Sunday, September 21, 2008
Country First?
Not if you work for the McCain campaign. As this look at Charlie Black reveals, your first allegiance is to your clients, the country is only first as a source of revenue.
Black, a senior adviser to the McCain campaign, has represented at least 120 clients from more than two dozen countries within the past decade. He has used his clout to help kill tax reforms that could have hurt foreign clients, and he once even pressed a judge to go easy an associate convicted of fraud.What Charlie is putting into the head of McCain is probably every bit as dangerous to the US as what the Vietnamese put in there when Johnny was their "guest".
Earlier this year, amid criticism that McCain's reformist message was being undercut by a campaign top-heavy with lobbyists, Black, 60, retired from his lobbying company.
But that hardly marked Black's departure from the Washington influence business, nor from private business dealings directly dependent on the decisions of the federal government.
Black remains a director of Civitas Group LLC, a low-profile consulting firm he set up months after the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security to invest in security companies and give them advice. National security is both the firm's business and the signature issue of the McCain campaign. Neither Black nor the McCain campaign would discuss Black's role with Civitas.
Federal law requires lobbyists to disclose who their clients while consulting firms, like Civitas, are not. But to some, that is a distinction without a difference; a consultant who devises the strategy lobbyists use, for example, is not considered a lobbyist.
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