How many times does Jim (The Skim) Thompson, four-time Illinois Governor and serial skimmer, get a pass?

Yesterday, hostile witness Pat Ryan of KPMG testified that at a Hollinger International Audit Committee meeting he asked and received confirmation from Governor Thompson that the non-compete payments had been approved.

Today, late in the morning, Chris Paci, a lawyer for Shearman & Stirling, had been doing some "due diligence" work for the Wachovia bank and requested a meeting with the Audit Committee to ask specific questions about the non-competes and other related-party transactions. He asked the Big Skim explicitly whether the disclosures on Hollinger 10K and proxy statements were correct. "He said that yes, the related-party transactions had been approved by the Audit Committee and that the disclosures were correct," testified Mr Paci. "I recall that I came away satisfied that I had got the answers I needed."

How many times does a four-term Governor get to skate on this? Risible as it is, he can just about get away with testifying that he "skimmed" the 11 official documents put his name to and missed the same  passage on 11 separate occassions, and it just coincidentally happens to be the same passage that his two fellow members of the Audit Committee claim to have missed 11 times, too. As I said at the time, that's Olympic-level synchronized skimming, but if he can say it with a straight face good for him.

But does he skim human conversations, too? Can he plausibly claim not to have confirmed his approval to Pat Ryan? And, even more of a stretch, can he claim not to have known what he was doing at a meeting where he was asked explicit questions about the approvals and in which Mr Paci had been invited to participate in order to receive confirmation of those very approvals?

Why are four men facing the rest of their lives in jail for these allegedly non-approved non-competes but the guy who approved them in writing and verbally multiple times gets to skate? How many different approvals and confirmations does the Serial Skimmer get to disavow?