It probably wouldn’t be a bad idea if all political news from here on in were tagged `Campaign ’96.’
Take the July 22 front-page piece by Washington Times reporter Frank J. Murray that brought late Commerce Secretary Ron Brown back to life to criticize the selection process for foreign trade missions and killed several Democratic wireless insiders with unkindly revelations.
If the man on the moon (no relation to the Moonies who run the right-wing paper) came down to read the article, he wouldn’t know until his second or third sip of java that Brown was permanently retired from earthly politics.
The Brown travel story was written several times by the Times and The Washington Post when Brown and Commerce were under attack from all sides, before he and 34 others died in a plane crash April 3 in Croatia during a trip to pursue reconstruction in the war-torn Balkans.
The rap against Brown propagated by Larry Klayman, head of Judicial Watch, is that a political contribution was the ticket to ride with the Commerce secretary. So what’s new; it’s a time-honored tradition of both political parties. The American way.
Yet the article acknowledged that Brown refuted the charge in 1995 by saying most of the delegations were compromised of Republican CEOs.
But the Times didn’t stop there. It went on to allege how Gerald S. McGowan, a wireless attorney who attended Georgetown as an undergrad with Bill Clinton and reportedly contributed nearly $75,000 to Democratic efforts in recent years, won White House backing for a Brown junket and for a seat on the Overseas Private Investment Corp.’s board.
OPIC, an independent federal agency that offers financing and political risk insurance to American firms investing in emerging economies, is apparently big on wireless. More than $52 million in OPIC insurance is underwriting Chase Manhattan financing of cellular systems in 11 regions of northern Russia. Lucent Technologies Inc. is the main supplier.
Another $65 million in OPIC insurance is going to Motorola Inc. for a St. Petersburg telecom project.
The article also reported that William Ginsberg, CEO of Cellular Communications International, got to travel with Brown to India after a plug from Phil Verveer, like McGowan, an FOB from Georgetown who represents the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association and whose wife Melanne is deputy chief of staff to Hillary Rodham Clinton.
The India trip, according to the Times, included Qualcomm CEO Irwin Jacobs after a word from former congresswoman Lynn Schenk of California, whose campaign reportedly received $7,500 from the CDMA proponent.
Yawn…ZZZzzzzzzzz.
