Forget the almost comically obvious conflict-of-interest lobbying ties. Randy Scheunemann needs to get the boot from the McCain campaign for much more serious reasons.
Scheunemann served as president of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, a neoconservative front group created in 2002. CLI coordinated with the Bush White House to gin up public support for the Iraq war by buttressing and echoing the administration’s various dubious claims about the threat posed by Saddam, and the quickness and ease of a war to remove him.
Part of Scheunemann’s work for the CLI was promoting convicted embezzler and WMD fantasist Ahmad Chalabi as the “new Iraqi Ataturk,” and Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress as a “government in exile.” In a 2003 NewsHour interview, Scheunemann defended Chalabi’s “vision” for Iraq, claiming that Chalabi was opposed for “ideological reasons” by the State Department and the CIA, who, it turns out, were precisely correct about Chalabi’s untrustworthiness.
Scheunemann also managed to convince John McCain that Chalabi was “a patriot with the interest of Iraq at heart.”
That doesn’t sound like the guy you want as the No. 1 foreign policy adviser to a presidential candidate. Not a lot of good judgment being shown…
