Undercover Video:Homeland Security Aide Caught On Tape Offering High-Level Access For Donations

[kpete]

Bush Homeland Security Aide Caught On Tape Offering High-Level Access For Donations To Bush Library»

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”:

PAYNE: The exact budget I will come up with. But it will be somewhere between $600,000 and $750,000, with about a third of it going directly to the Bush library. ...

200, 250, something like that. That’s gonna be a show of “we’re interested, we’re your friends, we’re still friends.”

Watch the startling video here.
http://thinkprogress.org/2008/07/12/bush-library-donation-scandal/
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article4322684.ece

[malaise]

1. Even better coverage here

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article4322684.ece

[Faryn Balyncd]

9. Why is the American MSM OUTSOURCING investigative journalism to REAL journalists overseas?

[Faryn Balyncd]

10. Did it require the British press to discover Lincoln bedroom improprieties?

"No government ought to be without censors; and where the press is free no one ever will."
- - Thomas Jefferson



“Grant me thirty years of equal division of inheritances and a free press, and I will provide you with a republic.”

- - Alexis de Tocqueville



“A free press can of course be good or bad, but, most certainly, without freedom it will never be anything but bad. . . . Freedom is nothing else but a chance to be better, whereas enslavement is a certainty of the worse.”

- - Albert Camus



“The free press is the mother of all our liberties and of our progress under liberty”

- - Adlai E. Stevenson




:kick:


:kick:

[malaise]

11. I'm hoping justice will soon be outsourced as well

over at the Hague.

[Faryn Balyncd]

13. Here's what the American media is up to - New 12 Part series on Chandra Levy's 2001 disappearance..

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x3610987

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003827036


Which unsolved crime does the Washington Post thinks merits a 12 part series in an election year ------ the Anthrax letter multiple murders, or Chandra Levy's disappearance?

[malaise]

17. M$M is

Grand Old Propaganda.

[Uncle Joe]

21. With apologies to Tennessee Ernie Ford, because the corporate media owners own their souls

sixteen tons what do you get, another a day older and deeper in debt, St Peter don't you call me, because I can't go, I owe my soul to the corporate media owners.

The big difference between coal miners and the corporate media puppets is that coal miners very survival was at stake. Corporate media puppets don't have that excuse, they only think their upper crust standard of living and fame is their survival.

[tanyev]

2. And where exactly would the other two thirds be going?

[CanonRay]

3. The RNC, where else?

[peekaloo]

4. His lobbying company, of course.

a pimp by any other name.....

[intheflow]

18. Department of Propaganda. n/t

[annabanana]

5. K&R for all the news you JUST CAN'T GET anywhere else..

(At least not in THIS country!)

[trusty elf]

6. That reeks!

K&R

[blogslut]

7. Worldwide Strategic Partners has alread scrubbed their website

http://www.worldwidestrategic.com">see?

Get your Google Cache pages while they're still up!

http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:pRgAC3skf20J:www.worldwidestrategic.com/+Worldwide+Strategic+Partners&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us">the main page

http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:fyzBKuTQAU0J:www.worldwidestrategic.com/partners.html+biden+worldwide+strategic+partners&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us">thepartners page

http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:41jaFqnIM58J:www.worldwidestrategic.com/aboutus.html+Worldwide+Strategic+Partners+about+us&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us">the about us page

http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:MVAInja1EYEJ:www.worldwidestrategic.com/services.html+Worldwide+Strategic+Partners+services&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=3&gl=us">the services page

[Ichingcarpenter]

16. Covering up their tracks however

This story is really beginning to have some legs
around the web.

The Logan Act was violated .

[babylonsister]

8. This is pathetic, and laughable.

Kind of makes me wonder about donors for another library...:think:

[Frustratedlady]

12. We need to keep this alive until Abramoff has a cellmate(s)

We could call it, Candidcameragate. Just sayin'.

I wonder how many others are concerned they might have also been filmed?

[htuttle]

14. Meyer Lansky would blush with envy at the actions of the Bush administration

The Executive branch has become a flat-out kleptocracy. We are being ruled by the mob.

[Ichingcarpenter]

15. This story is even bigger than it seems - Violation of the Logan Act

"The Logan Act is a United States federal law that forbids unauthorized citizens from negotiating with foreign governments. It was passed in 1799 and last amended in 1994. Violation of the Logan Act is a felony, punishable under federal law with imprisonment of up to three years." - Wikipedia



Bush Administration friend and operative Stephen P. Payne, a man who has cleared brush with George W. Bush himself, on Bush's ranch, attempting to sell access to the White House to representatives of a foreign nation's former president: donate several hundred thousand dollars to the planned George W. Bush Library currently slated to be established (along with an embedded, partisan think-tank) at Southern Methodist University in Texas and we'll get you in the door. That was the offer. Does Stephen P. Payne have any ties to presumptive GOP presidential nominee John McCain ? Curious minds want to know...

This post starts with the gathering Payne scandal but towards the end of the post I describe my new series, to be launched today on the Huffington Post, which outlines the threat to American Democracy posed by an influence peddling ring even bigger (by far) than Stephen P. Payne's tawdry, unethical and probably illegal operation, a influence peddling ring with international reach and which has been burrowing, for decades, into the very hear of American power. But, first, to the Payne scandal.

Here's what Stephen P. Payne and his Worldwide Strategic Partners have to offer:

Does your government need relief from billions of dollars in foreign debt ?

Does your military need to buy some U.S. F-16 fighter jets, C-130 transports, U.S. made military helicopters or night vision equipment ?

Does the President of your dictatorship require a special summit at Camp David ?

Does your corrupt and brutal West Asian dictator need the PR boost of a public endorsement from US Vice President Dick Cheney ?

Step right this way. Worldwide Strategic Partners can arrange that, and more, for a reasonable fee.


http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/7/13/75956/5572/331/550893

[Faryn Balyncd]

19. "Mr. President, have you fired Stephen Payne? Who are the donors to your library?What did each GET?"

Will the MSM start acting like a free press at the next presidential press conference?

[no limit]

20. Are you kidding me? Why has this not been mentioned in american media? Another downing street memo?