The White House connection: Saudi `agents' close Bush friends

A powerful Washington, D.C., law firm with unusually close ties to the White House has earned hefty fees representing controversial Saudi billionaires as well as a Texas-based Islamic charity fingered last week as a terrorist front.

The influential law firm of Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld has represented three wealthy Saudi businessmen - Khalid bin Mahfouz, Mohammed Hussein Al-Amoudi and Salah Idris - who have been scrutinized by U.S. authorities for possible involvement in financing Osama bin Laden and his terrorist network.

In addition, Akin, Gump currently represents the largest Islamic charity in the United States, Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development in Richmond, Texas.

Holy Land's assets were frozen by the Treasury Department last week as government investigators probe its ties to Hamas, the militant Palestinian group blamed for suicide attacks against Israelis.

Partners at Akin, Gump include one of President Bush's closest Texas friends, James C. Langdon, and George R. Salem, a Bush fund-raiser who chaired his 2000 campaign's outreach to Arab-Americans.

Another longtime partner is Barnett A. ``Sandy'' Kress, the former Dallas School Board president who Bush appointed in January to work for the White House as an ``unpaid consultant'' on education reform.

In September, a federal grand jury issued subpoenas for Holy Land records around the same time terrorist investigators froze the assets of a North Texas Internet firm hired by Holy Land.

Holy Land shared office space with that firm, InfoCom Corp., which was raided by police on Sept. 5, just days before the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks.

According to Akin, Gump, the firm represents Holy Land in a federal lawsuit filed against the charity and another suspected Hamas entity by the parents of a man allegedly murdered by Hamas operatives in the Middle East.

In a statement issued Friday, Akin, Gump said it decided last week to decline a request to represent Holy Land in its defense of terrorism-related charges made by the U.S. Treasury Department.

Akin, Gump, which maintains an affiliate office in the Saudi capital of Riyadh, is also a registered foreign agent for the kingdom. It was paid $77,328 in lobbying fees by the Saudis during the first six months of 2000, public records show.

In addition to the royal family, the firm's Saudi clients have included bin Mahfouz, who hired Akin, Gump when he was indicted in the BCCI banking scandal in the early 1990s. In 1999, the Saudi's placed bin Mahfouz under house arrest after reportedly discovering that the bank he controlled, National Commercial Bank in Saudi Aabia, funneled millions to charities believed to be serving as bin Laden fronts.

A bin Mahfouz business partner, Al-Amoudi, was also represented by Akin, Gump. When it was reported in 1999 that U.S. authorities were also investigating Al-Amoudi's Capitol Trust Bank, Akin, Gump released a statement on behalf of their client denying any connections to terrorism. One year earlier, the firm had co-sponsored an investment conference in Ethiopia with Al-Amoudi.

Akin, Gump partner and Bush fund-raiser Salem led the legal team that defended Idris, a banking protege of bin Mahfouz and the owner of El-Shifa, the Sudanese pharmaceutical plant destroyed by U.S. cruise missiles in August 1998.

cw-2 The plant was targeted days after terrorists - allegedly on the orders of bin Laden - bombed two U.S. embassies in Africa. The U.S. Treasury Department also froze $24 million of Idris' assets, but Akin, Gump filed a lawsuit and the government later chose to release the money rather than go to court. Idris, who insists he has no connection whatsoever to bin Laden or terrorism, is now pursuing a second lawsuit with different attorneys seeking $50 million in damages from the United States.

Charles Lewis, executive director of the Center for Public Integrity, a Washington, D.C.-based non-partisan political watchdog group, said Akin, Gump's willingness to represent Saudi power-brokers probed for links to terrorism presents a unique ethical concern since partners at the firm are so close to the president.

The concern is more acute now, Lewis said, because Bush has faced stiff resistance from the kingdom in his repeated requests to freeze suspected terrorist bank accounts.

``The conduct of the Saudis is just unacceptable by international standards, especially if they are supposed to be one of our closest allies,'' Lewis said.

Speaking of Akin, Gump partner Kress' office in the White House, Lewis added: ``That's not appropriate and frankly it's potentially troublesome because there is a real possibility of a conflict of interest. Basically you have a partner for Akin, Gump . . . inside the hen house.''

But another longtime Washington political observer, Vincent Cannistraro, the former chief of counter-intelligence at the Central Intelligence Agency, said the political influence a firm like Akin, Gump has is precisely why clients like the Saudis hire them.

``These are cozy political relationships . . . If you have a problem in Washington, there are only a few firms to go to and Akin, Gump is one of them,'' Cannistraro said.

Cannistraro pointed out that Idris hired Akin, Gump during the Clinton presidency, when Clinton confidante Vernon Jordan was a partner at the firm. ``He hired them because Vernon Jordan had influence . . . that's a normal political exercise where you are buying influence,'' he said.

Akin, Gump is not the only politically wired Washington business cashing in on the Saudi connection.

Burson-Marsteller, a major D.C. public relations firm, registered with the U.S. government as a foreign agent for the Saudi embassy within weeks of the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

One of Burson-Marsteller's first public relations efforts for the Saudis was to run a large advertisement in the New York Times reading: ``We Stand with You, America.''

The Washington chairman for Burson-Marsteller, which also maintains an office in Saudi Arabia, is Craig Veith, who ran communications for the Republican Party in the 1996 elections.

Other GOP heavyweights who have held top positions at the PR giant include Sheila Tate, the campaign press secretary for the elder George Bush; Leslie Goodman, deputy director of communications for the 1992 Bush-Quayle campaign; Craig L. Fuller, chairman of the 1992 Republican National Convention and elder Bush's vice presidential chief-of-staff.

Enron is perceived by the public as a political problem regardless of White House spins to the contrary. The White House is taking the wrong approach and looks foolish (who do they think they are kidding, hmm?) to try and bludgeon with PR blitz anyone who suggests it is also political

Yawwnnn OKC, here is a commentary that ran yesterday in one of the most liberal papers in the country, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Jack Kelly: The news not fit to print

Polls suggest Enron scandal is not hurting the GOP

Sunday, February 10, 2002

CBS News and The New York Times had a problem. Their poll showed that at the end of his first year in office, President George W. Bush had a higher job approval rating than any other president save for Harry Truman in 1945.

Americans trust Bush more than they do congressional Democrats to manage the economy as well as to fight the war on terror, their poll showed. And it indicated that for the first time since the Great Depression, more Americans identify with the GOP than with the Democrats.

This is how John Roberts of CBS spun the poll in favor of Democrats:

"The battle over documents has taken on new life in the wake of the Enron collapse and revelations about White House ties to the energy giant," Roberts said in a broadcast Jan. 28. "A new CBS News/New York Times poll finds 67 percent of Americans think the White House is hiding something, even lying about it."

But the poll indicates that only 9 percent of Americans think the president is "lying" about Enron. Higher proportions of Americans think O.J. is innocent, and Elvis is alive.

The Times had run its story on the front page the day before, under the headline: "Poll Finds Enron's Taint Clings More to GOP than Democrats."

The basis for this headline is that 45 percent of those polled agreed with the statement that "executives of the Enron corporation had closer ties to members of the Republican Party than to members of the Democratic Party."

That people think businessmen are closer to Republicans than to Democrats is no more news than that labor leaders are closer to Democrats than to Republicans.

The fact that 61 percent of respondents said it wouldn't affect their vote if their congressman had received contributions from Enron suggest that most of us think that as a political scandal, Enron isn't a big deal. But the CBS/New York Times pollsters didn't specifically ask this question.

Other pollsters have. A Gallup poll for USA Today and CNN found that 29 percent of respondents think Bush would feel he owed Enron executives special treatment in exchange for campaign contributions . . . but that 55 percent believe congressional Democrats felt that way.

This suggests Enron isn't likely to be a winning issue for Democrats. But they keep flogging it because they have no other arrows in their quiver. Journalists do their best to help. The media lavished attention on Jesse Jackson when he brought a busload of former Enron employees to Washington to meet with Democratic grandees.

Enron's bookkeepers could have learned a lot from Jackson. When last the IRS audited his array of "charities," there was $1 million unaccounted for. He raised more than $12 million for one of those tax-exempt charities, the Citizenship Education Fund, in 1998 and 1999, but spent less than $50,000 on education and research.

Jackson received donations from Enron, which he initially lied about, and refuses to return. This information didn't make it into the newscasts.

There is a business scandal that may have the political dimension Enron lacks. In January, Global Crossing became the fifth-largest bankruptcy in U.S. history. Last year, it gave more money to politicians than Enron did, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Among the politicos who did well was Democratic National Chairman Terry McAuliffe, whose $100,000 investment in 1997 was valued at $18 million when he sold it in 1999.

Global Crossing CEO Gary Winnick made a $1 million contribution to the Clinton library fund. Afterwards, the Defense Department awarded his firm a contract worth up to $400 million to build a fiber-optic network. The Bush administration canceled the contract last summer after receiving complaints of irregularities in the bidding process.

There is no evidence yet that politics played a role in Global Crossing's demise, or that improper favors were done on its behalf. But since the beneficiaries of Global Crossing's largess chiefly were Democrats, we can be pretty sure that if there was wrongdoing, we won't hear about it on the CBS Evening News, or read about it in The New York Times.

LINK

--not speaking for ole sub, but basically folks get flagged here who have shown an interest in the "type" of article before, what they are interested in. It's very easy to miss an article from the speed of how the main page changes here.

With that said, it's time to come to grips with political reality. there were tons of linkages early on in the slickmeisters admin of shady conections. the dims went berserk, stayed berserk until the bitter end, simply refused to ever make any sort of connection.

Well, it's starting to happen again, and you want to know why? I'll tell ya. It's because 'top leadership" is picked by the behind the scenes fatcats in the parties, grassroots has little to do with it except as truckloads of free sucker money. And "top leadership" in the two parties are almost universally more global corporate pirates than anything else, D's or R's. That's who gets elected every 2 and 4 years, that's why we have scandal after scandal after scandal, with none of them ever getting "really" solved or fixed, and no new ones prevented-because they are the ones investigating. Fox guarding the henhouse, in perpetutity, you'll keep losing hens..

9-11 was chickens coming home to roost for the globalist profits at any cost smooth operator pirates. They traded their silver for national security. D's and R's. Sub is pointing out it's both. Not just one or the other, both, and backing it up post after post with references. And we are starting to see the clues, exactly like we started seeing clues under klintgoon.

There's linkages to the same saudi big money that goes to support islamic terrs. There's evidence of high level investigations being stymied-both past administration and this one. Honest cops getting told to stand down. They ignored reality and it hit us in the face 9-11. And now all the politicians are scrambling to distance themselves, but it won't work.

Enron is another example, global crossing is another, and there's at least a half a dozen more soon to follow, and all of them will have linkages top high level D's and R's. Both

That's the real pattern it's BOTH, that's the one never changing common denominator, and the sooner people will actually be adult and admit it, instead of claiming to be adults, the sooner the country will be better off.

Denial is not a river in egypt. The dems are a disgrace for what they did for 8 years, deny, deny, deny. It gets criticised and laughed at here, deservedly so, because they were wrong about it, their top level people are crooks, it's obvious. So now is the time to stay on a roll, and honestly look at ALL politicians and these global corporate pirates, and forget about the party labels. Do that, events become clearer, and you aren't stuck trying to defend the indefensible, like the dems got stuck. Spook daddy had 90% "war" approval early on, what happened to him again?

If you value your party, don't make the same mistakes they did, and if anyone values the nation over their party, well, all it takes is an open unbiased mind to look at the data, just LOOK at it. it's not all that hard to do, either. Where there's smoke there's fire usually, good rule of thumb in scandals. Not all the time, but high 90's percentile is about right.

I started my political life as a goldwater republican, from before I could vote, and was glad to work for someone honest, and who had honest values and wasn't tied to crooks, even tangentially. He got shafted by the RINOS and the nixon goons, sabotaged, and lost. there's another lesson. Those kinda folks hijacked the party, and continue to own it, they stole it from the grassroots conservatives.

Well,. the party has changed, quite a bit, there are few if any of those sorts of real conservatives in the republican party at leadership levels, and here's a clue, gw sure ain't one either, I don't care how many disastrous bungles his administration accepts as victories, and 9-11 was a complete utter disaster, the mother of all bungles, and it's being cheered on like some sort of victory. It's disgusting.. If 9-11 had happened under clinton (or gore) the cries for impeachment would be overwhelming on this forum, and you know it, everyone here knows it. Anyone really want to deny that? That if 9-11, something that horrible, had happened under one of the dims, this forum would be a completely different experience right now? Anyone? that there wouldn't be cries to stage mass freeps in front of the whitehouse demanding his ouster and impeachment, if it was a Capital D instead of R there, with everything else the same?

Strange just because the fact of a R in the top spot, with everything else equal that it's somehow "wrong' to notice what a complete failure in leadership and command and control it was.

9-11 wasn't a 'success' or anything to be cheered on or rewarded, even though that's exactly what's happening, mainly from people who will not, they simply refuse to put nation OVER political party.. They didn't learn the lesson from klintgoon, how destructive that is, to reward incompetence or worse, to deny the linkages, to ridicule the messengers who tried to bring it out, and who are now trying hard and going out of their way to create false-history and illusional revisionism.

Beware, it WILL backfire if it continues. The RINOS at the top love this, it's how they stay in control of the republican party, it's the same thing the past klintgoon admin did, play their partisan support for suckers.

After goldwater got shafted, how many years did this nation suffer, what untold damage was done? Is this utter...stupidity.... to be rewarded forever? Just because top level RINOS want to stay in power and keep looting? I expect it of the dims, that party is too far gone anymore, the republican party has a chance, but they got ONE chance to wake up and clean house, starting at the top and working their way down, or lose big in the years ahead.

Yep, right now the "numbers" look good, so what? Really, so what? I'll make my spook daddy war numbers reference one more time. Think back.

Learn from history or repeat it.

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