January 3, 2002Richardson To Announce Candidacy For Governor
By Sue Major Holmes
The Associated Press
ALBUQUERQUE - Former Energy Department Secretary Bill Richardson will formally announce next week that he is seeking the Democratic nomination for governor in New Mexico, an aide said Thursday.
"You can be 100 percent sure he's going to be announcing for governor," Richardson's senior adviser, David Contarino said in a phone interview from Santa Fe.
Richardson will make formal announcements on Saturday, Jan. 12, in Santa Fe, Las Cruces and Albuquerque, Contarino said.
Richardson represented northern New Mexico's 3rd Congressional District for 14 years. He became Energy Secretary in 1998, becoming the highest-ranking Hispanic in the Clinton administration.
Richardson, 54, also served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
Last June, he became senior managing director at a Washington, D.C.-based international strategic advisory company, Kissinger McLarty Associates.
The company is headed by former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and former White House Chief of Staff Thomas F. McLarty III.
New Mexico elects a governor this year, and the primary races are expected to be crowded. Gov. Gary Johnson, a Republican, is completing a second term and can't run again.
Two other Democrats have announced they are seeking the party's nomination in the June 4 primary: state Land Commissioner Ray Powell and former state Rep. Gary King, son of three-term Gov. Bruce King.
Richardson took the helm of the Energy Department just as a string of security scandals at U.S. nuclear weapons labs started breaking.
He was repeatedly asked to explain a security flap involving former Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist Wen Ho Lee, who was charged with 59 counts of mishandling nuclear data. Lee pleaded guilty to one count in September 2000 and the rest were dropped, freeing him after he was sentenced to the nine months he already had spent in jail.
Richardson later said another security lapse at Los Alamos - the disappearance and mysterious reappearance of two hard drives in the lab's top-secret X Division - hurt his chances of being the Democratic vice presidential candidate to Al Gore in 2000.