by Deb Cupples | Many people around the world suspect that the Bush Administration is excessively fond of cash, but it's strangely comforting to find real evidence of that suspicion. Actually, I'm more alarmed than comforted.
Britain's Times Online has a great article and a four-minute video clip of lobbyist and Bush Pioneer Stephen Payne -- who was appointed to the Homeland Security Department's advisory council -- advising a former Kyrgyzstan official to donate hundreds of thousands of dollars in order to get meetings with Bush Administration officials and to buy positive public statements about that foreign official.
Think Progress summed it up as follows:
"In an undercover video, Payne is seen promising to arrange a meeting for an exiled leader of Krygystan with Dick Cheney or Condoleezza Rice.... All it will take for him to arrange this high-level meeting, says Payne, is 'a couple hundred thousand dollars, or something like that':
PAYNE: The exact budget I will come up with. But it will be somewhere between $600,000 and $750,000, with about a third of it going directly to the Bush library. […] 200, 250, something like that. That’s gonna be a show of “we’re interested, we’re your friends, we’re still friends.”...
"The Times reports, 'The revelation confirms long-held suspicions that favours are being offered in return for donations to the libraries which outgoing presidents set up to house their archives and safeguard their political legacies.' Bush loyalists previously said they had 'identified wealthy heiresses, Arab nations and captains of industry as potential 'mega' donors' to the Bush library." (Think Progress)
It gets worse. Eric Dos, an exiled politician from Kazakhstan who helped get the video of Stephen Payne last week, told the Times Online that Dos took part in a deal in 2005 with Mr. Payne on behalf of officials from Kazakhstan: a deal involving a $2 million payment passed through a foreign oil company to Mr. Payne's lobbying firm in exchange for positive statements from U.S. Officials about Kazakhstan's tyrannical government led by President Nazarbayev.
One result, according to the Times Online:
"The following May, Cheney made a brief trip to Kazakhstan. His visit was remarked upon in the media at the time, both for the lavish praise which he publicly heaped on Nazarbayev and for the stark contrast between this and a speech he had made just a day earlier at a conference in Lithuania in which he had lambasted Russia for being insufficiently democratic. Now he was lauding Nazarbayev, who has effectively made himself president for life and in whose country it is an offence to criticise him.
“'Why did Cheney castigate Russia’s imperfect democracy while saying not a word about Kazakhstan’s shameless travesty of the democratic system?' said one newspaper following the visit.
The big question: how many nations have our public officials endorsed -- without good cause -- simply because of discrete money transfers from those nations to our officials?
Oddly enough, in the video clip from last week, Mr. Payne (an obviously Republican lobbyist) also mentioned that he could get positive public statements from Democratic U.S. officials like Senator Joe Biden.
This does not implicate Sen. Biden, but I find it strange that Mr. Payne represented that he might have similar access to Biden as he has to the Bush Administration.
I hope that Congressman Henry Waxman gets a hold of this story and turns loose his Oversight Committee staff. We taxpayers have a right to know whether our nation's foreign policy has been for sale.
Memeorandum has commentary. And please read the Times Online's full article.
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