McCain again Violates Senate Ethics Rules.....

[amborin]

The New York Times

July 12, 2007 Thursday

McCain Call Raises an Ethics Question

BYLINE: By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and MICHAEL COOPER

DATELINE: WASHINGTON, July 11


About 3 p.m. Tuesday, Senator John McCain ducked off the Senate floor, entered the Republican cloakroom and took out his mobile phone. Just hours after accepting the resignation of his two top campaign aides, he was making a conference call to his top fund-raisers to urge them to keep up the fight.

The call, however, may only have exacerbated an already tough week for Mr. McCain.

Senate ethics rules expressly forbid lawmakers to engage in campaign activities inside Senate facilities.

If Mr. McCain solicited campaign contributions on a call from government property, that would be a violation of federal criminal law as well.

There is no evidence that Mr. McCain has made a habit of making such calls or otherwise exploiting his office for political gain, and he is hardly the first lawmaker to call a donor from under the Capitol dome.

But he made the call as he was in the spotlight because of the staff shake-up, sagging poll numbers and disappointing fund-raising of his Republican presidential primary campaign.

It was the kind of technical mistake that seasoned aides -- like the ones his campaign is now letting go -- are supposed to prevent.

Mr. McCain was well aware of the rules.

Ten years ago he led Republican calls for an independent prosecutor to investigate accusations of violations of the same rules by Vice President Al Gore.

Mr. McCain went on to make the episode a cornerstone of both his 2000 Republican primary campaign and his argument for the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law.

Matt David, a spokesman for the McCain campaign, confirmed that Mr. McCain made the phone call from the cloakroom.

Mr. David said Mr. McCain used his campaign cellphone and did not specifically ask the fund-raisers for campaign contributions, which would have been a crime.

And the spokesman sought to distinguish Mr. McCain's call, made as he was managing the Republican side of a fierce Senate debate over the Iraq war, from the accusations once made against Mr. Gore.

''This is very different than systematically abusing your office to raise money,'' Mr. David said.

Whether a conference call with fund-raisers could constitute a solicitation of campaign contributions and thus violate the criminal law as well as the internal Senate ethics rules can depends on the details of the call, several legal experts said.

''If it is a solicitation, it is illegal,'' said Lawrence Noble, a nonpartisan expert on political law in Washington.

Marc Elias, a Democratic campaign lawyer, said, ''It is going to depend on the precise words that were used on the call,'' noting that courts might consider an exhortation to pump up his fund-raisers a solicitation, depending on the context. (Mr. David insisted there was no form of solicitation on the call.)

As his aides confirmed the location where Mr. McCain made his call, the candidate himself was vowing Wednesday that his campaign would press on. Mr. McCain said he would compete all-out in his presidential bid, not only in New Hampshire and South Carolina but also in the caucuses in Iowa -- a state where he has acknowledged that his support for an immigration overhaul has hurt him badly in the polls.

''I want to assure you: I have no consideration of dropping out of the race,'' Mr. McCain said, in between floor speeches to defend President Bush's Iraq strategy. ''We're just trying to restructure and maintain the focus and do the same things we've always done.''

Acknowledging that his campaign's expenditures had been ''out of whack,'' Mr. McCain pledged once again to get its finances under control. (After spending heavily on private jets during the first quarter, he will be taking a commercial flight to New Hampshire later this week.) And he said his financial backers and primary state campaign workers were still on board.

Voters will dismiss the campaign shake-up as ''an inside-the-Beltway kind of thing,'' Mr. McCain said. He then added, ''But clearly, it's not helpful.''

He chuckled. ''Um, duh.''

With just $2 million in the bank, undisclosed debts, a campaign burning cash at a rate of more than $3 million a month and the recent layoffs of more than half its staff, the McCain campaign
is reading its obituaries in the comments of some observers.

''It's effectively over,'' said Charlie Cook, the editor of The Cook Political Report, a nonpartisan newsletter. ''The physicians have left the hospital room and it's the executors of the estate that are taking over.''

Rick Davis, Mr. McCain's new campaign manager, joked that the campaign had been ''exceptionally successful'' in lowering expectations about its chances in Iowa. He said the campaign would concentrate on the kind of inexpensive retail politics and town hall meetings where many aides feel Mr. McCain excels.

''He has proven that he can run this kind of campaign,'' said Mr. Davis, who was Mr. McCain's national campaign manager in 2000. ''So if anyone wonders is this is possible -- that's exactly what he did once before.''

Back then, the need for campaign finance reform was one of Mr. McCain's favorite themes, and he often mocked Mr. Gore's argument that there was ''no controlling legal authority'' forbidding his fund-raising calls from another federal property, the White House.

''The American people deserve a controlling ethical authority,'' Mr. McCain used to repeat on the campaign trail, ''as well as controlling legal authority.''

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Lobbyists for Saudi Arabia for McCain:

July 17, 2008 Thursday

McCain updates list of top fund-raisers

BYLINE: Michael Luo and Kitty Bennett - The New York Times Media Group

Senator John McCain released an updated list of his top money collectors, revealing that nearly a fifth of those who have brought in the largest amounts for him, more than $500,000 each, are lobbyists or work for firms that engage in lobbying.

McCain on Tuesday added more than 400 names to an existing list of just more than 100 elite fund-raisers that his campaign first posted on its Web site in April

<snip>

McCain also lists the occupations and employers for each of his top fund-raisers - those who raised $50,000 or more - information that
does not provide and that watchdog groups say is critical for identifying bundlers and understanding their potential interests.

<snip>

At least one fund-raiser who was originally on the McCain campaign
's bundler list was taken off.

That was James Courter, chief executive of the telecommunications company IDT, who resigned Monday as one of more than 20 national finance committee co-chairs for the campaign, after IDT was fined $1.3 million by the Federal Communications Commission for failing to disclose contracts it had in Haiti. Courter was listed in April as raising $100,000 or more for McCain .

Other fund-raisers whose activities have drawn scrutiny remained on the list, including Tom Loeffler, who had been a campaign general co-chairman.

Loeffler, whose lobbying firm, the Loeffler Group, represented Saudi Arabia, among other clients, stepped down from his official McCain position earlier this year after campaign officials issued a new conflict-of-interest policy.

[amborin]

1. scrutiny made McCain return foreign campaign donations:

The New York Times

August 8, 2008 Friday

McCain to Give Back $50,000 Under Scrutiny

BYLINE: By MICHAEL LUO

Senator John McCain's presidential campaign said Thursday that it would return all the contributions solicited for it by the Jordanian business partner of a prominent Florida fund-raiser for Mr. McCain.

For the McCain camp, the decision caps a queasy two days in which news accounts scrutinized a cluster of more than $50,000 in unusual contributions from a single extended family of Californians, the Abdullahs, and several of their friends.

The bundling of the donations was initially credited by the campaign to Harry Sargeant III, finance chairman of the Florida Republican Party and part-owner of a major oil trading company. But they were actually solicited by Mustafa Abu Naba'a, a longtime business partner of Mr. Sargeant.

The donations came under scrutiny because of their large size and the fact that for the most part, the Abdullahs do not appear wealthy. In addition, several of them interviewed expressed indifference or even hostility to Mr. McCain's candidacy.

All this taken together has raised the question of whether at least some of the family and their friends may have been donors in name only who were reimbursed by someone trying to skirt individual contribution limits.

''We are taking the precautionary effort of returning any and all contributions that were solicited by Mr. Abu Naba'a,'' said Brian Rogers, a spokesman for the McCain campaign.

''We had an issue with the idea there were people giving to the campaign who had no intention of voting for or supporting John McCain.''

Earlier Thursday, the campaign said it was reviewing all the donations collected by Mr. Sargeant, who has raised more than $500,000 for Mr. McCain. The campaign said it would send a letter to all of Mr. Sargeant's donors reminding them of a variety of restrictions, among them that campaign contributions may not be reimbursed and may not be made by foreign nationals.

If a donor has failed to meet those standards, the campaign said, it will arrange for a refund.

Given that Mr. Abu Naba'a is a foreign national, some Democratic officials questioned the legality of his bundling money for Mr. McCain. But several election law experts who were consulted said that while foreign nationals were clearly barred from making donations themselves, federal statutes did not explicitly forbid them to solicit contributions. They do come close, though.

In 2004, the Federal Election Commission considered the case of Zury Rios Sosa, a Guatemalan who was the fiancee of Representative Jerry Weller, Republican of Illinois. The commission issued an advisory opinion that said Ms. Rios, as an ''uncompensated volunteer'' for Mr. Weller, could ''solicit funds from persons who are not foreign nationals.''

Nevertheless, Paul S. Ryan, a lawyer at the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center, said there seemed to be some tension within the opinion, because it cites a regulation that says foreign nationals shall not ''directly or indirectly'' play a role in the ''decision-making process'' of any person's ''election-related activities,'' including the making of contributions.

Mr. Ryan said that if he were representing the McCain campaign, he would seek an opinion from the commission.

Mr. Rogers, of the McCain campaign, said its lawyers believed that the bundling by Mr. Abu Naba'a was permissible. The campaign decided to return the money, he said, because ''it just didn't sound right to us, the whole situation.''
********************

and.....

sweetheart deals with a Maryland bank:




The Washington Post

February 16, 2008 Saturday
Suburban Edition

McCain Got Loan by Pledging to Seek Federal Funds

BYLINE: Matthew Mosk; Washington Post Staff Writer

John McCain's cash-strapped campaign borrowed $1 million from a Bethesda bank two weeks before the New Hampshire primary by pledging to enter the public financing system if his bid for the presidency faltered, newly disclosed records show.

McCain had already taken a $3 million bank loan in November to keep his campaign afloat, and he sought from the same bank $1 million more shortly before this month's Super Tuesday contests, this time pledging incoming but unprocessed contributions as collateral.

He never used the funds of the most recent loan, because his win in the South Carolina primary helped him raise enough money to compete in Florida, his campaign aides said last night.

The loans, revealed yesterday in documents a McCain attorney filed with the Federal Election Commission, offer fresh details about how the Republican senator from Arizona scrambled to secure money as his shoestring campaign navigated a rapid-fire succession of primary contests.

The unorthodox lending terms also raised fresh questions from McCain's critics about his ability to repeatedly draw money from the Maryland-based Fidelity & Trust Bank.

Campaign finance lawyers speculated whether McCain may have inadvertently committed himself to entering the public financing system for the remainder of the primary season by holding out the prospect of taking public matching funds in exchange for the $1 million loan in December.

"This whole area is uncharted," said Lawrence H. Norton, a former general counsel of the FEC.

McCain's attorneys and the Fidelity & Trust president said the loan agreements were carefully scrutinized in advance to make sure they would pass muster with federal banking regulators and the FEC.

"We stayed in a safe zone, and so did he," said Barry C. Watkins, the bank's president. "We were being careful not to force either one of us into a situation we didn't intend."

McCain's campaign filed the modification to his initial $3 million loan on Dec. 17, seeking an additional $1 million. The bank asked him to produce something more than his campaign's assets as collateral.

"They said, 'You've explained how you can afford to borrow more, and how you can pay us back if things go well. What happens if things go badly?' " said Trevor Potter, a McCain attorney.

The campaign's response, Potter said, was that McCain could reapply in the future for federal matching funds, and would agree to use the FEC certifications for those funds as collateral.

Under the agreement, McCain promised that if his campaign began to falter, he would commit to keeping his campaign alive and to entering the federal financing system so the money he had raised could be used to gain an infusion of matching funds. Had that happened, he would have been forced to abide by strict federal spending caps before the Republican National Convention in September.

Under FEC rules, a candidate who uses a certification for federal funds as collateral for a loan is obligated to remain within the public financing system. "We very carefully did not do that," Potter said.

Cleta Mitchell, a veteran campaign finance lawyer and a McCain critic, said she has never encountered a similar agreement.

"They've clearly got a sweetheart deal with this bank," Mitchell said. "This bank is just a cash register for them."

Watkins, the bank president, said the terms of the McCain loans were novel, but only because the campaign finance rules have changed over the years. He said he and the other bank trustees have a long history of lending to political committees of both parties, including loans to the presidential campaigns of Democrat Walter F. Mondale and Republican Robert J. Dole.

"Over the years, we developed an expertise on ways to meet federal banking regulations and FEC requirements," Watkins said. "We've done everything in accordance with all the standards." Members of the bank's board of directors have made campaign contributions to candidates in both parties but none to McCain.

McCain's victories in the early primaries meant he never had to enter the public financing system. He formally returned his certification to the FEC on Feb. 6.

That decision has not stopped McCain from pushing for an agreement with Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) that, if the two became their parties' nominees, they would return to public financing for the general election.

Last spring, an Obama spokesman said that the Illinois Democrat would "aggressively pursue an agreement with the Republican nominee to preserve a publicly financed general election," and McCain told reporters yesterday that Obama should "keep his word to the American people."

"If Senator Obama goes back on his commitment to the American people, then obviously we have to rethink our position" on public financing, McCain said in Oshkosh, Wis.

Under the federal campaign finance system, after a political party nominates a presidential candidate at its convention, the nominee becomes eligible for $85 million from a fund provided by taxpayers but would be barred from raising additional money.

Candidates have abided by these limits in the past, but no campaign has created the kind of fundraising machine that Obama has.

Obama said in Milwaukee: "If I am the nominee, then I will make sure that our people talk to John McCain's people to find out if we are willing to abide by the same rules and regulations in respect to the general election." But, he added, "it would be presumptuous of me to start saying now that I'm locking myself into something when I don't even know if the other side is going to agree to it, and I'm not the nominee."
******************************

and, again bending ethics:


The New York Times

September 20, 2008 Saturday

McCain's Camp Tests Fund-Raising Limits

BYLINE: By MICHAEL LUO

Senator John McCain toiled for years to push a campaign finance overhaul through Congress. After the measure finally passed, Trevor Potter, a lawyer and vigorous advocate for reforming the system, was instrumental in defending the law from challenges and pressing for strict enforcement.

Now, as Mr. McCain makes his final sprint for the White House, Mr. Potter is again helping Mr. McCain, but this time by maneuvering to wring the maximum out of campaign finance laws in ways that some contend are at odds with the spirit of the reforms they championed.

The tactics appear to be legally permissible. And some argue that the McCain campaign's decision to bypass public financing and its attendant spending limits.

But critics point out Mr. McCain is capitalizing on legal loopholes that a watchdog organization headed by Mr. Potter has fought against.

''There are very, very few lawyers in the country that are better at exploiting campaign finance loopholes than Trevor Potter,'' said Bradley A. Smith, a former Republican chairman of the Federal Election Commission. '

'Of course, that's one of the odd things about the McCain campaign: 'Here's the rules we want, but we'll play by the rules that are here.' ''

Mr. McCain was an author of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, known as the McCain-Feingold law, an ambitious measure that supporters hoped would help drive big money out of politics.

He has also helped sponsor legislation to improve the public financing system for elections and attacked Mr. Obamafor backing away from a pledge to participate in it for the general election if his opponent accepted public money as well.

But now, as Mr. McCain's top legal adviser, Mr. Potter, a former F.E.C. chairman, and his team have been helping the campaign finesse the strict spending limits it faces under public financing. Although Mr. McCain is supposed to be out of the business of private fund-raising after he received his $84 million infusion from the Treasury this month, it is sometimes difficult to tell.

This month, the McCain campaign
began running banner Web advertisements asking for donations to the McCain-Palin Compliance Fund, a fund-raising vehicle rooted in a 1980s F.E.C. ruling that candidates who accept public financing can still collect private donations for legal and accounting costs for complying with campaign finance laws.

Only a careful observer, however, would have noticed the advertisements' fine print, which said donations to the fund would be used to pay for ''a portion of the cost of broadcast advertising,'' as well as other expenses.

That would seem to be a far cry from the legal and accounting exemption. But the F.E.C. issued an advisory opinion last year that said Senator John Kerry's presidential campaign could use its compliance fund to cover up to 5 percent of its advertising costs, because of the several seconds candidates must devote in their advertisements to a disclaimer.

The Campaign Legal Center, founded by Mr. Potter, joined with Democracy 21, a watchdog group, to file a strongly worded brief opposing the practice, warning that it would be exploited.

The McCain campaign declined to make Mr. Potter available for an interview. Brian Rogers, a spokesman for the campaign, said in a statement that the campaign had not yet paid for advertising with its compliance fund but ''reserves the option to do so under this recent, clear F.E.C. precedent.''

The centerpiece of McCain-Feingold was its efforts to rein in ''soft money,'' or unregulated contributions, in national elections. But McCain fund-raisers continue to build much of their efforts around the solicitation of large contributions of up to about $70,000 for a special joint fund-raising account for the Republican National Committee and several state parties, which can spend money on behalf of the campaign, called McCain-Palin Victory 2008.

Campaigns have used the joint fund-raising committees in the past, but the McCain campaign
took the practice to a new level by linking them with state party accounts, which can accept contributions of $10,000, on top of the $28,500 collected for the national party, $2,300 for the compliance fund and, until recently, $2,300 for the campaign's primary coffers.

<snip>

''The real irony here,'' said Craig Holman, a lobbyist for Public Citizen, a watchdog group, ''is we fought so hard to get B.C.R.A. through, McCain-Feingold through, with the whole intent of getting rid of those large donations, which everyone, including McCain, realized were potentially corrupting. And we've gone full circle with these large donations for the joint fund-raising committees.''

McCain fund-raisers certainly seem to pitch donations to the victory committee as supporting the ticket. The McCain campaign Web site attracts donors with a prominent ''Contribute'' button that sends them to a donation page for the committee, along with some lengthy disclaimers of the various entities that benefit from it.

By contrast, the Kerry campaign's contribution button on its Web page in 2004 was more clearly labeled ''Contribute to the Democratic Party.'' The Obama campaign is not soliciting contributions for its joint fund-raising committee on its Web site.

Some lawyers said that some of the ways the McCain campaign is pushing its victory committee fit awkwardly with the broader mandate of public financing to halt private fund-raising, as well as rules that ban the designating of funds to party committees for specific candidates.

''I think it's both an appearance and a legal question,'' said Lawrence H. Norton, who left his post as general counsel to the F.E.C. last year.

*****************************

and, more on McCain's erratic rages, etc....from The Nation, March 24, 2008:


"Hothead McCain by ROBERT DREYFUSS

If you've followed Senator John McCain at all, you've heard about his tendency to, well, explode. He's erupted at numerous Senate colleagues, including many Republicans, at the slightest provocation. "The thought of his being President sends a cold chill down my spine. He is erratic. He is hotheaded. He loses his temper, and he worries me," wrote Republican Senator Thad Cochran, shortly before endorsing McCain.

You've heard about his penchant for bellicose rhetoric, whether appropriating a Beach Boys song in threatening to bomb Iran or telling Russian President Vladimir Putin that he doesn't care what he thinks about American plans to install missiles in Eastern Europe.

And you've heard, no doubt, about McCain's stubbornness. "No dissent, no opinion to the contrary, however reasonable, will be entertained," says Larry Wilkerson, a retired army colonel who was former Secretary of State Colin Powell's top aide. "Hardheaded is another way to say it. Arrogant is another way to say it. Hubristic is another way to say it. Too proud for his own good is another way to say it. It's a quality about him that disturbs me."

But what you may not have heard is an extended critique of the kind of Commander in Chief that Captain McCain might be. To combat what he likes to call "the transcendent challenge radical Islamic extremism," McCain is drawing up plans for a new set of global institutions, from a potent covert operations unit to a "League of Democracies" that can bypass the balky United Nations, from an expanded NATO that will bump up against Russian interests in Central Asia and the Caucasus to a revived US unilateralism that will engage in "rogue state rollback" against his version of the "axis of evil." In all, it's a new apparatus designed to carry the "war on terror" deep into the twenty-first century.

"We created a number of institutions in the wake of World War II to deal with the situation," says Randy Scheunemann, McCain's top adviser on foreign policy. "And what Senator McCain wants to begin a dialogue about is, Do we need new structures and new institutions, both internally, in the US government, and externally, to recognize that the situation we face now is very, very different than the one we faced during the cold war?" Joining Scheunemann, a veteran neoconservative strategist and one of the chief architects of the Iraq War, are a panoply of like-minded neocons who've gathered to advise McCain, including Bill Kristol, James Woolsey, Robert Kagan, Max Boot, Gary Schmitt and Maj. Ralph Peters. "There are some who've moved into his camp who scare me," Wilkerson says. "Scare me."

If McCain intends to be a shoot first, ask questions later President, consider a couple of the new institutions he's outlined, which seem designed to facilitate an unencumbered, interventionist foreign policy.

First is an unnamed "new agency patterned after the...Office of Strategic Services," the rambunctious, often out-of-control World War II-era covert-ops team. "A modern day OSS could draw together specialists in unconventional warfare; covert action operators; and experts in anthropology, advertising, and other relevant disciplines," wrote McCain in Foreign Affairs. "Like the original OSS, this would be a small, nimble, can-do organization" that would "fight terrorist subversion take risks." It's clear that McCain wants to set up an agency to conduct paramilitary operations, covert action and psy-ops.

This idea is McCain's response to a longstanding critique of the CIA by neoconservatives such as Richard Perle, who have accused the agency of being "risk averse." Since 2001 the CIA has engaged in a bitter battle with the White House and the Pentagon on issues that include the Iraq War and Iran's nuclear weapons program. The agency lost a major skirmish with the creation of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which put the White House more directly in charge of the intelligence community. And now McCain wants to put the final nail in the CIA's coffin by creating a gung-ho operations force. Scheunemann, who credits Max Boot of the Council on Foreign Relations with the idea, says the new agency is urgently needed to "meet the threats of the twenty-first century in a time of war, much as the OSS was created in a time of war." And he disparages the CIA as a bunch of has-beens. The new agency would eclipse "an organization created to meet the needs of the cold war and hang out in embassies and try to recruit a major or two or deal with walk-in defectors," Scheunemann told The Nation.

But John McLaughlin, a former deputy director of the CIA who retired in 2004, is more than skeptical, and he worries that McCain doesn't understand the need for Congressional controls over spy agencies. "You need to have Congressional oversight and transparency," he says. "I would not recommend a new agency that is set up parallel to the CIA.... All of those things can be done within the boundaries of the CIA." Told about McLaughlin's comments, Scheunemann says, "Anyone who thinks that the agency today is a nimble, can-do organization has a different view than Senator McCain does."

The UN, too, would be shunted aside to make room for McCain's new League of Democracies. Though the concept is couched in soothing rhetoric, the "league" would provide an alternate way of legitimizing foreign interventions by the United States when the UN Security Council won't authorize force. Five years ago, on the eve of the Iraq War, McCain said bluntly before the European Parliament that if Security Council members resisted the use of force, or if China opposed US action against North Korea, "the United States will do whatever it must to guarantee the security of the American people." Among the targets McCain cites for his plan to short-circuit the UN are Darfur, Burma, Zimbabwe, Serbia, Ukraine and, of course, Iran--and he has already referred to "wackos" in Venezuela. According to Scheunemann, it's an idea that bubbled up from some of McCain's advisers, including Peters and Kagan, but it alarms analysts from the realist-Republican school of foreign policy. "They're talking about a body that essentially would circumvent the UN and would take authority to act in the name of the international community, sometimes using force," says a veteran GOP strategist who knows McCain well and who insisted on anonymity. "Well, it's very easy to predict that the Russians and Chinese would view this as a threat."

McCain seems almost gleeful about provoking Russia. At first blush, you'd think he'd be more nuanced, since many of the foreign policy gurus he says he talks to emanate from the old-school Nixon-Kissinger circle of détente-niks, including Henry Kissinger himself, Lawrence Eagleburger and Brent Scowcroft. Their collective attitude is that as long as Moscow doesn't threaten US interests, we can do business with it. But there is little evidence of their views in McCain's policy toward Putin's Russia. "I think it's fair to assume that he's most influenced by his neoconservative advisers," says the GOP strategist.

"We need a new Western approach to...revanchist Russia," wrote McCain in Foreign Affairs. He says he will expel Russia from the Group of Eight leading industrial states, a flagrant and dangerous insult, one likely to draw stiff opposition from other members of the G-8. He refuses to ease Russian concerns about the deployment of a missile defense system in Eastern Europe, saying, "The first thing I would do is make sure we have a missile defense system in place in Czechoslovakia and Poland, and I don't care what objections are to it." And he's all for rapid expansion of NATO, to include even the former Soviet republic of Georgia--and not just Georgia but also the rebellious Georgian provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Since Kosovo's declaration of independence on February 17, which was opposed by Russia, Moscow has said it intends to support independence of the two Georgian regions, making McCain's goal of expanding NATO provocative, to say the least. "McCain says ought to include Abkhazia and South Ossetia, which are not under the control of the current Georgian government," says a conservative critic of the Arizona senator. "Which, if not a prescription for war with Russia, is at least a prescription for conflict with Russia."

Earlier in his Congressional career, McCain was reluctant to engage in overseas adventures unless American interests were directly threatened. He opposed US involvement in Lebanon in the early 1980s, and in Haiti and the Balkan conflicts in the early 1990s. But as the post-cold war environment seemed increasingly to promise unchallenged American hegemony, McCain took up the neocons' call for interventionism. His views crystallized in a 1999 speech, when he called for the United States to use tough sanctions and other pressure to roll back "rogue states" like Iraq and North Korea, adding, "We must be prepared to back up these measures with American military force if the existence of such rogue states threatens America's interests and values." In referring to "values," McCain indicates his support for the notion that a selective crusade allegedly on behalf of freedom and democracy can provide a rationale for an aggressive new foreign policy outlook.

"He's the true neocon," says the Brookings Institution's Ivo Daalder, a liberal interventionist who conceived the idea of a League of Democracies with Robert Kagan. "He does believe, in a way that George W. Bush never really did, in the use of power, military power above all, to change the world in America's image. If you thought George Bush was bad when it comes to the use of military force, wait till you see John McCain.... He believes this. His advisers believe this. He's surrounded himself with people who believe it. And I'll take him at his word."

Not surprisingly, the center of McCain's foreign policy is the Middle East. "He's bought into the completely fallacious notion that we're in a global struggle of us-versus-them. He calls it the 'transcendental threat...of extreme Islam," says Daalder. "But it's a silly argument to think that this is either an ideological or a material struggle on a par with Nazi Germany or Soviet Communism." For McCain, the Iraq War, the conflict with Iran, the Arab-Israeli dispute, the war in Afghanistan, the Pakistani crisis and the lack of democracy in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan are all rolled up into one "transcendent" ball of wax.

More than any other politician, McCain is identified with the Iraq War. From the mid-1990s on, he and his advisers were staunch supporters of "regime change." Scheunemann helped write the Iraq Liberation Act in 1998, which funded Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress; joined Bill Kristol's Project for the New American Century; and helped create the neoconservative Committee for the Liberation of Iraq in 2002, with White House support. Together with Joe Lieberman, Sam Brownback and a handful of other senators, McCain emerged as a major cheerleader for the war. Like his fellow neocons, McCain touted what proved to be faked intelligence on the threat posed by Iraq. Echoing Vice President Cheney, McCain said on the eve of the war, "There's no doubt in my mind, once is gone, that we will be welcomed as liberators." He pooh-poohed critics who argued that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's war plan was too reliant on technology and too light on troops, saying, "I don't think you're going to have to see the scale of numbers of troops that we saw...back in 1991." When Gen. Eric Shinseki warned, a month before the war started, that occupying Iraq would require far more troops, McCain was mute.

Today McCain portrays himself as a critic of how the war was fought, but his criticism did not emerge until long after it was clear that the United States faced a grueling insurgency. From the fall of 2003 onward, against a growing chorus of critics who called for US forces to withdraw, McCain repeatedly called for more troops to secure "victory." By late 2006, when the bipartisan Iraq Study Group called for pulling out all combat brigades within fifteen months, McCain, Lieberman and a hardy band of neocons, led by Frederick Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute and joined by Cheney, persuaded Bush to escalate the war instead. Asked if McCain directly lobbied Bush to reject the ISG's recommendations, a McCain aide says, "There were many encounters with the President's senior advisers and with the President on this issue." Fred Kagan, the surge's author and Robert Kagan's brother, told McClatchy Newspapers, "It was a very lonely time. He went out there for us."

In January McCain famously said US forces might end up staying in Iraq for a hundred years. It's clear that for McCain the occupation is not just about winning the war but about turning Iraq into a regional base for extending US influence throughout the region. According to the original neocon conception of the war, as promoted by people like Perle and Michael Ledeen, Iraq was only a first step in redrawing the Middle East map. Gen. Wesley Clark said recently that on the eve of the war he was shown a Pentagon document that portrayed Iraq as the first in a series of operations to change regimes in Iran, Syria, Sudan, Libya, Somalia and Lebanon.

When The Nation asked Scheunemann why US forces would have to stay in Iraq so long, he explicitly linked their presence to the entire Middle East. "Iraq might be stable, but what about the region?" he responded. "Other countries could be in turmoil; other countries could be threatening Iraq. It could be an external threat that we need to have troops there for, à la South Korea, à la Japan." He added, "I understand your readers may think it's some sort of malevolent imperialist conspiracy." Conspiracy or not, it's clear that McCain sees our presence in Iraq as a permanent extension of US power in the oil-rich Persian Gulf.

McCain has made no secret of his belief that using force against Iran is the only way to prevent it from acquiring nuclear weapons. "There is only one thing worse than a military solution, and that, my friends, is a nuclear-armed Iran," McCain said. "The regime must understand that they cannot win a showdown with the world." He supports tougher sanctions against Tehran, but critics note that implementing them would require Russia's consent. McCain's provocative anti-Russia stand, though, makes such a deal less than likely. And he rejects direct US-Iran talks.

In the end, McCain seems almost reflexively to favor the use of America's armed might. "He would employ military force to the exclusion of other options," says Larry Korb, a former Reagan Administration defense official. Scion of admirals (his father and grandfather), a combat pilot in Vietnam who continued to believe long after that war that it might have been won if the US military had been allowed free rein, McCain presents the image of a warrior itching for battle. He is the candidate of those Americans whose chief goal is an endless war against radical Islam and who'd like nothing more than for the Arizona senator to clamber figuratively into the cockpit once more. Like his former aide Marshall Wittman, currently a top aide to Senator Lieberman, McCain sees Theodore Roosevelt, the Bull Moose interventionist President of the early twentieth century, as his role model. And that attracts neoconservatives.

"I'm an old-fashioned, Scoop Jackson--I guess you'd now say Joe Lieberman--Democrat, and he's a Teddy Roosevelt Republican, and they're pretty close in their views, so substantively there's a lot of overlap between us," says James Woolsey, a former CIA director who's endorsed McCain and has campaigned with him this year. "I think John's style is very TR-like. It's very much about speaking softly but carrying a big stick."

We're still waiting for the "speaking softly" part. "There's going to be other wars," McCain warns. "I'm sorry to tell you, there's going to be other wars. We will never surrender, but there will be other wars.""

[amborin]

7. just a few of McCain's Many Lies:

<http://www.mccainpedia.org/index.php/Count_the_Lies>

[amborin]

2. remember McCain's relationship with Vicki Iseman??? video:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Njf64yPNxi8&feature=related>


and

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYCW3QaBC0s&feature=related>

[amborin]

3. McCain campaign advisor was a lobbyist for country of Georgia:

<http://www.citizensforethics.org/node/31794>

"21 May 2008 // This story is part of USA TODAY's series, "The Price of Power," which tracks the political and business relationships between public officials and donors.
John McCain's top foreign policy adviser lobbied the Arizona senator's staff on behalf of the republic of Georgia while he was working for the campaign, public records show.

Randy Scheunemann, founder of Orion Strategies, represented the governments of Macedonia, Georgia and Taiwan between 2003 and March 1, according to the firm's filings with the Justice Department. In its latest semiannual report, the firm disclosed that Scheunemann had a phone conversation in November about Georgia with Richard Fontaine, an aide in McCain's Senate office.

Orion Strategies earned $540,000 from its foreign clients over the year ending on Dec. 1, reports show. Scheunemann also received $56,250 last year from March to July from McCain, according to campaign finance records.

The campaign consulting fees ended at a time when McCain was under financial pressure to cut costs, but Scheunemann remained the campaign's top foreign policy adviser. He represented McCain throughout last fall — including an appearance at a Republican Jewish Coalition event during the same week he lobbied McCain's Senate office.

While not illegal or a breach of Senate ethics rules, Scheunemann's lobbying of McCain's staff as he was advising the campaign comes to light a week after McCain announced a new policy to avoid such conflicts. The new conflict-of-interest policy prohibits campaign workers from being registered lobbyists or foreign agents and bans part-time volunteers from policy discussions on issues involving their clients.

Campaign spokesman Jill Hazelbaker said the ethics policy is not retroactive. She declined to answer any questions about Scheunemann. "This campaign has a policy; it's the most stringent of any presidential campaign in history, and everyone will have to comply or resign, but we're not going to discuss any individual staff members and their individual decisions," she said in an e-mail.

Scheunemann did not respond to messages left at his firm and at the campaign Monday and Tuesday."

[FrenchieCat]

5. See, the media doesn't know how to do it's job of investigative reporting!

I thank you for gathering this information. I'll be sending it to some folks who can maybe do something with it!

[Left Is Write]

4. It's easy to violate Senate ethics when you have no sense of personal ethics.

[amborin]

6. How McCain would Lower taxes on Big Oil:

"MCCAIN'S TAX PLAN: $4 BILLION FOR OIL AND GAS INDUSTRY WHILE AMERICANS PAY $4 PER GALLON AT THE PUMP

McCain's Tax Plan Will Cut Taxes For Oil Companies by Nearly $4 Billion - Including $1.2 Billion for Exxon.

A study by the Center for American Progress Action Fund noted that the corporate tax rate cut included in the McCain tax plan "would deliver a $3.8 billion tax cut to the five largest American oil companies" - ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Valero Energy, and Marathon.

According to their analysis of Exxon's financial statements, the company would receive a tax savings of $1.2 billion under the McCain plan. <"The McCain Plan to Cut Oil Company Taxes by Nearly $4 Billion," Center for American Progress Action Fund, 3/27/08>"

from:

<http://www.democrats.org/a/2008/08/mccain_watch_a.php>


********************

and:


"... Back in early 2004, Mr. Davis and Mr. Manafort started discussing becoming consultants with Pegasus Capital, based in Cos Cob, Conn. Not long afterward, the two men were providing advice to Pegasus about governmental matters that might affect companies in which the firm had invested and also suggested investment targets. The firm has never retained Davis Manafort as a lobbyist.

In late 2004, however, Mr. Davis became a registered lobbyist for Imagesat. He gained the account through a recommendation from Pegasus, which holds a stake in the company, said a person knowledgeable about the investment firm who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Mr. Davis said he found the firm without Pegasus’s help.

Davis Manafort received $120,000 from late 2004 to mid-2005 to lobby for Imagesat on both defense and domestic security issues. Mr. Davis and Christian Ferry, now Mr. McCain’s deputy campaign manager, were the two lobbyists on the project, the records show.

Early in 2005, Mr. Davis tried to develop another relationship with Pegasus when he and two other men suggested that it help bankroll a proposed new private equity firm. That firm was to focus on investments in domestic security companies, including those that vied for federal contracts, the person knowledgeable about Pegasus said. <...>

The proposed firm never took off. But Pegasus also offered another opportunity to advisers, like Mr. Davis and Mr. Manafort, who worked with it — the chance to get in on some of its investments. In November 2005, Pegasus bought a stake in a company called Traxys, which trades in industrial metals.

In January 2006, just two months later, the subject of metals trading came up in association with a social meeting Mr. Davis helped arrange near Davos, Switzerland.

At that meeting, first reported by The Washington Post, Mr. McCain met the Russian aluminum magnate, Oleg Deripaska, who has been barred from entering the United States apparently because of alleged criminal ties.

After the event, Mr. Deripaska sent a brief thank-you note to Mr. Davis and Mr. Manafort. In it, he said, “Please will you send me the information on the metals trading company we discussed and would be happy to see if I can do anything to help.”

In written responses to questions, Tucker Bounds, a spokesman for the McCain campaign, said that “Mr. Davis did not approach Mr. Deripaska” about any metals trading company. Mr. Bounds said Mr. Davis retained investments he made during the time he advised Pegasus, a relationship that ended in 2006.

He said Mr. Davis declined to disclose whether Traxys was one of them because he considered the investments a private matter.

That's interesting, because as National Journal's Bara Vaida points out in a new piece (sub. only), it was Davis himself who reportedly instituted the McCain campaign's tough new "conflict of interest" policy which has caused five McCain advisors to recently resign.

NJ: "Earlier this month, campaign manager Rick Davis (himself a former lobbyist with the firm Davis Manafort) implemented a conflict-of-interest policy requiring staff to stop representing their lobbying clients.

In addition, volunteers must identify their clients to the campaign, and they may not participate in any policy discussions that would affect their clients." So Davis won't disclose what his investments are and whether they pose any conflict of interest as this article strongly suggests they might?

Did as Deripaska's letter suggest he try to help out Traxys? And did Davis offer help in return? Perhaps help getting Deripaska's US visa problems sorted out, as well as some face time with the Republican presidential candidate.

As for Davis' acknowledged former client ImageSat, one wonders what ImageSat hired Davis Manafort to lobby for.

One theory is that the firm was hired to lobby to ease US pressure on the Israeli Defense Ministry-connected firm to steer clear of selling sensitive satellite imagery to certain countries. It would make sense that US pressure on Israel contributed to those ImageSat deals in Venezuela, China, etc. being shut down in the first place by the Israeli Ministry of Defense.

2004, the year ImageSat hired Davis Manafort, was the time period Feith's Pentagon was coming down hard on Israel's Ministry of Defense for Harpy drone sales to China, for instance, to the degree that the US suspended cooperation with Israel on some sensitive technology arrangements for a time.

More from: the original Post piece as well about a second meeting of Davis, McCain and Russian metals magnate Deripaska on a yacht in Montenegro, that McCain and Davis claim to hardly remember.

--Ken Silverstein on the Orwellian spectacle of Davis heading McCain's anti special interest "Reform Institute."

--And from a previous WSJ story about Davis' lobbying partner and McCain advisor Paul Manafort lobbying (unregistered) for the candidate on the wrong side of the Orange Revolution, Viktor Yanukovich (the one who didn't get poisoned by the KGB).

So too shilled for the pro Kremlin Yanukovich did Bruce Jackson, the partner of McCain's chief foreign policy advisor Randy Scheunemann in the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq and other endeavors. Jackson received $300k for his pet charity from a Ukrainian, Rinat Akhmetov, who is the chief financier of the same pro Kremlin Ukrainian pol.

"A company controlled by Mr. Akhmetov donated $300,000 in 2005 to a human-rights charity run by Mr. Jackson and his wife, an Internal Revenue Service document reviewed by The Wall Street Journal shows. Mr. Jackson said he was grateful for the support.

Mr. Manafort, who isn’t registered as a consultant to the Ukrainian leader, didn’t respond to requests for comment." It's hard to imagine McCain and Davis picking an issue that more highlights a gap between what McCain says he's about and the reality in terms of whom he chooses to surround himself with and who runs his campaign.


Photo: McCain campaign manager Rick Davis' business partner Paul Manafort and chief Yanukovich financier Rinat Akhmetov in Davos (Photo credit: Ukrayinska Pravda)."

from:

<http://www.warandpiece.com/blogdirs/2008_05.html>

[amborin]

8. McCain won't say "terrorists" can't have guns

<http://www.crooksandliars.com/2008/08/25/mccains-terror-gap>

"John McCain's campaign won't say whether he's for or against allowing suspected terrorists to buy guns, as he tries to pander to his lobbyist pals and the Republican pro-gun base but wanders into the "War On Some Terror" minefield by mistake.

Sen. John McCain portrays himself as a strong supporter of Second Amendment rights. But does that extend to gun rights for suspected terrorists?

His campaign won't say where he stands on a bill to eliminate a gun-control loophole that even the Bush administration wants closed: a gap in federal law that inhibits the government from stopping people on terrorist watch lists from buying guns.

The bill was inspired by an official audit covering a five-month period in 2004 which found that, because of the loophole, the Feds had to greenlight 35 out of 44 cases where a gun buyer was on a terrorist watch list.

One group opposed to closing the loophole is the National Shooting Sports Foundation, a gun manufacturers' trade association. Until this spring, one of its congressional lobbyists was Randy Scheunemann, now a top McCain campaign adviser on foreign policy......"


****************

and, against a bill that helps veterans: from a blog:

"John McCain can't handle Vet question over GI Bill

John McCain can't seem to handle people questioning his accountability on G.I. Bill even if they are Vets.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzr3pdXqZ98&eurl=http://www2.blogger.com/...

John McCain gets testy with a vet when questioned on his lack of support for Jim Webb's GI Bill and other bills that he's voted against which would support veterans.

He also attack Jim Webb who actually did the G.I Bill. Said Jim Webb hasn't done enough."

<http://www.samsedershow.com/node/3414>