Subcommittee hearing transcript, 19 September 1972, and the 1973 audit of the department's handling of the export sales
- Origin
- Congressional record; federal audit office
- Dated
- hearing 19 September 1972; audit 1973
- Extent
- transcript 118; audit 44 pages
- Status
- accepted
- Redactions
- None.
Chain of custody
Both are published documents that have been continuously available since the year they were issued. This newspaper obtained nothing and asked nobody. We are filing them because the disclosure everybody describes as a leak is a company officer answering a committee's question in public, on a numbered page, and because the audit that says the department did not know is not quoted anywhere in the popular accounts.
Held by: They Buried, document room; both mirrored publicly
Excerpt
Q. Can you tell the subcommittee the quantity your firm has contracted? A. I can. [figure given] Q. Has the Department been advised of that figure? A. There is no requirement that we advise them. I do not know whether anyone has. — and, from the 1973 audit — As of early September the Department remained unaware of the aggregate quantities contracted. No reporting mechanism existed by which it could have become aware.
Transcribed by the data desk. Line breaks follow the original. Bracketed matter is ours.
Editor's note
The second answer in that exchange is the whole story of 1972 and it is thirteen words long. A firm was not concealing anything from the department; there was no channel down which it would have travelled.
Cited in
- A Building-Maintenance Code Is Carrying $2.31m. Nobody Will Say For What.The Body · Aug 24
- Winifred Asante-Loew Marked 44 Gaps In 34 Years. ‘Inaudible’ Never Meant A Silence.Obituaries · Aug 22
- Six Firms Sold Him The Harvest. None Knew About The Others.Money & Mechanisms · Aug 10