In 1922, Edward L. Doheny and Harry Sinclair bribed Albert Fall, the secretary of the interior in the Warren G. Harding administration, for secret leases to drill on two oil-rich fields held by the U.S. Navy as emergency reserves in the event of war or serious disruption of supplies. One of those fields was called Elk Hills in Bakersfield, Calif. The other, just outside of Caspar, Wyo., was called Teapot Dome.

In 1973, during the gasoline crisis, President Richard Nixon tried to lease Elk Hills to increase domestic oil production. Congress stopped the deal.

In 1984, 1986 and 1987, the Reagan administration proposed selling Elk Hills for $1.5 billion to reduce the deficit. Congress, again, blocked the efforts.

In 1996, as part of Gore's "reinventing government" package, he recommended that Elk Hills be sold. Clinton approved the plan. The deal was included in the 1996 defense authorization bill that Congress approved.

Occidental Petroleum bought Elk Hills for $3.65 billion which tripled its U.S. oil and natural gas reserves in the process.

The founder of Occidental is Armand Hammer who had, in his own words, Albert Gore Sr., "in his back pocket." When the current vice president's father left the U.S. Senate in 1970, Hammer, a primary sponsor of the Communist Party USA and a personal friend of V.I. Lenin and Josef Stalin, provided him with a $500,000-a-year job and a seat on Occidental's board.

When the younger Gore was elected to Congress, Gore received $20,000 a year from Occidental for mineral rights on his farm. The zinc mine on his land, makes Gore one of the biggest polluters in the state.

According to the Center for Public Integrity, Occidental gave $50,000 to the Clinton-Gore re-election effort in response to one of Gore's "no-controlling-legal-authority" phone calls from his office in the White House. Occidental has given more than $470,000 in soft money to various Democratic committees and causes since 1992.

Gore declared: "I will not go along with an agenda that is of Big Oil, by Big Oil, and for Big Oil."