Is Adnan Khashoggi losing his touch? Chatterbox has long maintained that the shadowy Saudi arms merchant is connected, in one way or another, to every shocking world event that has occurred since 1960. (Click here to learn of Khashoggi’s link to the Florida vote count in the 2000 presidential election; here to learn of his link to the last-minute Clinton pardons; here to learn of his link to pollution in Washington, D.C.,’s tony Spring Valley neighborhood; and here to learn of his links to 9/11.)
Khashoggi is of course connected to Enron. But Chatterbox has to admit that this time out the connections are extremely tenuous. A Jan. 18 column by Joe Bob Briggs explains the Enron scandal by positing a mule trader in Peshawar named Ismail who sells off some of his liability to Adnan Khashoggi. But since Ismail is a figment of Briggs’ imagination, that’s neither here nor there. An October 1996 Houston Chronicle gossip column by the late Maxine Mesinger says that Khashoggi “has some good friends in Houston in the Smart Set” and notes that Khashoggi will soon be in Houston “looking into some business deals.” But we never learn what these deals were. An August 1992 column by Mesinger turns up the fact that Adnan Khashoggi’s son Mohamed attended a River Oaks luncheon thrown by Robert and Georgette Mosbacher during that month’s Republican National Convention. Former Enron chairman Kenneth Lay, who was on the Houston host committee, was at the same lunch. (Gratuitous detail: So too, no doubt, were many contributors to George W. Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign.) Finally, at one time Khashoggi owned some land across from the Houston Galleria, where every high-ranking past and present Enron executive (or a spouse) has presumably shopped at least once. Khashoggi hoped the pricey shopping mall would expand onto his property. But it never did.
