Now onto McCain: Keating Five scandal and more (birthday regards to a mob leader????)

[rainbow4321]

http://www.realchange.org/mccain.htm

In 1995, McCain sent birthday regards, and regrets for not attending, to Joseph "Joe Bananas" Bonano, the head of the New York Bonano crime family, who had retired to Arizona. Another politician to send regrets was Governor Fife Symington, who has since been kicked out of office and convicted of 7 felonies relating to fraud and extortion.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keating_Five

Gray testified that several U.S. senators had approached him and requested that he ease off on the Lincoln investigation. It came out that these senators had been beneficiaries of $300,000 (collective total) in campaign contributions from Keating. McCain received $112,000 by 1987 from Keating and Keating's relatives and employees to McCain's Senate campaign, more than any of the other Senators. In September 1987 National Thrift News was the first media outlet to break the story.

In October 1989 The Arizona Republic reported that in addition to campaign contributions, McCain's wife and her father had invested $359,100 in a Keating shopping center in April 1986, a year before McCain met with the regulators. The paper also reported that the McCains, sometimes accompanied by their daughter and baby-sitter, had made at least nine trips at Keating's expense, sometimes aboard the American Continental Corporation (parent of Lincoln) jet. Three of the trips were made during vacations to Keating's opulent Bahamas retreat at Cat Cay. McCain also did not pay Keating for some of the trips until years after they were taken, after he learned that Keating was in trouble over Lincoln. Lincoln Savings and Loan's collapse is said to have cost taxpayers $3.4 billion .

This allegation set off a series of investigations by the California government, the United States Department of Justice, and the Senate Ethics Committee. The ethics committee's investigation focused on five senators: Alan Cranston (D-CA); Dennis DeConcini (D-AZ); John Glenn (D-OH); John McCain (R-AZ); and Donald W. Riegle, Jr. (D-MI), who became known as the "Keating Five".

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After months of testimony revealed that all five senators acted improperly to differing degrees, the senators maintained they were following the status quo of campaign funding practices. In August 1991, the committee concluded that Cranston's, DeConcini's, and Riegle's conduct constituted substantial interference with the FHLBB's enforcement efforts and that they had interfered at the behest of Charles Keating. The Ethics Committee concluded that Glenn's and McCain's involvement in the scheme was minimal. The committee recommended censure for Cranston and criticized the other four for "questionable conduct." However, the report did not address the startling reality that a private U.S. citizen accused of improprieties had called a meeting of five U.S. senators with an agenda dedicated to aiding his financial fortunes, and all five of them actually showed up and allowed him to direct proceedings.



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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McCain_lobbyist_controversy


McCain wrote letters in 1998 and 1999 to the Federal Communications Commission (the FCC) encouraging it to uphold marketing agreements allowing a television company to control two stations in the same city, a position which Iseman had been advocating on behalf of her client Glencairn Ltd. (now Cunningham Broadcasting). McCain also introduced a bill to create tax incentives for minority ownership of stations, which several businesses Iseman represented were seeking.

In February 1999, McCain and Iseman attended a small fund-raising dinner with several clients at a Miami-area home of a cruise-line executive, then flew back to Washington along with a campaign aide on the corporate jet of Paxson Communications (now ION Media Networks), one of her clients. Later in 1999, Iseman requested McCain to write to the FCC urging it to reach a speedy decision in a case involving Paxson Communications. Iseman, according to an email sent to The Times, provided McCain's staff with the information to write the letter. McCain's two letters to the FCC resulted in William Kennard, the FCC chairman, issuing a rare public rebuke to McCain for his interference in FCC deliberations.

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It is alleged that in a campaign to "save McCain from himself", his aides began restricting Iseman's access to McCain during the course of the 2000 presidential primary. According to a story in the Washington Post published the same day as the New York Times story, Weaver met with Iseman at Union Station (Washington, D.C.) to tell Iseman not to see McCain anymore.