Senator John McCain (R-AZ) has added to his own mystique as being a man who seemingly is more interested in being situated in front of a Liberal camera than in being a stand-up guy for his constituents. McCain has never appeared to be comfortable in his own skin, often smirking at the camera with eyes darting off to the Left or the Right as if searching for the correct answer or looking for the MSNBC identifier.
A new report has delved into some questionable associations regarding the McCain Institute for International Leadership, a non-profit, tax-exempt foundation created with the unused portion of his campaign funds from his failed 2008 presidential bid. Under the law, this is allowed, but it’s not necessarily what he did with the money, but who decided to subsequently donate to his foundation.
McCain has claimed that the institute has nothing to do with him, that it’s handled by Arizona State University, but the fact remains that his name sits upon the foundation, making him keenly aware of who is giving generously to his legacy brand. This is one of those situations where corruption is slyly shoved under the rug to make way for the funding. Like in many ways to the Clinton Family Crime Foundation, the McCain Institute takes money from donors in all parts of the world, oftentimes from very questionable sources.
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.
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.
It does appear that no matter where you look, there seem to be politicians who will sign their souls over the Devil each and every time they’re presented with the opportunity. Here, you have a guy who arrived home from being imprisoned during the Vietnam War, who endured great pain and anguish, both physical and mental, but apparently can’t stand up to the guile and the lure of cold hard cash when offered in his cushy life as senator. The pattern is unmistakable. It’s not something we haven’t seen before, but it is something that should not be ignored.
Of course, McCain’s indiscretions through his Institute did not stop there.
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.
Knowing what happened in the past with the Keating Five and understanding the implications to which it could lead, you would think that McCain would know better than to continue to accept money in his legacy foundation, whether or not he says he’s directly involved, and would happily turn the money away, especially when it comes to governments who are perceived to be buying influence. This is the exact stuff that has been going on for decades and that which President Trump campaigned on to clean up the Swamp. It’s also the exact reason why McCain and others just like him throughout the bloated government are using everything they’ve got in an attempt to impeach him and force his resignation. The money that’s changing hands on an everyday basis is too great to allow a boastful New Yorker to block it and force transparency. Hence, the endless scandals and investigations.
The Moroccan economy has also been a donor to the Institute to the tune of $100K. The company, a Moroccan state-owned phosphate corporation, operates in the Western Sahara. The territory on which it operates was illegally seized in 1975 and the country continues to operate there under forced occupation, in defiance of UN resolutions and legal declarations by other governing bodies.
The government has been criticized for his human rights violations as well as horrible work conditions in these disputed territories. Called “white gold,” phosphate is valuable because of its use in making fertilizers and the Western Sahara is said to hold half of the world’s reserves.
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.”
As it stands right now, it looks as if these revelations may lead to something a bit unsettling for McCain, although it appears that he has the Swamp machine on his side for the time being. If he continues to come out in full opposition to President Trump, there may be a point where the full weight of the Executive Branch could prove a bit too muscular for him to hide any longer and McCain may finally bow out of politics, settling for his generous pension, sizable savings, wonderful benefits and face-time on MSNBC and CNN for the rest of his natural life. Talk about Liberal Utopia.
Source: The Daily Caller
Sickening people!
Jail mccain