I first heard this on Stephanie Miller's show this morning, and it's a doozy, courtesy of the Times of London:
The images on the tiny screen of Stephen Payne’s personal organiser told a clear story: this was a man with connections at the highest level. One showed Payne uprooting dead trees side by side with George W Bush on the US president’s Texas ranch. Another depicted him skeet shooting next to Dick Cheney, the vice-president, and a third grinning for the camera alongside Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state. The man on the other side of the table from Payne at the Lanesborough hotel in central London last week appeared impressed by the contents of the BlackBerry. He was a familiar figure, a Kazakh politician Payne knew as Eric Dos.
Dos, whose full name is Yerzhan Dosmukhamedov, told Payne that he was representing another foreign political figure who was looking to meet the top people in the US government. Dos had good reason for believing that Payne could make it happen. Payne has accompanied Bush and Cheney on foreign trips to the Middle East and Asia, and he sits on the influential advisory council to the Department of Homeland Security. Payne is also president of a lobbying company, Worldwide Strategic Partners (WSP), which specialises in connecting business and political interests with the US government. Dos told Payne that the politician needing help was Askar Akayev, the former president of the central Asian state of Kyrgyzstan. Akayev, who is in exile in Moscow after being ousted from power three years ago in a people’s revolt, was seeking an endorsement from senior US figures in order to help rehabilitate himself in the eyes of the world, Dos told Payne. “Who does he want to meet with in Washington?” asked the American. Dos replied: “Well of course, maybe the president of the United States, vice-president Cheney, to speak maybe directly to explain the situation in central Asia . . . To give his side of the story. These kind of things.” “I think that some things could be done,” said Payne, adding that seeing Bush himself might be more difficult. With barely a pause, he continued: “I think that the family, children, whatever [of Akayev], should probably look at making a contribution to the Bush library. “It would be like, maybe a couple of hundred thousand dollars, or something like that, not a huge amount but enough to show that they’re serious.”
... What Payne did not know was that the third person at the Lanesborough meeting last Monday was an undercover Sunday Times reporter. Nor did he know that the meeting was being recorded.
How to say ... "uh-oh..." Payne then went on to offer confabs with Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, or maybe Condi Rice.
So who is Dos? He's an exile from Khazakhstan! Yes, Khazhakstan... (is nice!) He had run afoul of that country's government when he deigned to set up his own political party. ... (is not nice...) The Times goes on:
Before that happened, however, he acted as an adviser to Timur Kulibayev, the billionaire son-in-law of Nursultan Nazarbayev, the Kazakh president, and a man of considerable influence within the country. Dos said that in the autumn of 2005 he had been asked by the Kazakh government, via Kulibayev, to arrange a visit by Cheney. The intention was to improve the country’s international standing. Dos had spent several days negotiating with Payne. A deal was eventually agreed, he said, and he understood that a payment of $2m was passed, via a Kazakh oil and gas company, to Payne’s firm. The following May, Cheney made a brief trip to Kazakhstan. His visit was remarked upon in the media at the time, both for the lavish praise which he publicly heaped on Nazarbayev and for the stark contrast between this and a speech he had made just a day earlier at a conference in Lithuania in which he had lambasted Russia for being insufficiently democratic. Now he was lauding Nazarbayev, who has effectively made himself president for life and in whose country it is an offence to criticise him. “Why did Cheney castigate Russia’s imperfect democracy while saying not a word about Kazakhstan’s shameless travesty of the democratic system?” said one newspaper following the visit. “Cheney’s flattery of the Kazakh regime was sickening,” said another. Dos believes some of the money paid to WSP may have found its way to “entities” connected to the Bush administration. In order to test which channels might be available to foreigners seeking influence within the US, Dos agreed to approach Payne, at The Sunday Times’s request, with a fabricated story about Akayev wanting to rehabilitate himself in the eyes of the world. Akayev was not aware of the approach to Payne.
And that's "uh-oh" number two. So just what is the going price of the "honor and integrity" of the Bush White House? Which leads us to a very telling quote by Mr. Payne: Following e-mail questioning from Dos about how Payne might pass on money paid to him by foreigners, Payne became increasingly cagey. He said: “Anyone that tells you ‘I can deliver a US government action in exchange for specific funds’ is someone you will soon visit in prison . . . as that would be bribery in this country.”
Clink-clink. The Democrats in Congress, as is their wont to do, are "investigating." Add it to the list.
| Labels: Bush administration, Bushies for sale, corruption, lobbyists, presidential libraries |
