New Video Shows White House Corruption

The Sunday Times reports Stephen Payne, a Bush pioneer and a political appointee to the Homeland Security Advisory Council, was caught on tape offering access to key members of the Bush administration inner circle in exchange for “six-figure donations to the private library being set up to commemorate Bush’s presidency.”

In an undercover video, Payne is seen promising to arrange a meeting for an exiled leader of Krygystan with Dick Cheney or Condoleezza Rice. (Not President Bush because “he doesn’t meet with a lot of former Presidents these days,” Payne says. “I don’t think he meets with hardly anyone.”) All it will take for him to arrange this high-level meeting, says Payne, is “a couple hundred thousand dollars, or something like that”:

PAYNE: The exact budget I will come up with. But it will be somewhere between $600,000 and $750,000, with about a third of it going directly to the Bush library. […]

200, 250, something like that. That’s gonna be a show of “we’re interested, we’re your friends, we’re still friends.”

Watch the startling video here.

A couple of angles to keep in mind here. First, it’s unclear exactly what kind of influence Payne has, but there can be little doubt that he’s a close Bush insider. He clears brush with the president in Crawford, goes shooting with Cheney, and serves on Bush’s Homeland Security Advisory Council. What’s more, Payne is president of Worldwide Strategic Partners, which exists to connect moneyed interests with the U.S. government. A cached version of his firm’s website explained, “Currently, Mr. Payne assists the White House as a Senior Advance Representative traveling internationally in advance of and with President Bush and Vice President Cheney.”

Second, when Payne talks in the video about having Dos’s friend buy access to administration officials, he’s talking about Askar Akayev, the former president Kyrgyzstan, who is currently in exile in Moscow after being ousted from power three years ago in a revolution when the country’s citizens became outraged by alleged corruption.

It paints an even more depressing picture — a close Bush ally is not only helping sell access in exchange for donations to Bush’s library, he’s also doing so by making arrangements with a very unsavory character.

It’s quite a story. If this were 1998, instead of 2008, the video alone would be enough to spark an investigation from a special prosecutor.