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.
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.”
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 said.
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 said. “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 said 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 said 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.
McCain’s
foundation 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.
“Song bird” 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. The institute’s spokesman refers people with questions to
Arizona State University.
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