Conservative Pundits Wrote Malaysian Propaganda

[DonViejo]

Source: TPM

-snip-

The news came out of a filing that conservative commentator and RedState co-founder Joshua Treviño recently made with the U.S. Department of Justice. The disclosure, which was made in late January under the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA), detailed how Treviño was paid $389,724.70 by the “[g]overnment of Malaysia, its ruling party, or interests closely aligned with either” between May 2008 and April 2011. According to the filing, Treviño did not deal directly with Malaysian representatives or officials. Instead, he had relationships and was paid by three groups: the British firm FBC Media, the lobbying firm APCO Worldwide, and the now-shuttered online consulting firm David All Group.

Treviño was paid to blog at two websites — malaysiamatters.com and malaysiawatcher.com — which have now gone dark, and also to generate and secure the placement of opinion pieces in U.S. media outlets. The FARA filing also details how Treviño paid thousands of dollars to ten other writers — including the conservative writer Ben Demenech, American Center for Democracy director Rachel Ehrenfeld, and Commentary editor Seth Mandel — to write opinion pieces.

According to BuzzFeed, work tied to the Malaysian money appeared in The Huffington Post, The San Francisco Examiner, The Washington Times, National Review, and RedState, and much of the work focused on the campaign against Anwar Ibrahim, a pro-democracy opposition leader in Malaysia. In an interview with BuzzFeed, Treviño called the arrangement “a fairly standard PR operation.”

-snip-

Read more: http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2013/03/joshua_trevino_malaysia.php?ref=fpb

[Iliyah]

1. The last Pope's administration also

hired a Fake News person and look where that got him!

[Enrique]

2. they're paid to write American propaganda too n/t

[starroute]

3. APCO has lobbied for every sleazy dictatorship in existence

APCO first became known in the 1990's for pioneering the use of astroturf front groups on behalf of Philip Morris and helping the tobacco industry to invent the tort reform movement. More recently, they've set up front groups for industries accused of toxic pollution.

See:
http://www.multinationalmonitor.org/mm2003/03march/march03corp3.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2006/sep/19/ethicalliving.g2

More recently, APCO has served as the go-to lobbying firm for dictators and Russian oligarchs. There was a long article about this at Harper's in 2007, which is now behind a paywall, but here are some paragraphs from it:

Although there are distinct limits to what they can achieve, lobbyists are the crucial conduit through which pariah regimes advance their interests in Washington. “It’s like the secret handshake that gets you into the lodge,” as one former lobbyist told me. . . .

Exactly what sorts of promises do these firms make to foreign governments? What kind of scrutiny, if any, do they apply to potential clients? How do they orchestrate support for their clients? And how much of their work is visible to Congress and the public, and hence subject to oversight? To shed light on these questions, I decided to approach some top Washington lobbying firms myself, as a potential client, to see whether they would be willing to burnish the public image of a particularly reprehensible regime. The first step was to select a suitably distasteful would-be client. Given that my first pick, North Korea, seemed too reviled to be credible, I settled on the only slightly less Stalinist regime of Turkmenistan. . . .

At around three on a pleasantly warm February afternoon, Barry Schumacher, a senior vice president at APCO Associates, ushered me into a conference room at the firm’s downtown Washington office, near the intersection of 12th and H Streets N.W. Accompanying me was “Ricardo,” a Spanish-born Maldon Group consultant (in actuality, a friend I had recruited to come along, since it seemed unlikely that a firm like mine would send a single associate to meet with potential lobbying firms). APCO was the first firm I had contacted, because it was such a natural candidate to represent Turkmenistan: it has experience working not just on behalf of authoritarian regimes in general—the dictatorship of General Sani Abacha in Nigeria, for example, which employed the firm in 1995, the same year it hanged nine democracy activists—but for Caspian regimes in particular, having done P.R. work for the oil-rich kleptocracy of Azerbaijan.

APCO, Schumacher had written eagerly to me by email, had “worked on image, policy, foreign investment and reputation issues for a host of governments.” He touted the firm’s “key professionals,” among them former members of Congress and former administration officials. In a follow-up note, he did ask if I might provide a bit more information about The Maldon Group, since, for obvious reasons, he hadn’t been able to discover anything about it. “We prefer to be discreet due to the sensitivity of our business,” I replied. Schumacher understood; he even volunteered that APCO would be “more than willing to sign a confidentiality agreement.” I assured him that if we were to proceed to the stage of contract negotiations, The Maldon Group would “certainly be able to satisfy any reasonable concerns” about our ability to pay, but until then, I wrote, “we’re not prepared to share much more than what I’ve already told you at the level of preliminary conversations.” To which Schumacher promptly replied, “I understand, and this is not unusual for us.”

The sidebar to this piece on Yukos Oil also gives a good idea of APCO's methods:
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=12236

[starroute]

4. Jack Abramoff and his pals were behind an earlier anti-Ibrahim campaign

The more things change...

http://rawstory.com/news/2005/President_of_Abramoff_linked_nonprofit_wrote_0221.html

February 21, 2006

The President of the conservative Washington nonprofit where fallen lobbyist Jack Abramoff served as a director penned an editorial that smeared a political opponent of the Malaysian Prime Minister -- an Abramoff client -- helping the Prime Minister in a campaign to paint a political rival as an Islamic radical, RAW STORY has found.

Amy Ridenour, the president of the nonprofit National Center for Public Policy Research, denies taking money from Abramoff or Malaysia to write the article. But the recent admission by Prime Minister Mahathir bin Mohamad that a $2.2m payment was made to Abramoff to arrange a meeting with President Bush may suggest that the Center has deeper ties. . . .

In 2001, Ridenour penned an editorial titled "The U.S. Must Tread Carefully to Avoid Creating More Fundamentalist Islamic Governments" in which she touted Malaysia as a "prosperous, stable and democratic state" and smeared Mahathir opponent Anwar Ibrahim as an Islamic radical. . . .

Ridenour's article came amidst a climate of political unrest in Malaysia. Anwar had recently been sentenced to nine years in prison on sodomy and corruption charges. Some of the charges were later questioned after witnesses recanted confessions; the allegations were seen as a political response to rallies Anwar led that called for Matathir's resignation and for reforms. One such rally drew 100,000 people, who marched on the Prime Minister's residence. Soon thereafter, Anwar was arrested.