EXCLUSIVE: Soros, Clinton-Linked Teneo Among Donors to
McCain Institute, by Richard Pollock, 6/19/17
Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain
in 2012 turned over nearly $9 million in unspent funds from his failed 2008
presidential campaign to a new foundation bearing his name, the McCain
Institute for International Leadership.
The institute is intended to serve
as a “legacy” for McCain and “is dedicated to advancing human rights, dignity,
democracy and freedom.” It is a tax-exempt non-profit foundation with assets
valued at $8.1 million and associated with Arizona State University.
Conservative and liberal critics,
however, believe the institute constitutes a major conflict of interest for
McCain, The Daily Caller News Foundation’s Investigative Group has learned.
McCain, a former Navy pilot who was
shot down over North Vietnam in 1967 and was then a prisoner of war in the
infamous Hanoi Hilton until 1973, is a major political force in Washington,
D.C. He is presently chairman of the Senate Committee on Armed Services.
Critics worry that the institute’s
donors and McCain’s personal leadership in the organization’s exclusive “Sedona
Forum” bear an uncanny resemblance to the glitzy Clinton Global Initiative
(CGI) that annually co-mingled special interests and powerful political players
in alleged pay-to-play schemes.
The institute has accepted
contributions of as much as $100,000 from billionaire liberal activist-funder
George Soros and from Teneo, a for-profit company co-founded by Doug Band,
former President Bill Clinton’s “bag man.” Teneo has long helped enrich Clinton
through lucrative speaking and business deals.
And Bloomberg reported in
2016 on a $1 million Saudi Arabian donation to the institute, a contribution
the McCain group has refused to explain publicly. In addition, the institute has taken at least $100,000 from a
Moroccan state-run company tied to repeated charges of worker abuse and
exploitation. The McCain group has also accepted at least $100,000 from the
Pivotal Foundation, which was created by Francis Najafi who owns the
Pivotal Group, a private equity and real estate firm.
The Pivotal Foundation has in the
last three years given $205,000 to the National Iranian-American Council
(NIAC), which has been a vocal advocate for the Iranian nuclear deal the Obama
administration negotiated. The NIAC web site claims the group “is a
nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to strengthening the voice of
Iranian Americans and promoting greater understanding between the American and
Iranian people.”
But NIAC President Trita Parsi has
long been an advocate for Iran, including demanding in May 2017 that President
Donald Trump and officials in his administration “cease questioning the
integrity of a (nuclear) deal.” The NIAC is “Iran’s lobbyists in Washington,”
charged Aresh Salih, the Washington representative of the Democratic Party of
Iranian Kurdistan. “People inside of Iran know them as their lobbyists in
Washington, D.C.,” Salih told TheDCNF. The NIAC does not file as a foreign
agent under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, nor does it register as a
lobbyist with Congress.
Yet in May 2013, Parsi spoke to
a packed Capitol Hill meeting sponsored by Minnesota Democratic Rep. Keith
Ellison to argue in favor of the nuclear deal. Ellison was the first Muslim
elected to Congress and is also deputy chairman of the Democratic National
Committee.
“This is a very real conflict of
interest,” Craig Holman, a government affairs lobbyist at Public Citizen, told TheDCNF.
“This is the similar type of pattern we received with the Clinton Foundation in
which foreign governments and foreign interests were throwing a lot of money in
the hopes of trying to buy influence.” Liberal consumer advocate Ralph Nader
founded Public Citizen.
Lawrence Noble, general counsel for
the Campaign Legal Center, told the DCNF that accepting contributions in the
name of a sitting senator like McCain raises troubling issues.
“In terms of the ethics of it, it
does raise a broad question of people trying to get good will with the elected
official,” he said. “From a personal standpoint, I’d rather not see these
entities exist.”
Charles Ortel, a retired Wall Street
investment banker and philanthropy law expert, told TheDCNF that “high government
officials such as John McCain, [former Secretary of State] Hillary Clinton and
President Barack Obama should not get involved with vehicles like these where
substantial sums can be funneled over time in ways that at best, wreak of
impropriety and at worse are public corruption.”
The institute’s donations not only
suggest special pleading before the senator, but also in some instances appear
to contradict McCain’s vision of human rights and national security. It
accepted more than $100,000 from OCP, S.A., a Moroccan state-owned phosphate
company operating in the Western Sahara, territory which Morocco seized in
1975. The North African country has since occupied the region by force in
defiance of U.N. resolutions and legal declarations by other international
bodies.
Morocco has come under criticism
from human rights groups that the government violates basic human rights and
that its state-owned companies subject its workforce to gruesome conditions
while exploiting the disputed territory’s natural resources.
The Western Sahara holds half of the
world’s phosphate reserves. Used to make fertilizer, phosphate is called
Morocco’s “white gold.”
Last week, a South African
court ruled in
favor of the seizure of an OCP ship charged with illegally carrying 50,000 tons
of phosphate from the Western Sahara. The country’s independence movement,
which calls the territory the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, succeeded in
convincing the court to keep the ship in port until the case is resolved.
The King of Morocco was a major
donor to the Clinton Foundation. Hillary Clinton personally accepted $12 million from the King in return for holding a CGI
regional meeting in the country. OCP also was a major sponsor of
the CGI meeting, and Bill Clinton was the featured speaker.
The Robert F. Kennedy Center for
Justice has charged OCP with “serious human rights violations,” including
exploitation of workers by not “adequately compensating the impoverished people
who live there.”
McCain has lavished effusive praise
on the King of Morocco, saying in
2011, that the country was a “positive example to governments across the Middle
East and North Africa.”
McCain and Soros reportedly became
friends after the senator was exposed as a member of the “Keating Five” during
the savings and loan (S&L) industry scandal during former President George
H.W. Bush’s administration. As the S&L bank chairman, Charles Keating paid
$1.3 million to bribe five members of Congress to interfere with government
regulators on behalf of the savings bank.
The experience so scarred McCain
that he became a vigorous advocate of campaign finance reform and in the
process reportedly became friends with Soros. McCain recently claimed no
involvement with the institute, saying “I’m proud that the institute is named
after me, but I have nothing to do with it.”
The institute did not respond to
requests for the dollar amounts of its high donors, when the donations were
made and if there were strings attached to the contributions, claiming it did
not have any of the information. Late Monday, the institute’s spokesman
referred The DCNF to Arizona State University.
http://dailycaller.com/2017/06/19/exclusive-soros-clinton-linked-teneo-among-donors-to-mccain-institute/
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