The Smartest Trial in the Room

I'm sure the Republicans didn't want the Enron trial to kick off right in the middle of an election year, but there it is.

Jury selection began Monday in the trial of former Enron Corp. chiefs Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling with a federal judge warning a pool of about 100 not to use the closely watched case to exact vengeance for the company's epic implosion four years ago.

"I can assure you this will be one of the most interesting and important cases ever tried," U.S. District Judge Sim Lake told potential jurors, who crammed into five rows of a cavernous courtroom and were being questioned individually throughout the day.

The judge hoped to seat a jury by day's end Monday, meaning opening statements could come Tuesday morning in the trial — perhaps the premier criminal case to emerge from corporate scandals that began when Enron went under in 2001.

Lake told the jury pool the trial could take as long as four months. Among the expected witnesses is Andrew Fastow, Enron's former chief financial officer, who pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges in 2004 and faces up to 10 years in prison once he is finished cooperating with federal prosecutors. Fifteen other former Enron executives have pleaded guilty in the accounting scandal.

That's four months of really bad press. Four months of the man once nicknamed "Kenny Boy" all over Court TV and CNN.

Here's an interesting chart of all the major players in the Enron trial, including those in the executive branch. I'm not holding my breath for a lot of dot-connecting here, but in that four months' worth of coverage, it could leak out that the Bush-selected chairman of the Republican Party was an Enron lobbyist, that the pick for Secretary of the Army was an Enron executive, that the pick to head the SEC was an Arthur Andersen lawyer, and so on, and so on, and so on.

It's amazing how little Enron and the side effects of unregulated capitalism factored into the 2004 Presidential race. The goal of the GOP is to gut regulation and make sure private companies operate with total impunity. Enron was the test case of how that resulted. And the Democrats said maybe three words on it. They have a four-month window to expand on those words.