The Lobbyist Chronicles

As I said earlier, McCain opened up a huge can of worms with his year-too-late "lobbying policy," and now there's going to be a consistent drip, drip, drip for six months. Rick Davis, his campaign manager, is a lobbyist. McCain says he's no longer registered as a lobbyist and so it's OK, but continues to lobby while being unregistered, which is worse. And look at the client list:

But while Mr. Davis took a leave from Davis Manafort in 2006, the company has developed a specialty in recent years in a type of lobbying for which firms do not have to register — namely, representing the interests abroad of foreign politicians and businessmen.

In recent years, the company’s clients have included the richest man in Ukraine and a former premier of that country whose opponents were supported by Mr. McCain. The Washington Post reported in January that Mr. Davis also set up a meeting in Switzerland in 2006 between Mr. McCain and a Russian businessman, who has been barred from entering this country, apparently because of accusations about past ties to organized crime in Russia. That businessman, Oleg Deripaska, has denied such links.

This continued even while Davis was employed as McCain's campaign manager.

Also, it turns out that a lobbying firm was paying members of the McCain staff, which amounts to an illegal corporate contribution.

I am writing to express Campaign Money Watch’s concern that the McCain campaign may have violated federal election law when the Loeffler Group, a Washington lobbying firm, made payments to Susan Nelson, the campaign’s national finance director. It is also possible that either Ms. Nelson or the Loeffler Group may have violated lobbying disclosure law. As you know, the Loeffler Group is led by lobbyist Tom Loeffler, the campaign’s National Finance Chair until this past weekend.

We are concerned that the campaign may have received an illegal corporate contribution from Loeffler’s lobbying firm which sent payments to your chief fundraiser on staff.

That’s why we urge the campaign to immediately and publicly release the facts surrounding Ms. Nelson’s simultaneous compensation by your campaign and the Loeffler Group. This information should include how much Ms. Nelson was paid by the Loeffler Group, as well as what work Ms. Nelson conducted for the Loeffler Group while working full-time for the campaign. If the McCain campaign believes that there are no violations of election or lobbying laws, then this information will prove you correct.

All of this could have been avoided if McCain simply passed the bill he sponsored, which would have banned candidates or candidate's campaign committees from paying registered lobbyists. But he didn't, and now the slimy associations will all come out. The one reason to have lobbyists on the campaign is for the purposes of raising money, but even with them McCain lags far behind Obama on that score. It's just a total disaster.