McCain aides lobbied for Boeing rival
WASHINGTON - Top advisers to Senator John McCain's presidential campaign last year lobbied for a European airplane maker that bested
Two of the advisers gave up their lobbying work when they joined McCain's campaign. A third, former representative Tom Loeffler of Texas, lobbied for the European Aeronautic Defence and Space Co. while serving as McCain's national finance chairman.
EADS is the parent company of Airbus, which teamed up with US-based
McCain, the Republican presidential nominee in waiting, has been a key figure in the Pentagon's yearslong attempt to complete a deal on the tanker. McCain helped block an earlier, scandal-marred tanker contract with Boeing and prodded the Pentagon in 2006 to develop bidding procedures that did not exclude Airbus. He is also the top recipient in Congress of political contributions this election cycle by EADS.
EADS retained Ogilvy Government Relations and The Loeffler Group to lobby for the tanker deal last year, months after McCain sent two letters urging the Defense Department to make sure the bidding proposals guaranteed competition.
"They never lobbied him related to the issues, and the letters went out before they were contracted" by EADS, said McCain campaign spokeswoman Jill Hazelbaker.
According to lobbying records, Loeffler Group lobbyists on the project included Loeffler; Susan Nelson, who left the firm and is now the campaign's finance director, and former secretary of the Navy William Ball III, who has campaigned for McCain. Ogilvy lobbyist John Green, who was assigned the EADS work, recently took a leave of absence to volunteer for McCain as the campaign's congressional liaison.
McCain yesterday defended his work on the tanker.
"I had nothing to do with the contract, except to insist in writing, on several occasions, as this process went forward, that it be fair and open and transparent," he said at an appearance in St. Louis. "That was my involvement in it." 