The Wonk Room

Scheunemann: Just Another Lobbyist On The Straight Talk Express

Via TAPPED, John McCain’s foreign policy spokesman Randy Scheunemann recently gave an interview to Radio Free Europe about the growing tension between Russia and Georgia. Scheunemann took a hard line against Russia’s “undermining of Georgian sovereignty” by moving to establish direct ties with breakaway regions of Georgia.

Interestingly, neither Scheunemann nor the interviewer mentioned that Randy Scheunemann used to be employed as a lobbyist for the Georgian government. That’s right, the person who’s giving John McCain advice on Russia and Georgia was “registered with the U.S. Department of Justice as a foreign agent working on behalf of the government of Georgia.”

Scheunemann is a longtime neoconservative activist and lobbyist. In addition to working for the government of Georgia, Scheunemann was was the director of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, a neocon front group spun off from the Project for the New American Century (where Scheunemann also works as a foreign policy and national security analyst) which lobbied for the invasion of Iraq. Scheunemann’s firm, Scheunemann and Associates, also lobbied for the National Rifle Association between 1999 and 2002.

Of course, Scheunemann is only one of the many former lobbyists helping to drive the Straight Talk Express. In fact, as Media Matters reported, “McCain has more current and former lobbyists working on his campaign staff than any other candidate in the 2008 presidential election.”