It’s hard to believe Sen. John McCain’s campaign can deny a conflict-of-interest involving his chief foreign policy adviser, Randy Scheunemann.
It’s Scheunemann whio has been advising McCain to take a get-tough approach toward Russia, and to strongly affirm U.S. ties to Georgia.
Oh, and it’s also Scheunemann whose two-man lobbying firm, has since 2004 been paid $800,000 by the government of Georgia to lobby members of Congress.
Scheunemann sure earned his money: He reported lobbying McCain or his staff on 49 separate occasions during the time he was a paid representative for the former Soviet republic.
He also lobbied McCain or his staff nearly 50 times on behalf of the governments of Taiwan and Macedonia, each of which paid Scheunemann’s company, Orion Strategies, over a half-million dollars, and Romania, which paid Orion over $400,000, and Latvia, which paid Orion nearly $250,000.
And how can the McCain campiagn say there’s no conflict? Because for the past three months Scheunemann has taken a leave of absence from the lobbying firm and is only collecting a consulting fee from the McCain campaign for his foreign policy expertise.
Between Jan. 1, 2007, and May 15, 2008, Scheunemann has been paid nearly $70,000 for his work on the McCain campaign.
The mainstream media is starting to take a closer look at Scheunemann and his cozy working relationships with McCain and the government of Georgia.
They would do well to take a closer look at Scheunemann’s politics.
Scheunemann, who also was a foreign policy adviser in McCain’s 2000 presidential campaign, is one of the group of hardliners who pushed hard for the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Scheunemann operated a group known as the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, which was set up in late 2002 to bolster U.S. public support for the invasion of Iraq — an invasion predicated on fabricated evidence about Saddam Hussein, weapons of mass destruction and the “threat” he posed to the West.
Earlier, Scheunemann was a signatory on the report from the Project for the New American Century which suggested just days after the attack on the World Trade Center that Iraq had ties to the Sept. 11 terrorists.
Who else besides Scheunemann signed the PNAC letter? There were about three dozen well-known neocon fanatics, including William Kristol and Richard Perle, who lobbied President Bush into a war we never had to start.
In the 1990s he also was an aide to then-GOP Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott.
Scheunemann’s politics are downright scary. That McCain is listening to, and following, his advice in formulating foreign policy positions — and in his saber-ratting threats toward Russia — is even more frightening.
