White House officials had, indeed, brokered last year's settlement between the attorneys general and the tobacco companies.
Tobacco bonds, for the uninitiated, are an offshoot of a 1998 settlement among 46 state attorneys general and four big tobacco companies--Philip Morris USA, R.
Last year's settlement was reached by the tobacco companies and the attorneys general of a majority of the states.
In his place are Patton Boggs and Motley Rice, whose lawyers are still drawing millions of dollars a year in fees from the 1997 tobacco settlement with state attorneys general.
The 378 billion cigarettes officially sold in the U.S. last year, according to the Treasury Department, represent a 21% drop from 1998, the year a group of state attorneys general secured a landmark settlement against the tobacco industry.
Take billions of dollars upfront from a 1998 settlement that attorneys general in 46 states inked with four major tobacco companies and pass the risks onto investors.
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In fact, RJR Nabisco CEO Steven Goldstone said he's still committed to the deal worked out by the tobacco industry, 40 state attorneys general and a couple packs of lawyers.
Clinton praised the attorneys general, who he said have uncovered evidence about tobacco industry marketing and made public internal industry documents available to the public.
Its roots go back to 1998, when Ron Motley, a South Carolina lawyer and veteran of the tobacco settlements, met state attorneys-general and identified lead-based paint as a promising area for public litigation.
Washington Attorney General Robert McKenna, cochairman of NAAG's Tobacco Committee, told the audience how an army of lawyers at NAAG and state AG offices keeps tabs on the tobacco industry, from monitoring sales to stepping in to halt taboo marketing tactics such as running cartoon ads in Rolling Stone.
The state attorneys general, not Clinton, were leading the war on tobacco.
To make sense of the ruling, we turn to Mike Moore, former attorney general of Mississippi, the first state to sue the tobacco industry.
Officially, these fees are being paid by the tobacco firms, which spares the state attorneys-general the politically embarrassing task of having to pay the lawyers huge amounts of money out of their state's share of the settlement.
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After I wrote a piece critical of the parallel mortgage settlement with state attorneys general last year, comparing it to the deeply flawed tobacco settlement, I was barraged with comments from critics accusing me of downplaying foreclosure fraud.
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He now also follows packaged-food stocks such as General Mills, Kellogg and Kraft yet confesses a closer bond with tobacco investors.
Tobacco use among service members is higher than in the general population.
The lawyers involved in the tobacco suits insist that the awards are fair, reflecting the risk they ran by taking on the tobacco firms when no one, including the state attorneys-general, thought they had much chance of winning.
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Dennis Burke, who was U.S. Attorney for the state, admitted to senior Justice Department officials in 2011 that he had leaked to the media the memo written by John Dodson, an agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, according to the Justice Department inspector general's finding on Monday.
The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which makes no mention of tobacco, states that free trade should not interfere with a country's right to protect public health.
The next big blow to the tobacco industry came in the early 1960s, with the formation of the Surgeon General's Advisory Committee on Smoking and Health.
The Senate leadership is looking to McCain to take the lead on tobacco legislation, and McCain has been consulting with the White House, state attorneys general and members of the health community to hammer out a rough outline of a bill.
Economists predict sharply lower tobacco farm income as a result of the cigarette industry's deal with the attorneys general.
In general, religious investors wanted to avoid investments in companies involved in addictive substances and behavior: alcohol, tobacco and gambling.
The official said the main sticking point is whether the Food and Drug Administration will have regulatory authority over tobacco, which is supported by the White House, former FDA Administrator David Kessler and former Surgeon General C.
The inspector general also concluded that poor internal information-gathering and communication at the justice department and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) caused them to misinform Congress about the operation.
Like the attorneys-general, these cases suffer from the weakness that the insurers can, in theory, claim money only if the tobacco firms are liable for smokers' illnesses (a responsibility that has rarely been established).
"I see a lot of money generated from the tobacco settlement being used to fund new investigations, " says Ashley Taylor, a former Virginia deputy attorney general who works for law firm Troutman Sanders in Washington, D.
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