Monday, July 21, 2008

Top McCain Advisor Involved in Lobbying Scandal

This is what John McCain's experience means--ties to lobbbyist. You don't become a powerful political figure in Washington without being up to your neck in sleaze. The image McCain has cultivated over the years as somehow being a political outsider is a hoax.

A top foreign policy adviser to John McCain has lobbied the National Security Council, Congress and the State Department on behalf of Stephen Payne, the Texas businessman and longtime Republican fundraiser caught up in a controversy over whether he sought to sell access to the Bush White House.

According to records on file with Congress, McCain foreign policy adviser Randy Scheunemann lobbied the Senate and House on behalf of Payne's firm, Worldwide Strategic Partners Inc., in 2002.

Scheunemann also lobbied the National Security Council and the State Department regarding energy issues in the Caspian region in 2005 and 2006 on behalf of another Payne firm, Caspian Alliance Inc., according to the records.

The McCain campaign said Scheunemann did not lobby on any specific legislation on behalf of either company, said McCain campaign spokesman Brian Rogers. The fees to Scheunemann's firm amounted to $50,000.

On Monday, McCain's campaign said that from 2002 to 2006, Scheunemann periodically engaged in consulting relationships with the two companies and that Scheunemann was never on the payroll of either firm, but that he was an occasional outside expert consultant.

In regard to Caspian Alliance, Scheunemann arranged several informational meetings for Payne with Department of State and NSC officials following Caspian energy issues, said Rogers.

This isn't the first lobbying scandal involving the Republican nominee:
It seems odd, but for John McCain it was a blessing to have the chance to bury questions about his dealings with lobbyists beneath an alleged sex scandal. The prurient part of the story was easy to deny, and voters are sick of sex scandals.

But even if the sex goes away, the underlying questions raised last week in the story for which the New York Times took such grief are unlikely to disappear. The McCain campaign's sweeping denials may have been a bit too sweeping, and sex, in the end, is not what the story was really about.

The Times got into trouble largely because of the second paragraph of its story Thursday about the relationship between Vicki Iseman, a telecommunications lobbyist, and McCain, when he was chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee.

[...]The same day the Times ran its account, The Post ran a story that stayed away from the "romantic" angle but reported (as the Times also had) that McCain had written two letters to the Federal Communications Commission, urging that it vote on the sale of a Pittsburgh television station to Paxson Communications, one of Iseman's clients.

The Post wrote: "At the time he sent the first letter, McCain had flown on Paxson's corporate jet four times to appear at campaign events and had received $20,000 in campaign donations from Paxson and its law firm. The second letter came on Dec. 10, a day after the company's jet ferried him to a Florida fundraiser that was held aboard a yacht in West Palm Beach."

In denouncing the Times story, McCain's campaign denied that he had met with Lowell "Bud" Paxson, president of the firm. But Paxson later told The Post that he had met with McCain. More telling, Newsweek reported this weekend that McCain himself acknowledged in a 2002 deposition that he had met with Paxson.

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