John Weaver Is Not Jane Doe

Apparently, the talking point that the broadcast media all settled on today is that the McCain/Vicki Iseman story is irresponsible because it's based entirely on unnamed sources.

Um, people?

The only on-the-record source the New York Times used in their John McCain story says he gave his quote to the paper in December and immediately shared it with the Arizona senator's top strategists.

John Weaver, formerly McCain's top strategist, tells Politico that after hearing repeatedly from Times reporters working on the story, he asked for written questions and then provided an e-mail response.

"They asked about the Union Station meeting and so I answered their questions," Weaver says. "I forwarded it to Steve, Charlie and Mark within minutes of sending it to the Times."

Steve Schmidt, Charlie Black and Mark Salter are all top advisers to McCain.

Weaver very simply said that Iseman was involved in the campaign and that could hurt McCain's image as a straight-talking reformer. This doesn't presume an intimate relationship, it presumes a relationship with a lobbyist. And this is a big problem.

Iseman was a telecommunications lobbyist, working for Pax Communications among other clients (including Sinclair Broadcasting, who aired "Stolen Honor", the anti-Kerry hit piece, in 2004. In the late 1990s McCain chaired the Senate Commerce Committee and Iseman had business before him:

In the years that McCain chaired the commerce committee, Iseman lobbied for Lowell W. "Bud" Paxson, the head of what used to be Paxson Communications, now Ion Media Networks, and was involved in a successful lobbying campaign to persuade McCain and other members of Congress to send letters to the Federal Communications Commission on behalf of Paxson.

In late 1999, McCain wrote two letters to the FCC urging a vote on the sale to Paxson of a Pittsburgh television station. The sale had been highly contentious in Pittsburgh and involved a multipronged lobbying effort among the parties to the deal.

At the time he sent the first letter, McCain had flown on Paxson's corporate jet four times to appear at campaign events and had received $20,000 in campaign donations from Paxson and its law firm. The second letter came on Dec. 10, a day after the company's jet ferried him to a Florida fundraiser that was held aboard a yacht in West Palm Beach.

McCain has argued that the letters merely urged a decision and did not call for action on Paxson's behalf. But when the letters became public, William E. Kennard, chairman of the FCC at the time, denounced them as "highly unusual" coming from McCain, whose committee chairmanship gave him oversight of the agency.

Now, the McCain camp can deny this all he wants but there's a ton of smoke here, as well as an ON-THE-RECORD source basically confirming that Iseman's very presence at McCain events was a problem. And the floodgates ought to open once you recognize that McCain's campaign and professional life are crawling with lobbyists:

St. John McVain has a dirty little secret. The vaunted "maverick" Senator who works tirelessly against corruption and undue lobbyist interest in Washington?

Sham. He's been in bed with lobbyists for quite some time.

Why do I say that? Well, there's this: McCain's campaign staff had more lobbyists on it than any other back in June. And, after the staff massacre in July, the person he hired to be his new campaign manager (resurrecting his position from the failed 2000 campaign)? Uber-lobbyist Rick Davis. Who is Rick Davis? Try this on for starters:

"So now that very same Rick Davis will be taking over as campaign manager. Who is he? Fittingly for the most lobbyist-infested campaign in the race (on either side), Davis is yet another lobbyist. Davis founded Davis, Manafort & Freedman, Inc., through which he served clients ranging from Nigerian dictator Gen. Sani Abacha to “mafia-like” Argentine legislator Alberto Pierri. Davis has had a long association with McCain — one tangled up in webs of special influence. In 1999, while Davis was working for McCain, two of his firm’s clients, COMSAT and SBC, “had major (and controversial) mergers pending before the Federal Communications Commission in 1999, and both mergers were approved.” The FCC was under the legislative oversight authority of McCain’s Commerce Committee, yet McCain refused to recuse himself from the proceedings.

Davis was also a central figure in McCain’s Reform Institute scandal, an under-reported affair in which the “Maverick” Senator used a nonprofit, tax-exempt “reform” organization to trade political favors for corporate cash."

He had plenty of lobbyists on his campaign back in 2000, too. This is the real problem here, a huge dent to the Straight Talk Express' image. This is why Mitt Romney's throwing up repeatedly today.

Meanwhile, there's the story behind the story, covered in the New Republic today. There were months of wrangling behind the scenes at the New York Times, including McCain's lawyer Bob Bennett intervening to try and knock the whole thing down. The result was a piece that didn't completely mail anything down. It's a pretty interesting behind-the-scenes look, but it's not totally relevant. The right wing is trying to make this about the NYT, but Josh Marshall's take sounds right to me.

At the moment it seems to me that we have a story from the Times that reads like it's had most of the meat lawyered out of it. And a lot of miscellany and fluff has been packed in where the meat was. Still, if the Times sources are to be believed, the staff thought he was having an affair with Iseman and when confronted about it he in so many words conceded that he was (much of course hangs on 'behaving inappropriately' but then, doesn't it always?) and promised to shape up. And whatever the personal relationship it was a stem wound about a lobbying branch.

I find it very difficult to believe that the Times would have put their chin so far out on this story if they didn't know a lot more than they felt they could put in the article, at least on the first go. But in a decade of doing this, I've learned not to give any benefits of the doubt, even to the most esteemed institutions.

If they have more, they'll put it out; the cat's out of the bag now. But the focus ought to be on the fact that someone who claimed he's completely free of any of the usual corruption you'd expect from a guy who's spent 24 years in Washington is getting caught.

UPDATE: Ygz:

Basically, in exchange for money and freebies, McCain sought to intervene in a federal regulatory process in favor of a company that had provided him with tens of thousands of dollars in cash and services. He could try to plead naiveté, but in light of the hot water he got into with the Keating Five affair, which had the exactly same structure, he clearly knew what he was doing and knew that it was wrong. Now whether or not some guy gets to buy some TV station in Pittsburgh or not isn't a big deal as such, but it's an example of how dubious McCain's "straight talk" persona is. What's more, I think we can all agree that the subversion of the basic functioning of the federal government (see, e.g., US Attorneys scandal, FEMA, etc.) has been a major problem during the Bush years and we see here that McCain takes a Bush-like attitude to the integrity of these processes.

Yep.