lots of
interesting connections between Neil Bush & John Hinckley JR.
& now under BUSH, he's sane enough to go home.
- Neil Bush told Denver reporters that he met the brother of John Hinckley Jr. at a surprise party at the Bush home two months before the assassination attempt, which was approximately three weeks after the U.S. Department of Energy had begun a "routine audit" of the books of the Vanderbilt Energy Corporation, the Hinckley oil company.
- On the morning of March 30, 1981, three representatives of the U.S. Department of Energy told Scott Hinckley, vice president for operations of Vanderbilt Energy, that auditors had uncovered evidence of pricing violations on crude oil sold by the company from 1977 through 1980. The auditors said the government was considering a penalty of $2 million. The meeting ended a little more than an hour before President Reagan was shot. Still unanswered is whether John Hinckley Jr. knew that an audit of his father's company was under way while he was living in the Hinckley home near Denver.
- After Sharon Bush, Neil's wife, had told reporters that the Bush family knew the Hinckley family because of their contributions to the Bush campaign, both the Washington and Houston offices of Vice President Bush said they had checked the records and found "no evidence of contributions to Bush from the Hinckley family." The truth, however, is that John Hinckley Sr. had contributed to Bush as early as his 1970 campaign for the U.S. Senate.
- John Hinckley Sr. was repeatedly characterized in the press as "a strong supporter of President Reagan" although there is no record of contributions to Reagan. To the contrary, the senior Hinckley and Scott Hinckley separately contributed to John Connally in late 1979 when Connally was leading the campaign to stop Reagan from gaining the 1980 presidential nomination.
- Neil Bush lived throughout most of 1978 in Lubbock, where he served as campaign manager for his oldest brother, George W. Bush, in an unsuccessful race for a U.S. congressional seat and where young Hinckley also lived while attending Texas Tech University. Both Neil and George have admitted that it was "certainly conceivable" they had met Hinckley in Lubbock.