They say they aren't front running and never have, and yet how many times have people looked up a domain on GoDaddy only to have it registered minutes or hours later by a GoDaddy account.
That doesn't mean that GoDaddy itself is doing this, but their employees certainly could be, or they could sell domain query data to a 3rd party to keep their hands clean. Some Godaddy employees certainly have access to the data of who is looking for what.
It would not be hard at all to have an algorithm that looks that those domains for dictionary words and possibly look at Google keyword search volume on each one and only buy the ones that pass some minimum criteria. That would be smarter than Network Solutions and harder to prove.
I personally stopped doing domain lookups on GoDaddy because they would register domains I didn't pull the trigger on fast enough and I've been moving domains away from them as well.
Just because some VP says they don't do it doesn't mean they aren't lying or there isn't some low level tech or manager who isn't doing this on their own.