Fundraising for a presidential library has always been controversial, in part because, unlike contributions to U.S. political campaigns, donations to libraries can come from foreign sources, and are easier to conceal.
But this kind of corruption is striking, even by the Bush administration’s standards.
The Sunday Times reports Stephen Payne, a Bush pioneer and a political appointee to the Homeland Security Advisory Council, was caught on tape offering access to key members of the Bush administration inner circle in exchange for “six-figure donations to the private library being set up to commemorate Bush’s presidency.”
In an undercover video, Payne is seen promising to arrange a meeting for an exiled leader of Krygystan with Dick Cheney or Condoleezza Rice. (Not President Bush because “he doesn’t meet with a lot of former Presidents these days,” Payne says. “I don’t think he meets with hardly anyone.”) All it will take for him to arrange this high-level meeting, says Payne, is “a couple hundred thousand dollars, or something like that.”
Specifically, Payne tells a Kazakh politician he knew as Eric Dos that Payne would come up with “the exact budget,” which would be “somewhere between $600,000 and $750,000, with about a third of it going directly to the Bush library.” The contribution would “be a show of ‘we’re interested, we’re your friends, we’re still friends.'”
In the same video, Payne asks the Kazakh politician, “Who does he want to meet with in Washington?” When Dos mentions Bush and Cheney, Payne responded, “I think that some things could be done…. I think that the family, children, whatever, 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.”
So, was Payne basically selling access to top Bush administration officials? It sure sounds like it.
A couple of angles to keep in mind here. First, it’s unclear exactly what kind of influence Payne has, but there can be little doubt that he’s a close Bush insider. He clears brush with the president in Crawford, goes shooting with Cheney, and serves on Bush’s Homeland Security Advisory Council. What’s more, Payne is president of Worldwide Strategic Partners, which exists to connect moneyed interests with the U.S. government. A cached version of his firm’s website explained, “Currently, Mr. Payne assists the White House as a Senior Advance Representative traveling internationally in advance of and with President Bush and Vice President Cheney.”
Second, when Payne talks in the video about having Dos’s friend buy access to administration officials, he’s talking about Askar Akayev, the former president Kyrgyzstan, who is currently in exile in Moscow after being ousted from power three years ago in a revolution when the country’s citizens became outraged by alleged corruption.
It paints an even more depressing picture — a close Bush ally is not only helping sell access in exchange for donations to Bush’s library, he’s also doing so by making arrangements with a very unsavory character.
It’s quite a story. If this were 1998, instead of 2008, the video alone would be enough to spark an investigation from a special prosecutor.