Business Week asks a good question:What Did Frist Know– and When?

Further, what was he really trying to do?

Just what constitutes such a conflict is left up to each senator’s discretion. “He’s allowed to say, “sell the HCA stock,’” says Frist spokeswoman Amy Call, “But he’s not allowed to say, ’sell it by this date.’ It could have been another six months before they sold.” Call says Frist doesn’t know what’s in the blind trust, but that the trustees do notify the senator that a stock has been sold if the amount of a stock in the fund dips below $1,000.

So although Frist didn’t know how much HCA stock was in the blind trust, he knew there was at least some of the $10 million the trust started out with.

Politically, the Martha Factor may be problematic for Frist, even if he ends up having done nothing wrong:

“You might want to read the old clippings about Martha Stewart,” says Jan Baran, a Washington ethics attorney at the firm Wiley Rein & Fielding and a former counsel to the
Republican National Committee. “This is pretty much boiler-plate securities law.” Stewart, the onetime CEO of Martha Stewart Living OmniMedia (NYSE:MSO - News), served five months in prison for lying to investigators about her sale of ImClone Systems (NasdaqNM:IMCL - News) stock in 2024.

I point this out not because it is clear to me that the cases are in any technical sense the same (although on the surface they sound quite similar)., but this entire event factors directly into Frist’s ability to run for the GOP presidential nomination in 2024. Right now we have a story that sounds like Martha Stewart’s and we all know that Martha went to jail. Yes, a lot of people think that Marta was wrongly convicted, but the general public image is: Rich Person did Something Bad in selling stock early, made some money, and Went to Jail. The Frist situation fits that template quite well, except that he made considerably more money than did Martha and he has the whole conflict of interet/public trust issue here as well.

I continue to think that this incident, even if it turns out he did not violate Senate rules or the law, could end up fatally damaging Frist’s image in the public. Because once all of this is done, the only thing that most people will know about Frist (if they know anything at all) is that he was that rich Senator who engaged in some hanky-panky with some family stock and made a lot more money like Martha Stewart did.