tech jobs permanently lost

* Another 3 million tech jobs to be exported overseas in next 15 years, but the good news is that 3 million new minimum-wage food-service jobs will be created in the US over the same time period. Happy McLabor Day!

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Janklow charged with second-degree manslaughter in crash
Monday, September 1, 2003 Posted: 12:02 PM EDT (1602 GMT)

CNN) -- U.S. Rep. Bill Janklow was charged Friday with manslaughter in the second degree, a class-four felony in South Dakota, said a court official in Flandreau, South Dakota.

The Republican was charged in connection with the August 16 death of a motorcyclist at an intersection near Janklow's hometown, Flandreau.

The charges, which were filed Friday morning, also include one count of failing to stop at a stop sign, one count of driving "at least" 71 mph in a 55 mph zone and one count of reckless driving, said Karla Bjerke, clerk of the court in Moody County.

If convicted, Janklow could face a maximum sentence of 10 years in the state penitentiary and a $10,000 fine.

Janklow, 63, was at the wheel of the car involved in the weekend collision in eastern South Dakota that killed Randolph E. Scott, 53, of Hardwick, Minnesota.

The accident occurred about 4:30 p.m. on a Saturday at an intersection of two rural county roads about 10 miles south of Janklow's hometown.

Ralph Nader and other consumer advocates this week called on Janklow to resign.

"There is no need to wait for prosecutors or civil suits by the next-of-kin to haul you into South Dakota's courts," Nader wrote in a letter to Janklow, a first-term congressman and former governor. "You should resign your congressional seat immediately in atonement for what was only going to be a matter of time -- the taking of life by a driver relentlessly bent on turning his vehicle into a lawless, dangerous missile."

Nader wrote that Janklow had been cited several times previously for "excessive speeding and reckless driving," and said that "for years you have spoken, some would say even boasted, about your penchant for driving very fast on public highways."

Nader, the Green Party candidate for president in 2000, said Janklow should face second-degree manslaugher charges.

Janklow's office did not respond to a call for comment Friday.

Janklow was elected to the state's sole House seat in 2002 after serving four terms as governor.

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