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McCain’s generous — and ‘unlikely’ — financial supporters

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There’s been a fair amount of interest lately about John McCain’s contributions from the oil industry. It’s not surprising some of the donations raised eyebrows — that’s what happens when a middle-class family that rents their home in Queens donates more than $60,000 to the Republican campaign.

The concern, of course, is whether McCain’s generous benefactors are playing a shell game. It’s illegal for a donor to get the money from another source — it’s called the “straw donor” problem — and if people who seemingly wouldn’t (or couldn’t) write big checks to a political campaign suddenly become generous donors, it’s going to raise questions about whether there’s an illegal fundraising scheme being orchestrated.

Today, in a fascinating front-page report in the WaPo, those questions get considerably louder.

The bundle of $2,300 and $4,600 checks that poured into Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign on March 12 came from an unlikely group of California donors: a mechanic from D&D Auto Repair in Whittier, the manager of Rite Aid Pharmacy No. 5727, the 30-something owners of the Twilight Hookah Lounge in Fullerton.

But the man who gathered checks from them is no stranger to McCain — he shuttled the Republican on his private plane and held a fundraising event for the candidate at his house in Delray Beach, Fla.

Harry Sargeant III, a former naval officer and the owner of an oil-trading company that recently inked defense contracts potentially worth more than $1 billion, is the archetype of a modern presidential money man. The law forbids high-level supporters from writing huge checks, but with help from friends in the Middle East and the former chief of the CIA’s bin Laden unit — who now serves as a consultant to his company — Sargeant has raised more than $100,000 for three presidential candidates from a collection of ordinary people, several of whom professed little interest in the outcome of the election.

And when the Post says “little interest,” that’s quite literal. Some of the generous checks Sargeant has bundled for McCain come from people who aren’t even registered to vote.

Some of the most prolific givers in Sargeant’s network live in modest homes in Southern California’s Inland Empire. Most had never given a political contribution before being contacted by Sargeant or his associates. Most said they have never voiced much interest in politics. And in several instances, they had never registered to vote. And yet, records show, some families have ponied up as much as $18,400 for various candidates between December and March.

Both Sargeant and the donors were vague when asked to explain how Sargeant persuaded them to give away so much money.

“I have a lot of Arab business partners. I do a lot of business in the Middle East. I’ve got a lot of friends,” Sargeant said in a telephone interview yesterday. “I ask my friends to support candidates that I think are worthy of supporting. They usually come through for me.”

One of these friends is Ibrahim Marabeh, the manager of a Rite Aid drugstore. Neither Marabeh nor his wife are even registered to vote, but the couple has nevertheless donated more than $9,000 this year to Sargeant-backed candidates (Rudy Giuliani and Hillary Clinton). When asked, Marabeh said he hadn’t made any campaign contributions. He then said he was asked to donate by “a local person. But I would like not to talk about it anymore.”

That seems a little odd.

And now that Sargeant has become a top bundler for John McCain, the presumptive GOP nominee is getting big checks from people who seem passively disinterested in politics. Abdullah Abdullah, a supervisor at several Taco Bell restaurants, and his wife have donated $9,200 to McCain. Asked about his contributions, Abdullah said, “I have no idea. I’ll be honest with you.”

Earlier this year, Norman Hsu, a top Clinton bundler, was brought up on criminal charges for allegedly using “straw donors” to exceed legal limits. The media treated this as a pretty big deal for quite a while.

I wonder if Harry Sargeant’s name will soon achieve similar notoriety.

Comments

  • Diogenes

    says:

    “I wonder if Harry Sargeant’s name will soon achieve similar notoriety.”

    No. He’s got the McCain halo going for him. It will just be a matter of how Harry Sargeant is just such a nice guy, and a straight talker, that he convinced some people to give some money to a worthy cause. And then, we’ll all have some donuts and BBQ.

  • Tom Cleaver

    says:

    I wonder if Harry Sargeant’s name will soon achieve similar notoriety.

    IOKIYAR

    Nice to see Mr. Campaign Finance Reform demonstrating just how high his hypocrisy level is. This has to be something that even Donut Dolly will have trouble explaining.

  • johno

    says:

    How much traction will this story have? Is it possible it will actually stick? Have legs, etc? In a fair and rational world, this would at the very least cause moderate damage and could potentially be absolutely devastating. How will it actually play out in the media mccainiverse…?

  • JS

    says:

    Surely this is illegal, I hope the media highlights this at every opportunity, McCain continues to violate campaign financing rules and seems to get away with it, all the time he is bashing Obama for not accepting public financing. McCain wants public financing as well as all other methods.

  • ml johnston

    says:

    Who will hold the Republicans ACCOUNTABLE for illegal practices ? Certainly not a Politician. Will the news mediaocracy ? No !corporate manages the words used by the newsdom. Freedom of the press will be supressed.

  • Focality

    says:

    Nothing will come of it since Sargeant’s strawman-donating to McCain. If he had been donating to Obama, we’d see a media firestorm.

    What will happen, however, is these people who “have no idea” about donations made in their names will be attacked, vilified by the Rove-Driven Hate Machine. Right now, a coordinated attack is being prepared. Look for Limbaugh, Hannity, Coulter, Malkin and O’Reilly to start the attacks.

    We’ll see photos of these people, their homes, places of work, what sort of kitchen counters they have, the neighborhoods in which they live, and especially those that are non-white: “They’re not Americans anyway so who cares?”

  • Bose

    says:

    Two of the couples mentioned have names which are practically anagrams of each other: Nadia and Shawn Abdalla, and Nader and Sahar Alhawash.

    Quirky coincidences…

  • The Answer is Orange

    says:

    When asked, Marabeh said he hadn’t made any campaign contributions. He then said he was asked to donate by “a local person. But I would like not to talk about it anymore.”

    Relax people, I’m sure no one is threatening anyone with a one-way trip to Gitmo (or merely the spread of rumors that would get the knuckledraggers to throw bricks) if they don’t cooperate.

    Forget Maverick McCain, it’s Mobster McCain and his Gun Moll Cindy.

  • Nashville_fan

    says:

    Is anybody gonna mention that Iraq has a budget surplus and we have a budget deficit? Isn’t that an “inconvenient truth”?

  • MW

    says:

    Forget Maverick McCain, it’s Mobster McCain and his Gun Moll Cindy.

    Let’s all remember that from now on it is Cindy “Buffalo Chip” McCain.

  • ericfree

    says:

    This is a good example of what some at the WaPo can do when their superiors aren’t watching them. Several WaPo reporters were key players in breaking both the Abramoff and Valerie Plame stories. Unfortunately, they don’t seem to last long. With the exception of Dana Milbank, who seems to have recently taken the advice to go Neocon or become unemployed, I don’t think any of those people are still there.

    Matthew Mosk. Remember the name. We’ll see what happens to him.

  • Steve

    says:

    Cindy “Buffalo Chip” McCain.

    Given the beer she distributes, that would be an extreme understatement….

  • The Answer is Orange

    says:

    ericfree, you’re forgetting Dana Priest and the writers she’s worked with (Anne Hull and ???) The Post and the NYT both have their low points but they’re mostly confined (concentrated) to the Opinons section.

    Of course, our other choices in DC are The Washington Times and the Wall Street Urinal so perhaps my standards aren’t the best. 😉

  • ericfree

    says:

    #17, not forgetting them at all, just haven’t seen them lately. Is Priest still with the Post? I used to think of Priest and Milbank as a 1-2 Danapunch, but that seems like a long time ago. Granted that some of these reporters, like Priest, often work for months on a single story, thus seem absent and then post everyday for a week, but I can’t help remembering the WaPo of late ’05-early ’06 as a real return to the Watergate days, something we haven’t seen enough of since. I would be delighted to be wrong, but I’ve thought for some time there’s more interaction between Opinion honchos and the News section than is healthy.

    One nice thing — Michelle Goldberg, author of Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism, who’s been absent from Salon for over a year, turned up in the New York Times today. To answer a previous query from Libra concerning Bob Herbert, I didn’t read the Times for years because its Opinion columns required a subscription, so was familiar only with its better known columnists who get reprinted more often. I also preferred the Post, as an ex-DC area type. These days I take my news wherever I can get it, which includes CB more and more.

  • Jerry Policoff

    says:

    The former head of the CIA’s Bin Laden unit is Michael Scheuer. Given the fact this is public knowledge and Scheuer is very much a public figure why didn’t the Washington Post name him???

  • libra

    says:

    Today, in a fascinating front-page report in the WaPo, those questions get considerably louder. — CB

    To offset that, here’s the front page story from the NYT:
    http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/06/us/politics/06bundlers.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

    It starts with:
    “In an effort to cast himself as independent of the influence of money on politics, Senator Barack Obama […]” and goes downhill from there. It mentions that thre have been people who — oh, horror — not only gave more than the $200 Obama likes to mention, but, often, gave as much as $1000. It mentions *bundlers* (oh, horror!). It mentions that some of them have donated as much as a million in political contributions over the past decade. Where, specifically, did that money go? That’s not important, as long as a seed of doubt (to Obama?) can be planted in readers’ minds. Only much later in the text it’s casually mentioned that some of those bundlers have been hedging their bets (appropriately enough, in one case of a hedge fund manager) and bundling for *both sides* of the political divide.

    There’s nothing so entertaining (I just adore hanging over the toilet, puking my guts out, when I have nothing better to do) as New York Times at its most “liberal”…

  • Paul

    says:

    I was just going to comment that the WaPo ran a rather major correction contradicting some of this story, and thus some of your commentary, but then I noticed your blatant lie at the end. He didn’t say he doesn’t have any idea “about his contributions,” he said he doesn’t know about McCain but “My brother Faisal recommended John McCain. Whenever he makes a recommendation, we do it.” There’s just no good reason to misquote an article like that. It makes you look dishonest and weak, and ruins your credibility. Why would I ever link to a blog I couldn’t even trust to properly excerpt a front page news article?

  • Michael

    says:

    McCain’s obvious issues with funding demonstrate his “insider” status, in stark contrast to his “maverick” claims. While campaign finance at one time was supposed to be his virtue, clearly his study of the problem provided him with the tools to work the system.

    Unfortunately, the White House is for sale. And much as I’d like to say that Obama is different in this respect, it doesn’t seem to be true. Life as Usual in Board Rooms and Back Rooms analyzes data from the Center for Responsive Politics to conclude that the sources of funding (at least, the reported sources) come from substantially similar business and interest groups to the two candidates. Of the top twenty categories of interest-business (such as lawyers, health professionals, and the finance industry) donors to each candidate, sixteen are the same. For the remaining four, at least one (oil & gas), while not in Obama’s top-twenty list of donors, still has given money to him. Likely the same is true for Obama’s “unique” categories in the list–they also give to McCain, but not at the top-twenty level.

    While the estimated 500 million dollars (yep, half-a-billion dollars!) each candidate needs to raise for this election cycle no doubt will help the economy (think of it– a one-billion dollar economic stimulus package, at least for the media world that produces and disseminates political ads), it just can’t be good for voters.