Cuban was taunted by SEC lawyer over anti-Bush film

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A bizarre twist in the Securities and Exchange Commission’s insider-trading case against Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban: An agency lawyer appears to have taunted the billionaire in 2007 over what the lawyer perceived to be Cuban’s bias against President George Bush.

Floyd Norris at the New York Times says on his blog that an SEC lawyer in the agency’s Fort Worth office sent Cuban an e-mail in May 2007, blasting him for supporting a documentary film titled ‘Loose Change.’

The documentary asserts that the federal government planned and carried out the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Norris prints the e-mail in the blog post, here, and poses the obvious question: Is Cuban ‘a victim of a political hit job because he helped finance a movie that was scathingly critical of President Bush?’

At a minimum, this will be an embarrassment for the SEC as it tries to prove that Cuban broke insider-trading rules. What was one of the agency’s lawyers doing, sending an e-mail with political overtones from an SEC address? Did he sleep through the law school lecture on common sense?