McCain finds a thorny path in ethics effort

By Barry Meier and Kate Zernike

updated 3:25 a.m. ET May 20, 2008

Sorting out the lobbying entanglements of his campaign advisers is proving to be a messy business for Senator John McCain.

On Monday, just days after it issued new rules to address conflicts of interest, the McCain campaign was furiously sifting through the business records of aides and advisers. The new rules were prompted by disclosures that led to the abrupt departure from the campaign of a number of aides who worked as lobbyists, including some with ties to foreign governments.

Mr. McCain’s political identity has long been defined by his calls for reducing the influence of special interests in Washington. But as he heads toward the general election as the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, he has increasingly confronted criticism that his campaign staff is stocked with people who have made their living as lobbyists or in similar jobs, leaving his credentials as a reformer open to attack.

The process of trying to purge the campaign of conflicts that in appearance or reality might violate Mr. McCain’s stated principles or cause him political trouble has so far focused only more attention on the backgrounds of his aides and advisers.

The delicate task of writing and enforcing the new conflict-of-interest policy has fallen to Mr. McCain’s campaign manager, Rick Davis, who was himself a lobbyist until he took a leave of absence from his firm, Davis Manafort, two years ago.

In 2005, Mr. Davis was registered as a lobbyist for corporate clients like the telecommunications company Verizon. Under the campaign’s new rules, issued by Mr. Davis on Thursday, lobbyists who are currently registered either for American companies or for foreign governments or businesses cannot be employed by the campaign. They must also disclose their lobbying work even if they are working for Mr. McCain on a part-time, voluntary basis.

But while Mr. Davis took a leave from Davis Manafort in 2006, the company has developed a specialty in recent years in a type of lobbying for which firms do not have to register — namely, representing the interests abroad of foreign politicians and businessmen.

In recent years, the company’s clients have included the richest man in Ukraine and a former premier of that country whose opponents were supported by Mr. McCain. The Washington Post reported in January that Mr. Davis also set up a meeting in Switzerland in 2006 between Mr. McCain and a Russian businessman, who has been barred from entering this country, apparently because of accusations about past ties to organized crime in Russia. That businessman, Oleg Deripaska, has denied such links.

Another senior McCain campaign aide who has lobbied on behalf of foreign governments over the past seven years is Randy Scheunemann, the chief foreign policy adviser.

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Over the past several years, Mr. Scheunemann met several times with Mr. McCain to discuss his clients’ interests. He introduced the senator to the foreign ministers of Albania, Croatia and Macedonia as they tried to win admission to NATO, and a representative of Taiwan as it lobbied for free trade, records show. Mr. Scheunemann also accompanied Mr. McCain to Latvia in 2001 and Georgia in 2006.

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