Neocon Arizona Republican Senator John McCain may have his own little Clinton Foundation pay-to-play scheme operating in the halls of the US Senate.
The Daily Caller investigative group has learned that in 2012 McCain turned over nearly $9 million in unspent funds from his failed 2008 presidential campaign to a new foundation bearing his name, the McCain Institute for International Leadership.
The McCain Institute for International Leadership’s mission is to serve as a “legacy” for John McCain and “is dedicated to advancing human rights, dignity, democracy and freedom”, but many readers certainly are well aware that human rights and dignity are the furthest things from the neocon warmonger’s mind.
The institute is a tax-exempt non-profit foundation and has assets valued at $8.1 million, associated with Arizona State University.
Bloomberg reported in 2016 on a $1 million Saudi Arabian donation to the institute. The McCain Institute to date has refused to publicly explain the Saudi Arabian million dollar contribution.
The McCain Institute’s donor list gets even more nefarious with more digging, as revealed by The Daily Caller, linking McCain to regime change globalists like George Soros…
Critics worry that the institute’s donors and McCain’s personal leadership in the organization’s exclusive “Sedona Forum” bear an uncanny resemblance to the glitzy Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) that annually co-mingled special interests and powerful political players in alleged pay-to-play schemes.
The institute has accepted contributions of as much as $100,000 from billionaire liberal activist-funder George Soros and from Teneo, a for-profit company co-founded by Doug Band, former President Bill Clinton’s “bag man.” Teneo has long helped enrich Clinton through lucrative speaking and business deals.
The McCain-Soros friendship runs deep, and may help to explain why Republican neocon McCain appears to always be politically aligned with globalist neo-liberal Soros (think Ukraine, Syria and Russian sanctions)…
McCain and Soros reportedly became friends after the senator was exposed as a member of the “Keating Five” during the savings and loan (S&L) industry scandal during former President George H.W. Bush’s administration. As the S&L bank chairman, Charles Keating paid $1.3 million to bribe five members of Congress to interfere with government regulators on behalf of the savings bank.
The experience so scarred McCain that he became a vigorous advocate of campaign finance reform and in the process reportedly became friends with Soros.
The Daily Caller reports that in addition to donations made by Saudi dictators and George Soros (the man widely held to be the architect behind the 2014 neo-nazi coup in Ukraine), McCain has accepted large amounts from various groups working to shape US foreign policy.
In addition, the institute has taken at least $100,000 from a Moroccan state-run company tied to repeated charges of worker abuse and exploitation. The McCain group has also accepted at least $100,000 from the Pivotal Foundation, which was created by Francis Najafi who owns the Pivotal Group, a private equity and real estate firm.
The Pivotal Foundation has in the last three years given $205,000 to the National Iranian-American Council (NIAC), which has been a vocal advocate for the Iranian nuclear deal the Obama administration negotiated.
“This is a very real conflict of interest,” Craig Holman, a government affairs lobbyist at Public Citizen, told TheDCNF. “This is the similar type of pattern we received with the Clinton Foundation in which foreign governments and foreign interests were throwing a lot of money in the hopes of trying to buy influence.”
Lawrence Noble, general counsel for the Campaign Legal Center, told the DCNF that accepting contributions in the name of a sitting senator like McCain raises troubling issues.
“In terms of the ethics of it, it does raise a broad question of people trying to get good will with the elected official,” he said. “From a personal standpoint, I’d rather not see these entities exist.”
John McCain recently stated that he had no involvement with the institute, saying “I’m proud that the institute is named after me, but I have nothing to do with it.”
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