5-27-08, 9:33 am

For the fourth straight month, John McCain is facing serious ethics problems, including inappropriate relationships between lobbyists and his presidential campaign and the appearance of influence peddling.

According to media reports published last week, a close McCain advisor mixed his lobbyist business with his role campaigning for the presumptive Republican nominee. The USA Today reported that McCain's top foreign policy advisor, Randy Scheunemann, lobbied McCain's Senate office on behalf of his foreign clients in the same week he represented the Senator on the campaign trail.

Scheunemann lobbied on behalf of the governments of the Republic of Georgia, Macedonia, and Taiwan. Government documents that Scheunemann's firm filed to fulfill legal requirements by lobbyists who work as 'agents of a foreign government' showed that Scheunemann talked by phone with another McCain aide about his clients in November 2007, the same week he stood in for McCain at a campaign event.

Scheunemann's actions appear to violate McCain's recently announced edict that his top campaign advisors must hold off on lobbying him for their clients during the election season after several medias stories exposed inappropriate behavior by lobbyists who also hold high positions in his campaign. McCain's new rule, implemented this month, also barred lobbyists who are legally registered as agents of a foreign government with the Department of Justice.

The New York Times recently revealed, however, that McCain's senior advisor Charlie Black undertook similar efforts to Scheunemann's when he worked on the Bush campaign and lobbied George W. Bush on behalf of his own clients, military contracting firm Fluor Corp. and Occidental Petroleum, back in 2003 and 2004. Black also admitted to lobbying Senator McCain and others on behalf of his clients on the back of McCain's so-called straight talk express bus.

Black's lobbying work and his role in the McCain campaign were so closely tied that the Washington Post reported on it last February. 'But even as Black provides a private voice and a public face for McCain, he also leads his lobbying firm, which offers corporate interests and foreign governments the promise of access to the most powerful lawmakers,' the Post wrote. 'Some of those companies have interests before the Senate and, in particular, the Commerce Committee, of which McCain is a member. Black said he does a lot of his work by telephone from McCain's Straight Talk Express bus.'

Current McCain campaign manager Rick Davis was also revealed to have arranged meetings between Sen. McCain and his own overseas clients in 2006. This past week the New York Times described Davis as 'a typical Washington insider in many ways, having long worked as both a lobbyist and a political operative along the intersection of politics, policy and money.'

Last week, Charlie Black told the Wall Street Journal that Davis had not been a lobbyist for the past five years. But the New York Times reported that Davis only took a leave of absence from his lobbying firm in 2006 after arranging meetings between McCain and a controversial Russian capitalist, Oleg Deripaska, who backs Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. Additional media reports showed that McCain met with a billionaire in London, England at a fundraising event for his campaign there who also has ties to the Russian capitalist.

The State Department had stripped Deripaska of a travel visa to the US after it became concerned that the man had accumulated his wealth illegally. Deripaska admitted to the media that he wants top US government officials (such as a potential future President McCain) to use their influence to help him get his visa restored.

Some experts on lobbying reportedly told the New York Times that although Davis had stopped being a registered lobbyist in 2006, he probably continued to do unofficial lobbying work. According to the Times, Davis' business partner continued to meet with foreign clients and use Davis' relationships with McCain and other top Washington political figures to influence policy. Davis was also paid for personally arranging meetings between his firm's foreign clients and McCain's office, the Washington Post reported earlier this year. Davis is still known to deal in the 'highest level of decision making and deal making,' reported the Times.

Ironically, Davis served as the head of the Reform Institute, a think-tank founded by McCain to reduce the influence of lobbyists in Washington. The McCain campaign has also admitted that Davis continues to hold a stake in his lobbying firm, reported the Times.

These latest reports came after McCain only recently severed ties with two other top campaign officials who worked as lobbyists for the miltiary regime in Myanamar (Burma). A recently re-released report, titled 'The Torturers' Lobby' by the non-partisan Center for Public Integrity, showed that current McCain advisor Charlie Black and Paul Manafort, business partner of McCain manager Rick Davis, 'have a long history of lobbying on behalf of foreign governments, taking in millions of dollars in hefty fees from the torturers, human rights abusers, and tyrants they called clients.'

The report says, 'In 1991 and 1993 alone ... [Black and Manafort] collected more than $3 million for representing Nigeria, Kenya, the Philippines, and Angola’s UNITA rebel group, headed by Jonas Savimbi, who allegedly tortured and murdered his enemies.'

It is increasingly clear that rather than a 'maverick' as the US mainstream media likes to portray him, John McCain has been repeatedly bought and sold in his nearly three decades as a Washington insider. From subverting the federal campaign finance laws he helped write to arranging inappropriate land deals for his financial backers and selling out his campaign to lobbyists and 'agents of foreign governments,' John McCain represents the worst of Washington politics-as-usual.

These actions must be what McCain refers to when he touts his experience in Washington over Obama's relative newcomer status.

--Reach Joel Wendland at