WaPo‘s Richard Cohen: McCain’s flip-flops matter less than Obama’s because McCain was POW.
McCain’s national campaign co-chairman, former DHS Secretary Tom Ridge, sorta kinda forgot to register as a foreign lobbyist for Albania, Roll Call reports (sub. req.):
For almost two years former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge failed to register a nearly half-million-dollar lobbying contract that he had with the government of Albania.
Ridge filed a registration statement on behalf of the country earlier this month after being contacted by the Department of Justice. …
Ridge’s registration was spurred by a DOJ inquiry after press accounts surfaced noting Ridge’s connection to the country. …
After a meeting with Justice and his counsel at Blank Rome, Ridge decided to file his FARA registration.
“Once we were made aware of certain contacts by Gov. Ridge, we advised him to register, which he did,” said Topper Ray, a spokesman for Blank Rome.
FARA prosecutions, or even, as in Ridge’s case, contact by the Justice Department to encourage registration, are unusual, ethics lawyers said.
TPM Reader BH writes …
Regarding the Tom Ridge lobbying story, I have what are, perhaps, several stupid questions. Why would someone not register their lobbying activities? Is is purely because it looks bad politically or are there other reasons? How often do lobbyists fail to register? Is failing to register associated with failure to report the income?
Good question. Turns out I know a bit about this because I spent a lot of time earlier in this decade researching and reporting about the activities of foreign lobbyists. The unfortunate answer is that the FARA (Foreign Agents Registration Act) is written and has been subsequently interpreted in such a way to provide numerous workarounds for foreign lobbyists not to register if they don’t want to. I have a very vivid memory in fact of sitting down with one of the FARA office’s staff lawyers circa 2000-2001 and having him walk me through whether a certain set of facts amount to non-compliance with the law. You would have thought I was talking to the defense attorney for the guy who I was reporting on. They seemed institutionally invested in a minimal interpretation of the legislation they were tasked to enforce.
One thing that tells you is that this Ridge thing is pretty exceptional. The FARA office does very, very little proactive enforcement of its legislation. Which makes me think that Ridge must have been making a lot of waves, getting a lot of attention, or perhaps they thought there was something going on more significant than the simple non-compliance.
As for why he wouldn’t register? That’s quite a mystery. I could perhaps imagine that even a big player like Ridge wouldn’t know about the requirement if he were on his own. But he works for Blank Rome, which has plenty of experience in the foreign lobbying biz. So that seems like quite a mystery too.
The House oversight committee is holding hearings today on those 20-something Florida arms dealers (I could write that phrase a 100 times and take no less pleasure in it).
According to evidence obtained by the committee, government contracting officials had complained that their company, AEY, was delivering “poor quality,” “damaged goods, ” “junk” weapons, and other equipment in “the reject category.” And that was before the Pentagon awarded AEY that $300 million contract to supply ammo to the Afghan Army.
As we know now, AEY turned around and bought decades old Chinese-made ammo from an Albanian arms supplier, which the Justice Department now says was a violation of the Arms Control Export Act. So DOJ indicted these hapless dudes, even though the Albanian government, with an alleged sign-off from the U.S. embassy in Tirana, had helped conceal the Chinese origin of the ammo.
Did I mention that both the Albanian arms dealer and one of the 20-something dudes, Efraim Diveroli, were on the State Department Arms Trafficking Watchlist at the time the Pentagon awarded them the big contract? We’ll have more on that wrinkle shortly at TPMmuckraker.
Late Update: Here’s more on that State Department watch list that the Pentagon just routinely ignores.
Later Update: The U.S. ambassador to Albania has issued a statement denying any involvement in Chinese arms trafficking.
Michelle Obama headlining her first fund-raiser for the DNC, at the Waldorf-Astoria on Thursday night.
The DOJ IG report concludes that Michael Elston, the chief of staff to then-Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty, violated federal law and DOJ policy in making partisan-based hiring decisions for the department’s Honors Program.
But it’s worth looking at the analysis the inspector general did in determining the actual impact of those ideological-based hirings. For example, in 2002, the first year of the new politicized hiring process for the Honors Program, 80% of the so-called liberal applicants who had made it to the second stage of the hiring process were screened out, while just 9% of so-called conservative applicants were.
We have the numbers and charts laid out here at TPMmuckraker.
At the TPMCafe Book Club, Jeffrey Goldberg sees Abu Ghraib through the prism of his time as a military policeman at the Ketziot Military Prison Camp in the Negev Desert of Israel.
It’s not every day — in fact, I feel pretty confident saying it’s never happened before — that we have two Albania-related stories in the mix at TPM.
Quite a few readers have noted the coincidence that AEY, Inc. — which occupies the exceedingly narrow niche of arms dealers run by Floridians in their 20s who buy outdated Chinese ammo and resell it to the U.S. government — was buying its ammo in Albania while at the same time Tom Ridge, former DHS secretary and current McCain campaign co-chairman, was lobbying for the Albanian government (although he failed to register as a foreign lobbyist until DOJ came calling).
At this point we have no evidence to suggest that it is anything other than an odd coincidence. But we go into such things with an open mind. So if any readers spot, or know of, a firm connection between the two, please let us know.
The State Department inspector general’s office confirms to TPMmuckraker that it has opened an investigation into the alleged cover up by the the U.S. embassy in Albania of its involvement in those allegedly illegal Chinese ammo shipments.