Release the Keating Report Now

Six weeks after its completion, the report by the Senate Ethics Committee’s special counsel on the part played by the “Keating Five” in the savings and loan scandal remains hidden from public scrutiny.

The report is said to recommend dropping charges of improper conduct against John Glenn (D-Ohio) and Arizona’s John McCain, the only Republican among the five senators who reaped a total of $1.3 million in political contributions after helping Charles H. Keating Jr. hold off federal regulators. That intervention helped prolong the survival of Keating’s shaky Lincoln Savings & Loan. One result was to balloon the cost that must now be paid to bail out Lincoln’s depositors.

This week McCain and Glenn demanded the immediate release of special committee counsel Robert S. Bennett’s report, a 354-page compilation of evidence and recommendations, believing it will help restore their political reputations. That’s understandable. But there is a much larger issue involved in the committee’s delay in releasing the report. That is the public’s right to know, in timely fashion , what its elected representatives may have been up to, including most specifically whether some of them violated Senate rules and certain federal regulations.

McCain and other Republicans charge that the Bennett report is being held back for partisan reasons until after next month’s congressional elections, because it proposes further investigations of Democratic Sens. Alan Cranston of California, Dennis DeConcini of Arizona and Donald W. Riegle Jr. of Michigan. Whatever the validity of that claim, the Ethics Committee has now voted to hold public hearings on senatorial involvement with Keating beginning Nov. 15, more than a week after the elections. That is something less than confidence-inspiring.

The savings and loan debacle dwarfs every previous financial scandal in the nation’s history. New estimates are that ultimately it could cost taxpayers up to $1 trillion. How did the Keating Five, or the Keating Three, contribute to this mess? The Ethics Committee has some clues, maybe even some answers. The public has a right to that information, now and in full.