Cash and Kerry

From FrontPage:

Remember the controversy four years ago when it came to light that one of the flagship stations of the Public Broadcasting Service, WGBH in Boston, had been violating the privacy of its contributors and the taxpayer-supported impartiality of this PBS station by giving its confidential lists of contributor addresses, telephone numbers and other personal information to the Democratic National Committee? The partisan person who reportedly committed this outrage was WGBH Board Member and bigtime Democratic fundraiser Alan Solomont, now the Daddy Warbucks of the Kerry Campaign.

Another Kerry moneybags is former Texas Lt. Governor Ben Barnes, who during the same period ponied up more than $450,000 for the Massachusetts senator. This fatcat lobbyist, called by Tom Daschle “the fifty-first Democratic senator,” was so adroit as a fixer that he once cut a deal so that, after Texas enacted a state lottery, he and a partner would personally be paid 3.5 cents for every ticket sold – which added up to more than $3 million for them each year. Bill Clinton, a master at backroom money-grubbing, once reportedly told a group of Methodist ministers: “If you all will take a sinner like [Ben] Barnes, you might take me.”

A third cash-and-Kerryer, who during this same period gave Kerry more than $180,000, is Hassan Nemazee. This Iranian-American investor raised a cool $250,000 for Al Gore in November 1995, and he and his family slushed another $150,000 to Democrats during the mid-1990s. Six Nemazee family members and friends (including the caretaker of his 12-acre Katonah, N.Y., estate) donated a total of $60,000 – the maximum legally allowed -- to Bill Clinton’s legal defense fund.

In the closing days of 1998 Clinton named Nemazee his Ambassador-designate to Argentina. Hillary Clinton embraced the Muslim moneyman at a January 1999 White House celebration of the Islamic holiday Eid. The Senate, however, refused to confirm the controversial nominee after a Forbes Magazine investigation exposed Nemazee’s questionable business dealings. “He was,” said a bitter former business partner, “the Iranian equivalent of J.R. Ewing.”

The Forbes magazine investigation also documented how, in order to get his hands on public-employee pension fund monies allocated for minority managers, the U.S.-born Nemazee had falsely claimed to be a Hispanic of Venezuelan background and, on another occasion, an Asian-Indian.

But Nemazee’s cynical lust for money can be frightening as well as laughable. He is a founding board member of the Iranian American Political Action Committee [IAPAC], which seeks to create friendly and lucrative business relationships with the medieval theocratic dictatorship now ruling Iran. Iran is, of course, an “Axis of Evil” nation that seeks to acquire nuclear weapons and is on our State Department’s official list of nations that support terrorism. Nemazee seeks to enrich himself by further enriching the power-mad Mullahs ruling Iran.

“The founding member of this group is Mr. Hassan Nemazee, an American of Iranian origin and one discredited, and well-known agent of the Islamic Republic, within the Iranian community in the United States,” wrote opponent of the Iran regime Aryo B. Pirouznia of the Student Movement Coordination Committee for Democracy in Iran. “Their [IAPAC’s] agenda in their own words is: ‘…how relations between the Islamic Republic and the United States can be restored in support of the Islamic Republic and the revolution.’”

Pirouznia wrote this in an open letter to Senator Edward Kennedy urging the Massachusetts Democrat to dissociate himself from Nemazee. The more-leftward senator from the Bay State, John Kerry, continues to embrace Nemazee and the suitcases full of money that he donates.

You don't suppose that this Iranian friend of his has any influence on Kerry's Middle East policy, do you?