There's a new article out, co-published by The Nation and Newsforreal.com, about the involvement of a fellow named Alan Quasha with Hillary Clinton's campaign. I have never met Mr. Quasha, but I feel like I know him, because I spent a lot of time working on the Harken Energy issue in 2002, and Quasha was a very big player in the Harken Energy company at the time George W. Bush got a $6 million payout on an insider trading deal at Harken. He is a true sleazebag.
The Nation/Newsforreal piece alleges that Quasha and his partner, Hassan Nemazee, are major players in the Clinton campaign. Nemazee certainly is a player with Hillary, and in Democratic Party circles in general- finance chair for the DSCC last cycle, the NY fundraising chair for Kerry, and according to this article, he organized a $500,000 fundraiser for Hillary's presidential campaign.
When I first started to read this article, I was outraged because I know what a sleazebag Quasha is. But it's not at all clear to me how much of a role Quasha is playing in the Clinton campaign. I found the article a little frustrating, because it alleges deep connections and sinister motivations without providing much actual documentation. For example, it says that Quasha's "involvement with Clinton is at least as substantial" as Norman Hsu's who raised $850,000 for her, but other than one business partner's fundraising efforts on Hillary's behalf, it provides no proof of that. It says that Quasha has made "concerted efforts" to get into Clinton's inner circle "that are reminiscent of his relationship with a pre-Gov. Bush," but Quasha gave Bush a $6 million payoff, and there's no evidence of any kind of business relationship with the Clintons. The article's basis for its allegations is the fact that (a) Quasha maxed out to her campaign; (b) a partner in one of his business ventures (Nemazee) did a big fundraiser for her; (c) the same firm that Quasha and Nemazee are partners in had some kind of business arrangement with Terry McAuliffe (I say "some kind of business arrangement" because McAuliffe refused to answer questions about it); and (d) they quote some former associate of Quasha's that he has been to visit Bill Clinton "quite a few times," whatever that means.
However, the Clinton campaign, when I asked them about all this, while acknowledging the Nemazee connection, emphatically deny any relationship to Quasha other than the fact that he wrote them a check and showed up at his partner's fundraiser. I have no reason not to believe them on this, and I know that people have many business partnerships in D.C. that are not close personal or political ties, including Democratic/Republican partnerships where partners never do work on politics together.
The article does continue to make me nervous, though. Quasha and Nemazee's business ties to McAuliffe seem pretty well-documented, and McAuliffe's refusal to answer any questions about them does raise some concerns for me, and I wish he had just answered them. And any mention of Quasha in relationship to a Democrat is like a red flashing alarm to me, because the guy's role in Harken Energy is incredibly creepy.
The issue advocacy group I chair, American Family Voices, produced an ad about Bush, Cheney, and corporate corruption in 2002, which prominently featured Harken Energy. Here it is:
Ironically, this ad is alluded to in the article as an example of McAuliffe's hypocrisy: "associates of McAuliffe, fronted by a fake grassroots organization, released an aggressive ad campaign seeking to highlight the Harken-Bush connection." This mention gave me a clue that perhaps the article's looking for evil about the Clintons was bit overwrought.
Like every other Democrat involved in national politics in the last 20 years, I know Terry a little bit, but we've never been closely aligned philosophically or personally, let alone "associates." And I'm not sure how an organization that's been doing all kinds of political work for seven years, and has 60,000 members, can be considered fake. But then, I've always had a thin skin.
(I should pause here to say that this ad campaign was one of the single most satisfying things I've ever done in politics. We were the first organization to run an ad attacking Bush, post-9/11, and did it in July 2002 when his approval rating was still in the high 60s.
We started our buy the day before a phony speech by Bush on corporate ethics, and we felt we just had to expose his hypocrisy. The ad flipped out the Bush White House so much that they called a Presidential press conference on three hours notice to try to draw attention away from it, but the press conference backfired when 21 out of 30 questions were about the ad. Bush was forced to repeatedly defend himself on Harken Energy, and denounce us and the ad. The ensuing media brouhaha helped drop his approval 15 points in the matter of a few weeks. It was a great moment, which in case you can't tell, I still quite proud of. If Democrats had stayed on the attack on Bush's corporate responsibility hypocrisy instead of allowing themselves to get drawn into that absurd war vote that shattered party unity, we would have won control of Congress in 2002.)
I know I have gone back and forth in this piece, because I am genuinely conflicted about it. On the one hand, I think the reporters really stretched to a negative conclusion about Clinton that was unsupported by the facts they presented in the article: the $6,000,000 inside trading payoff Bush got from Quasha is completely incomparable to him giving her campaign a donation, or even to a business partner throwing a fundraiser for her. They stretch to make everything look like an evil conspiracy, and I just don't think the evidence is there. Frankly, it reminded me a little bit of some of the John Solomon pieces I've seen attacking other Democrats.
But Quasha is a bad guy. Harken Energy stunk to high heaven, and this guy is just plain and simple a bad actor. The Clinton campaign should keep him the hell away from anything to do with the campaign, and McAuliffe would be better served by being less mysterious about his associations with Quasha. I hope this article, flawed as it is, will be a wake-up call for the Clinton campaign to stay away from Quasha and other sleazebags like him.
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