McCain's Phantom Donors

The New York Times advances the story on Harry Sargeant and his cadre of Arab-American donors. While a couple of the donors mentioned in the WaPo yesterday had actually only given to some of Sargeant's other candidates, clearly Sargeant did some work for McCain too, and all of it shady.

The Jordanian business partner of a prominent Florida businessman, who has raised more than $500,000 for Senator John McCain, appears to be at the center of a cluster of questionable donations to his presidential campaign.

Campaign finance records show Mr. McCain collected a little more than $50,000 in March from members of a single extended family, the Abdullahs, in California and several of their friends.

Amid a sea of contributions to the McCain campaign, the Abdullahs stand out. The checks come not from the usual exclusive coastal addresses, but from relatively hardscrabble inland towns like Downey and Colton. The donations are also startling because of their size: several donors initially wrote checks of $9,200, exceeding the $2,300 limit for an individual gift.

Sargeant's business partner, Mustafa Abu Naba'a, actually made the connection with the Abdullah family to donate to McCain. He's being sued by the brother-in-law of the King of Jordan about a Pentagon contract to ship fuel to the US military in Iraq. Abu Naba'a and Sargeant apparently stiffed their partner out of his share of the proceeds.

Some of the donors disparaged McCain in public statements, which doesn't really fit the profile of a maxed-out contributor:

Abdullah Makhlouf, the owner of a discount stereo store who is one of Mr. Abdullah's closest friends, and his wife contributed $9,200.

"He's like a worse copy than Bush," Mr. Makhlouf said of Mr. McCain.

When a reporter initially contacted Mr. Makhlouf, he denied giving to the McCain campaign.

After eventually admitting to the donation, Mr. Makhlouf added, "I'm still not going to vote for him."

Hilarious.

The McCain campaign is now investigating the donations. While they're at it, they can take a look at the Hess donations as well, especially considering that members of their own staff were Hess lobbyists:

It turns out that two high-ranking McCain campaign officials, one of whom is also one of McCain's more prolific bundlers, were both were paid lobbyists for Hess for roughly three years, according to disclosure forms.

The two lobbyists are Wayne Berman, McCain's national finance co-chairman, and John Green, who's been the McCain campaign's chief Congressional liaison since March. Both men worked for a firm called Ogilvy Government Relations. The firm has been paid $800,000 by Hess from 2005 up to the present, including $720,000 during the period that both of the two lobbied for the company, the forms say.

Berman, a prolific fundraiser and bundler for McCain, appears to still be lobbying for Hess. The most recently filed form shows that he was lobbying for the company as late as mid-July. Green took a leave of absence from Ogilvy to join the campaign, but was still on the Hess account up through the first quarter of 2008, the forms show.

I'm telling you, the fact that McCain keeps pulling out this money despite the major enthusiasm gap and his trouble with fundraising just shows that there's something dirty going on here.