http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=526_1203690010
A very nervous Sen. John McCain responds to a New York Times report that suggests he may have had an improper relationship with a lobbyist.
He really seemed nervous around the Relationsship between him and the women. I think hell pull the “depends on what your definition of is, is”
Now for his Lobbyst FACTS:
According to the Center for Responsive Politics, McCain has taken nearly $1.2 million in campaign contributions from the telephone utility and telecom service industries, more than any other Senator. McCain sides with the telecom companies on retroactive immunity.
THIS FROM TIME MAG:
February 22, 2008
When parts of McCain’s defense don’t add up
Posted February 22nd, 2008 at 2:31 pm
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There have been plenty of legitimate questions raised about the reliability of the New York Times report about John McCain, his relationship with Vicki Iseman, and professional efforts McCain may have made on her behalf. The piece was thin and some of the charges weren’t exactly backed up by ample evidence.
For that matter, the McCain campaign (and its various conservative allies, including the Bush White House) have mounted a very effective and aggressive pushback, casting additional doubts on the NYT’s piece.
But it’d be a whole lot easier to dismiss the accusations out of hand if McCain’s story added up. It doesn’t.
A sworn deposition that Sen. John McCain gave in a lawsuit more than five years ago appears to contradict one part of a sweeping denial that his campaign issued this week to rebut a New York Times story about his ties to a Washington lobbyist.
On Wednesday night the Times published a story suggesting that McCain might have done legislative favors for the clients of the lobbyist, Vicki Iseman, who worked for the firm of Alcalde & Fay. One example it cited were two letters McCain wrote in late 1999 demanding that the Federal Communications Commission act on a long-stalled bid by one of Iseman’s clients, Florida-based Paxson Communications, to purchase a Pittsburgh television station.
Just hours after the Times’s story was posted, the McCain campaign issued a point-by-point response that depicted the letters as routine correspondence handled by his staff — and insisted that McCain had never even spoken with anybody from Paxson or Alcalde & Fay about the matter. “No representative of Paxson or Alcalde & Fay personally asked Senator McCain to send a letter to the FCC,” the campaign said in a statement e-mailed to reporters.
But that flat claim seems to be contradicted by an impeccable source: McCain himself. “I was contacted by Mr. Paxson on this issue,” McCain said in the Sept. 25, 2002, deposition obtained by NEWSWEEK. “He wanted their approval very bad for purposes of his business. I believe that Mr. Paxson had a legitimate complaint.”
While McCain said “I don’t recall” if he ever directly spoke to the firm’s lobbyist about the issue — an apparent reference to Iseman, though she is not named — “I’m sure I spoke to [Paxson].” McCain agreed that his letters on behalf of Paxson, a campaign contributor, could “possibly be an appearance of corruption” — even though McCain denied doing anything improper.
Oops.
The Newsweek piece also added these colorful details:
In the deposition, noted First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams (who was representing the lawsuit’s lead plaintiff, Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell) grilled McCain about the four trips he took aboard Paxson’s corporate jet to campaign events and the $20,000 in campaign contributions he had received from the company’s executives during the period the firm was pressing him to intervene with federal regulators.
Asked at one point if Paxson’s lobbyist (Abrams never mentions Iseman’s name) had accompanied him on any of the trips he took aboard the Paxson corporate jet, McCain responded, “I do not recall.” (McCain’s campaign confirmed this week that Iseman did fly on one trip returning to Washington from a campaign fund-raiser in Florida.)
On the campaign trail, McCain boasts to voters, “Everybody says that they’re against the special interests. I’m the only one the special interests don’t give any money to.” But back in the Senate, the claim looks pretty ridiculous.
But taking a step back, consider the broader McCain pushback against the NYT story. By Wednesday night, the McCain gang was absolutely in rapid response mode, knocking down the article with considerable ferocity. By Thursday morning, the senator, well prepped, gave a series of sweeping denials at a major press conference.
Far too many of the McCain claims, however, haven’t withstood even minor scrutiny. McCain hadn’t spoken to anyone at Paxson, except he had. His letters on Paxson’s behalf were considered perfectly acceptable to the FCC, except that they weren’t. The McCain campaign made no effort to squash the NYT article, except that they went to great lengths to do just that. McCain never even spoke the NYT about the piece, except that he had.
Josh Marshall added, “There’s no way of getting around the fact that McCain routinely, almost constantly, issues categorical denials that are demonstrably false. The very volume and clarity of the bogusness of so many of these statements might even be viewed as his best defense.”
And why would a presumptive presidential nominee make obviously false, easy-to-disprove claims? Because McCain doesn’t really care — he knows reporters have given him an unearned reputation as a “straight talker,” and he assumes he can more or less lie with impunity.
We’ll find out soon enough if that’s true.
