McCain’s Kyrgyz Connection: The “Freedom House” That Isn’t Free

[Joanne98]

The US Presidential Candidate, His Lobbyist-Advisor, and the “Tulip Revolution” Gone Awry


By Bill Conroy
Special to The Narco News Bulletin
August 3, 2008

Despite all the experts who have pored over McCain’s financial disclosure statements, it seems far too little attention was paid to a very small detail: John McCain’s position as chairman of the “Supervisory Committee” of an organization called the Media Support Center Foundation (MSCF).


Presidential candidate John McCain aboard the campaign plane with top foreign policy advisor and lobbyist Randy Scheunemann in May of this year.
The MSCF operates a printing company in the Republic of Kyrgyz in Central Asia – a nation tucked between China, Tajikistan (which borders Afghanistan), Kazakstan and Uzbekistan.

The tiny “Stan” nation of Kyrgyz, located in the heart of a region rich in oil and natural gas deposits and under the shadow of giants Russia and China, has recently been in the news in relation to another matter connected to the McCain campaign.

The Associated Press and other mainstream news reports recently making their rounds in Blogistan reveal that one of McCain’s chief policy advisors on foreign affairs, Randy Scheunemann, has a past history of providing lobbying services (for compensation to the tune of at least some $50,000) for a Houston businessman (and big-time Republican rainmaker) named Stephen Payne. The targets of the lobbying efforts (which centered on, among other things, “energy issues”) were Congress, the National Security Council and the Department of State.

McCain’s camp has gone to great lengths to distance itself from Payne, a business friend of President George and VP Dick Cheney, and to downplay the role Scheunemann played in his lobbying efforts for Payne. (USA Today reports that Orion Strategies, a management consulting firm founded by Scheunemann, “earned $540,000 from its foreign clients” over the 12 months ended Dec. 1, 2007, and “received $56,250 last year from March to July from McCain.”)

Payne is now in the hot seat, facing the spotlight of a Congressional investigation, after being taped in an undercover sting set up by the Sunday Times of London offering to introduce the former president of Kyrgyzstan (Askar Akayev) to high-level Bush administration officials, including possibly the president himself, if Akayev agreed to make a hefty donation to the legacy of President George – his presidential library fund:

http://www.narconews.com/Issue54/article3175.html