Leading Off:
•SD-Sen: In a damning and shocking admission, former South Dakota Gov. Mike Rounds acknowledged Tuesday that he did in fact know that a top former cabinet official, Richard Benda, was going to work for investors running a meat-packing concern called Northern Beef, right around the same time that Rounds approved a $1 million loan to that very company.
Just before Rounds left office at the end of 2010, he signed off on the million-dollar loan. Shortly thereafter, Benda, then the state's secretary of tourism, secured an additional $600,000 loan—money that went directly into his own pockets, as he paid himself $225,000 a year to oversee the now-failed plant. (Rounds denies authorizing this supplemental loan, though a staffer for his successor says that any six-figure lending involves the governor.)
A state audit later found that Benda had a serious conflict of interest in requesting the loans—duh—but until now, we didn't know whether Rounds himself was aware of this glaring conflict. It turns out that he most certainly was:
At the time, though, Rounds didn't ask Benda for more details.Rounds had previously had been mum on the topic but let this admission drop very casually—so casually that the Argus Leader's David Montgomery, who first flagged this as a new development, says he initially didn't even realize how remarkable this confession was. But remarkable it is."I said 'Good, I'm glad to hear that he's going to be actively involved in the beef plant,'" Rounds said in a live interview on the Argus Leader's "100 Eyes" online show.
However, despite this burst of candor, Rounds is still being cagey: He claims he can't remember whether he learned of Benda's future employment plans before or after the Northern Beef loans went through. But even if he only found out about them after, he surely could have raised an alarm while he still had time. Instead, he went blithely silent.
There's much more to this scandal, though. Head below the fold to learn more.