Links Between Scheuneman and Chalabi, and Iraq, and....

[amborin]

"Roston's account suggests close ties between Scheunemann's group and Chalabi.

Brooke, he reports, threw a party at Chalabi's Georgetown home to celebrate the committee's founding in the fall of 2002. "Most of the key neoconservatives were there," Roston writes. "It wasn't set up, strictly speaking, as another group linked to the Iraqi National Congress, although it did eventually morph into that."

Brooke says he doesn't remember any such party, although he acknowledges throwing lots of parties in those heady prewar days—a time when he and Chalabi were working inside the Pentagon helping to draw up plans for war. "

"In between those campaigns, Scheunemann left the Hill to become a lobbyist, first going to work in 1998 at the Mercury Group, where his clients have included oil company BP and the National Rifle Association.

(In January 1997, Scheunemann was arrested by Capitol Hill police for driving into the Capitol zone with a shotgun in his vehicle, forgotten after a duck-hunting trip.)

Later he set up his own lobbying shop, Scheunemann and Associates, and in 2001 he founded Orion Strategies LLC, where he specialized in representing former East bloc countries seeking to become members of NATO, including Latvia, Romania, Georgia, and Macedonia as well as Lockheed Martin.

That year, Scheunemann also served as a consultant on Iraq to the office of Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld.

Scheunemann's lobbying on behalf of NATO expansion raised eyebrows earlier this year: In August, the Washington Post reported that Scheunemann had prepped McCain for a phone call with the president of Georgia on the same day, April 18, 2008, that Orion Strategies "signed a $200,000 contract to continue providing strategic advice to the Georgian government."

(McCain shares his adviser's hostile view toward Moscow; even before the invasion of Georgia this summer, he suggested kicking Russia out of the G8.) "

etc.....

<http://www.motherjones.com/washington_dispatch/2008/10/scheunemann.html>