GOP Consultant On Tape Offering Access To Senior Bush Officials For Library Gift

The Sunday Times of London (hat tip Think Progress) has some fascinating videotape of a GOP consultant named Stephen Payne offering to set up meetings with Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and other senior Bush administration officials in return for a donation to the new library for President Bush, as well as as much as $500,000 for his firm, Worldwide Strategic Partners.

You can see the videotape and read the Sunday Times story in full here.

On the tape, Payne is seen telling  "Eric Dos," a Kazakh  politician whose full name is Yerzhan Dosmukhamedov, that he can help arrange meetings with top Bush officials for Askar Akayev, the former president of Kyrgyzstan, who is now in exile in Moscow.

The Sunday Times reported: "“I think that some things could be done,” said Payne, adding that seeing Bush himself might be more difficult. With barely a pause, he continued:

“I think that the family, children, whatever [of Akayev], should probably look at making a contribution to the Bush library.

“It would be like, maybe a couple of hundred thousand dollars, or something like that, not a huge amount but enough to show that they’re serious.”

Unfortunately for Payne, the Sunday Times has reporter secretly videotaping his meeting with Dos.

Dos and Payne have had some previous dealings, Dos claims, including a trip Cheney paid to Kazakhstan, Dos' home country, back in 2006.

"Dos said that in the autumn of 2005 he had been asked by the Kazakh government, via [Timur] Kulibayev [son in law to Kazakh President  Nursultan Nazarbayev], to arrange a visit by Cheney. The intention was to improve the country’s international standing," the Sunday Times reported.

"Dos had spent several days negotiating with Payne. A deal was eventually agreed, he said, and he understood that a payment of $2m was passed, via a Kazakh oil and gas company, to Payne’s firm.

The following May, Cheney made a brief trip to Kazakhstan. His visit was remarked upon in the media at the time, both for the lavish praise which he publicly heaped on Nazarbayev and for the stark contrast between this and a speech he had made just a day earlier at a conference in Lithuania in which he had lambasted Russia for being insufficiently democratic. Now he was lauding Nazarbayev, who has effectively made himself president for life and in whose country it is an offence to criticise him."

 
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