Riga, Latvia -- The steady expansion of the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization has been widely touted in the West as a way to spread
freedom. It also has opened a door for Washington lobbyists, who have profited by helping
shape the process as it has unfolded.
As NATO has worked to integrate former Soviet republics and client
states with the West, those nations have sought influential middlemen with the contacts
and know-how to pull it off. The stakes are huge, offering not just military but
diplomatic -- and economic -- opportunity.
None of the lobbyists are household names. But for Washington insiders,
European officials and businesses seeking access to NATO's new members, they have become
prized contacts -- while carving out a lucrative niche.
One of the most prominent, is Sally Painter, a former official in the
Clinton Commerce Department who since leaving government in the mid-1990s has become a key
representative for NATO's new and aspiring members. Just last month, Ms. Painter signed
contracts totaling more than $200,000 from seven of the new NATO countries, including
Latvia, that are seeking to waive visa requirements for citizens traveling to the U.S.
Ms. Painter also is a key figure in organizing conferences at NATO's
annual summits, which have grown in recent years into lavish events at which
foreign-policy mavens and government leaders mingle with big corporate donors. Since 1999,
10 former Soviet-orbit countries have joined the Western alliance, three have been
selected to host a NATO summit.
Ms. Painter organized NATO summit events in Washington in 1999, Prague
in 2002 and here in the Latvian capital last fall. Before President Bush and other NATO
leaders gathered in Riga's cobblestoned old town, she helped corral $100,000-plus
donations from some of her private clients to sponsor a gala dinner and foreign-policy
conference that was the main public networking event of the summit. Those clients,
including a disbarred lawyer under grand-jury investigation, were rewarded for their
donations to the NATO conference with a White House meeting with President Bush.
"The NATO summit made Latvia much more visible for international
investors," says Valdis Birkavs, a former Latvian prime minister.
Other well-known lobbyists who have worked with new members of NATO
include Randy Scheunemann, now foreign-policy director for Arizona Republican Sen. John
McCain's presidential campaign, and Paige Reffe, a former aide in the Clinton
administration.
Mr. Scheunemann worked on NATO issues as a Senate aide and joined the
NATO expansion committee after he left Capitol Hill in 1998 to lobby. His clients included
Latvia, Georgia, Macedonia and Romania. Mr. Reffe snagged lobbying contracts with
Lithuania and Slovakia after leaving the Clinton administration.
The lobbyists' work doesn't violate ethics rules, and is fairly common
in Washington. But it does open a little-noticed window on the close interplay between the
public and private sectors in Washington -- and how that process is spreading from
domestic policymaking to the newly open Eastern European countries.
Their efforts also show how the expansion of NATO -- first formed in
1949 as a Western military alliance to counter the Soviets -- has been influenced by
Washington insiders well after they have left their government roles, even as its original
military purpose has broadened. Several NATO lobbyists have played key roles as well on
other issues, such as winning support from aspiring members for the U.S.-led Iraq invasion
in 2003.
Ms. Painter says her public and private roles have complemented each
other. "To join NATO, these countries had to make a lot of reforms," she says.
"Their economies grew, and there's naturally been heightened interest from global
corporations."
After leaving the Commerce Department, Ms. Painter joined the U.S.
Committee to Expand NATO, a nonprofit group that advocated opening the Western military
alliance to former Soviet states. There, she helped persuade Congress to embrace NATO's
growth.
In 2001, working at the Washington lobbying firm Downey McGrath Group
Inc., Ms. Painter began working to help Bulgaria and Estonia enter NATO as well. She also
worked for the Czech Republic in its successful NATO bid.
In February 2003, as the administration sought European allies to back
an invasion of Iraq, two of Ms. Painter's Republican allies from the Committee to Expand
NATO helped circulate a letter from Latvia and other aspiring members declaring their
support for toppling Saddam Hussein. In turn, the Bush administration began pushing hard
within NATO to elevate their interests.
Most of the nations that signed the letter were current, past, or
future clients of Ms. Painter and Messrs. Reffe and Scheunemann.
Popular in Washington, NATO expansion has proved to be an issue that
cuts across party lines. Ms. Painter was slammed by congressional Republicans while in the
Commerce Department for placing big Democratic donors on overseas U.S. trade missions led
by her then-boss, the late Commerce Secretary Ron Brown.
Even so, Ms. Painter has emerged as one of the rare former Clinton
administration officials able to open doors in the Bush White House. "We've had a
great esprit de corps," she says of the Republicans -- including Stephen Hadley, now
national-security adviser -- who worked with her on the committee. "That's because it
was really all about the public policy, not the partisanship."
Ms. Painter and her colleagues also have taken on as clients some
businesses and officials from the new NATO countries. She signed up a Latvian bank, Parex
Bank AS, which Treasury Department officials suspected was being used by some of its
Russian clients for money laundering. One of Ms. Painter's tasks was to help convince U.S.
officials the bank was working to stop illegal activities. Parex says it wasn't able to
control what its clients did but now is working with the U.S. to report and detect
suspicious activity and shut it down.
In 2004, Ms. Painter took her services and clients to the lobbying
powerhouse Dutko Worldwide LLC, where she was put in charge of its new international
consulting arm, Dutko Global Advisors. She quickly signed a $60,000 contract with Aivis
Ronis, Latvia's ambassador to the U.S., to support its effort to host the 2006 NATO
summit.
Mr. Ronis hired Ms. Painter again last year to organize a gala
conference that was to coincide with the Riga summit. Ms. Painter helped persuade Parex,
which has paid Dutko $383,000 for lobbying, to donate $200,000 to sponsor the conference.
Another of Ms. Painter's clients, an Orlando, Fla., investor named
Frank Amodeo, contributed $100,000, on top of $320,000 he had paid Dutko to help him
identify business opportunities in Latvia and elsewhere, filings and interviews show. When
NATO conference donors were invited to meet Mr. Bush in October at the White House, Mr.
Amodeo was seated two places away from the president.
Currently, Mr. Amodeo is under investigation by a federal grand jury in
Florida in connection with millions of dollars that went missing from companies he
controlled, according to people familiar with the situation. The former lawyer previously
served two years in federal prison for fraud.
Through a spokesman, Mr. Amodeo declined to comment for this article.
The White House didn't respond to requests for comment on Mr. Amodeo. Ms. Painter says she
was unaware of her client's history until recently. She says Mr. Amodeo's contract with
Dutko ended in March.
By Mary Jacoby
The Wall Street Journal
17 Aug 2007 |
