[Breitbart] Foreign money flowing into Washington is keeping the United States in prolonged wars, and most Americans are not even aware of it, according to Dr. Ben Freeman, director of the Foreign Influence Transparency Initiative at the Center for International Policy.'War is our business, and business is good.'
"Right now, U.S. foreign policy is for sale ‐ not to the lowest bidder, but to the highest bidder. War is a business. And our wars are not our own. They never have been," he said Wednesday at an event in Washington, DC, sponsored by the Committee for a Responsible Foreign Policy.
Freeman and his team researched for six months Saudi Arabia’s 2017 lobbying activities in Washington, DC, including meetings, emails, contacts with journalists, and political campaign contributions, and the potential effect those activities had on foreign policy.
They found that Saudi Arabia had hired more than two dozen firms in that year with more than a hundred agents working on their behalf. In 2017, those agents had more than 2,500 contacts during this time, the majority of them with members of the Senate, news media, and the House‐in that order.
Freeman said many of the contacts were related to arms sales, foreign military sales, and some of the votes that were held to stymie those arms sales. He said sometimes the lobbying is done by former members of Congress who earn hundreds of thousands of dollars to lobby former colleagues.
"Every time there is a vote on arms sales or anything related to Yemen, this lobby goes bananas," he said. "And we can see the activity on the days that there are these votes. In some cases, they visit almost every single office on the day of those votes."
Freeman said they also found more than $2.2 million in 2017 campaign contributions to both Democrats and Republicans. The list was a "who’s who" in the Democrat and Republican Party, he said.
The top Saudi campaign contributions were to then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, totaling $94,496 because some donations in late 2016 were included, he said. He said Trump got "a little over $10,000" from Saudi Arabia.
And they found 12 instances where contact with a lobbyist pushing for or against a vote and a campaign contribution happened on the same day.
"In other words, a lobbying firm walks into a member of Congress’s office and says, ’I need you to vote a certain way on this upcoming vote on an arms sale,’ and then later that day ... they say, ’Oh, by the way, here’s a $2,000 check to your campaign. Good luck on re-election, buddy,'" Freeman said.
He said the number of contacts expands exponentially if the time window is expanded, for example, to two weeks before a vote.
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