"Everybody says that they’re against the special interests. I’m the only one the special interests don’t give any money to." - John McCain, New Hampshire Town Hall, November 2007

• 3/08: McCain's appearance at the Deer Valley event, arranged by J.P. Morgan Vice Chairman James B. Lee Jr., a top McCain fundraiser, put him in a room with the chief executives of companies such as General Electric, Xerox and Sony. It was, Lee said, "a chance for him to let them see him for who he is and possibly decide to support him." The effort paid off: J.P. Morgan executives have donated $56,250 to McCain's campaign, two-thirds of which came after his Utah appearance. And his visit there was quickly followed up by dozens of smaller private meetings with corporate executives in New York City arranged by leading Wall Street figures. "We tried to get him around to a lot of those kinds of things," said McCain campaign manager Rick Davis. "We were very much in the friend-making business." 
• According to the Center for Responsive Politics, McCain has taken nearly $1.2 million in campaign contributions from the telephone utility and telecom service industries, more than any other Senator. McCain sides with the telecom companies on retroactive immunity.
• McCain is also the single largest recipient of campaign contribution by Ion Media Networks — formerly Paxson Communication — receiving $36,000 from the company and employees from 1997 to mid-year 2006.

Steven Betts (5/8/08)

• Sen. John McCain championed legislation that will let an Arizona rancher trade remote grassland and ponderosa pine forest here for acres of valuable federally owned property that is ready for development, a land swap that now stands to directly benefit one of his top presidential campaign fundraisers.
• Initially reluctant to support the swap, the Arizona Republican became a key figure in pushing the deal through Congress after the rancher and his partners hired lobbyists that included McCain's 1992 Senate campaign manager, two of his former Senate staff members (one of whom has returned as his chief of staff), and an Arizona insider who was a major McCain donor and is now bundling campaign checks.
• When McCain's legislation passed in November 2005, the ranch owner gave the job of building as many as 12,000 homes to SunCor Development, a firm in Tempe, Ariz., run by Steven A. Betts, a longtime McCain supporter who has raised more than $100,000 for the presumptive Republican nominee. Betts said he and McCain never discussed the deal.
• Although the bill called for the two parcels to be of equal value, a federal forestry official told a congressional committee that he was concerned that "the public would not receive fair value" for its land. A formal appraisal has not yet begun. A town official opposed to the swap said other Yavapai Ranch land sold nine years ago for about $2,000 per acre, while some of the prime commercial land near a parcel that the developers will get has brought as much as $120,000 per acre.

Donald Diamond (4/22/08)

• McCain helped a wealthy and generous donor buy land from the Army — complete with special water rights — for a quarter of a million dollars, which McCain’s buddy then sold two years later for $20 million. There’s a term for this — it’s called “influence peddling,” and it’s exactly the kind of thing McCain swears he never gets involved with. 
• on a number of key occasions, McCain played a key role in helping Diamond, a major campaign contributor, make deals that made him millions of dollars
• two of those involved bills (in 1991 and 1994) co-sponsored by McCain that swapped public land for Diamond's land, and the other involved McCain doing a couple personal favors in order to help Diamond land an incredibly lucrative piece of land owned by the Army
• The most delicate of the three transactions for the McCain camp is undoubtedly the Army deal: an old base in Monterey County, California called Fort Ord. Helped along by a meeting with an Army official set up by a McCain aide, Diamond got the inside track on the land, which ultimately made him a $20 million profit. McCain had also written a letter to the city of Seaside, California, enthusiastically recommending Diamond, who was making a bid to buy Fort Ord's two golf courses that had been acquired by the city.
• Mr. Diamond is close to most of Arizona's Congressional delegation and is candid about his expectations as a fund-raiser. "I want my money back, for Christ's sake. Do you know how many cocktail parties I have to go to?" To raise money for Mr. McCain, Mr. Diamond invites local Republicans to make fund-raising calls from his Tucson office. Ray Carroll, a member of the council that controls zoning in Pima County, Ariz., said Mr. Diamond followed up on one fund-raising session with a thank-you note "on behalf of Mr. McCain," sending a copy to the senator. "To reciprocate, if you need any zoning in the county, let me know," Mr. Diamond wrote. (Mr. Diamond said it was the kind of joke he often made.)
• Mr. Diamond, for his part, said Mr. McCain had only done his job. "I think that is what Congress people are supposed to do for constituents," he said. "When you have a big, significant businessman like myself, why wouldn't you want to help move things along? What else would they do? They waste so much time with legislation."

Sinclair Broadcasting / Glencairn Broadcasting (2/23/08)

• In late 1998, Senator John McCain sent an unusually blunt letter to the head of the Federal Communications Commission, warning that he would try to overhaul the agency if it closed a broadcast ownership loophole.
• The letter, and two later ones signed by Mr. McCain, then chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, urged the commission to abandon plans to close a loophole vitally important to Glencairn Ltd., a client of Vicki Iseman, a lobbyist. The provision enabled one of the nation’s largest broadcasting companies, Sinclair, to use a marketing agreement with Glencairn, a far smaller broadcaster, to get around a restriction barring single ownership of two television stations in the same city.
• For its part, Glencairn appeared to have been getting little support in Congress until it retained Ms. Iseman in 1998.
• Edwin Edwards, who was the president of the company at the time, said in a recent interview that after retaining Ms. Iseman, he was able to get heard by Mr. McCain.
• “We were pounding the pavement in Washington,” Mr. Edwards said. “We recruited help from as many people as we could. We knocked on every door just trying to get support.”

FEC Violations

• TPM 2/22/08: First, McCain opted in to the public finance system for the primaries last year. It meant that his struggling campaign would get $5.8 million in public matching funds in March. Now that he’s effectively the Republican nominee, he wants out, because the system entails a spending limit of $54 million through the end of August. He’s almost spent that much already, according to the Post.
  It is a serious issue. As the Post reports, “Knowingly violating the spending limit is a criminal offense that could put McCain at risk of stiff fines and up to five years in prison.” 
• Judicial Watch 4/24/08: Judicial Watch, the public interest group that investigates and prosecutes government corruption, announced today that it filed a formal complaint, dated April 22, 2008, with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) related to a fundraising luncheon held at London’s Spencer House to benefit Senator John McCain’s presidential campaign.  The venue for the event was apparently donated to the campaign by foreign nationals, in violation of federal campaign finance laws.

FEC Violation #2