Insider trading? Talking Points Memo has a thread going about blind trusts, a topic launched by the timing of the sale of shares of HCA in a blind trust held for Sen. Bill Frist (R-TN). Two weeks before the stock in his family hospital dropped 15 percent due to poor financials, Frist "instructed the trustee managing the assets to sell his HCA shares," according to the Washiington Post.

In 2003, the Nashville Scene examined the trust and had an "eight-member, bipartisan, unpaid panel of experts in trusts" brought into analyze it.

The Scene discovered that the trust isn't very blind; the assets were "concentrated in the stock of HCA." Reading tax documents (capital gains filings, for example), the experts were able to deduce what was happening with the trust.

Frist first set up his trust in 1995; in 2000, he set up a new one. Its trustee is Kirk Scobey Jr., the president of Nashville-based Equitable Trust Co. The management fee is considerably less than stated fees, "not unusual when assets are significant."

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2008 Presidential Race, Bill Frist, Politics