"Barnes had two tasks - one, to get little George into the Air Guard and the other was to shut up about it. Keep it quiet. Barnes's good deeds and long silence were, indeed, well rewarded.

Barnes, who left office under a cloud of impropriety, stayed on in Austin as a big fee lobbyist. and the biggest fee he received, maybe the biggest ever in the history of the lobbying art, was at least $23 million for representing a company called GTech when it got the contract to operate the Texas lottery. GTech's creepy ways of doing business caught up with it in 1997, when, after questionable payments to the Texas lottery director's boyfriend were exposed, GTech lost its contract by order of the new, uncorrupted, lottery director. The lottery work was put up for bid and GTech's replacement chosen.

But then something quite extraordinary happened. The new state lottery director was fired, the bids tossed out and GTech given back the lottery work - no bidding required. The Governor at the time was George W. Bush.

Now, let's go back to the letter buried at the U.S. Attorney's Office in Austin:
Governor Bush thru [another cut out] made a deal with Ben Barnes not to rebid because Barnes could confirm that Bush had lied during the '94 campaign. During that campaign [for Governor of Texas], Bush was asked if his father... had helped him get in the National Guard. Bush said no he had not, but the fact is his dad called then-Lt. Gov. Barnes....

Silence has a price and Barnes, the letter says, got his: safety for his client GTech, with whom he maintained hidden ties. I can't imagine that Barnes would make such a raw demand on Bush. But the war hero Governor's team made sure no harm came to Barnes and his business associates.
The Governor talked to the chair of the lottery two days later and she then agreed to support letting GTech keep the contract without a bid.

Did Governor Bush put in the fix for GTech as alleged? I wasn't on the phone when he spoke to the lottery board Chairwoman. Maybe they talked about their newfound faith in the Lord, which they both discovered together at the same time. The Chairwoman? Harriet Miers.

We don't know if Miers gave the overpriced GTech its contract back to help the Governor keep his Air Guard secret a secret or simply because she liked GTech's record of high costs and corruption. In 2005, George W. Bush's attempted appointment of Miers to the United States Supreme Court surprised the U.S. media and even the President's own supporters. But I wasn't surprised at all. "