It was a story of connections. But were they real?
“Hillary’s Mystery Money Men,” first appeared on the website the Real News Project on Oct. 18.
The story was then reprinted in the Nov. 5 issue of The Nation and it has circulated widely on the Internet.
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It either opens a window on a significant shift of a controversial Republican money man to the Democratic camp, or it overstates the actions of a hedge-fund savvy financier who may have been hedging his bets by contributing to several candidates.
The piece by Russ Baker and Adam Federman argues that “notorious financier Alan Quasha” was a secret force behind the presidential campaign of New York’s Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Quasha’s involvement would be significant because he was the head of Harken Energy in 1986 when it bailed out Spectrum 7 Energy Corp., a failing oil company headed by George W. Bush. Harken is now known as HKN Inc.
The rescue of the company gave Bush some needed money and set the stage for his lucrative time as a managing partner of the Texas Rangers. After that, he became governor of Texas before becoming president.
Consequently, it would seem that a man who made the Bush presidency a Republican reality is now backing Clinton, a Democrat, for president.
As proof, Baker and Federman note that Quasha has contributed to Clinton.
Beyond that another one of Quasha’s companies, Carret Asset Management, hired Terry McAuliffe after he stepped down as Democratic chairman in 2005. McAuliffe left that company after becoming national chair of Clinton’s presidential campaign.
The authors suggest that Quasha could prove to be a problem for the Clinton campaign, the second coming of Norman Hsu. That “financier” raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for Clinton before he was revealed to be a fugitive from the law.
“The very premise of your article is wrong,” Quasha wrote in response to the story. “Not only am I not a secret force behind the Clinton campaign, I am not even supporting Hillary Clinton for president. … I am openly backing Mitt Romney for president.”
(Federal campaign contribution records show that Quasha has given $5,200 to Romney. He has contributed to $4,600 to Clinton, $2,300 to former New York Mayor Rudy Guiliani, a Republican, and $2,300 apiece to Democratic senators Barack Obama and Christopher Dodd. His wife, Ilona Nemeth Quasha, has given to Clinton.)
In his response to the story, Quasha wrote that his contributions to the Clinton campaign were made at the request of Hassan Nemazee, his business partner and a key Democratic contributor.
Nemazee also invested in Harken and he is a co-chair of Carret.
Quasha also said he gave to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee because Nemazee is the finance chairman of that group.
And Quasha also stated that it was Nemazee who hired McAuliffe
In his response after the story appeared, McAuliffe takes the authors to task on several points. He alleges he did not receive $18 million by selling his interest in Global Crossing, an interest that had cost $100,000.
And he states that he had not “intentionally” omitted his connection to Carret in his memoir. Rather, he states, the memoir stopped before he got to his hiring at Carret.
Baker and Federman fire back, saying they had made all sorts of good-faith efforts to contact Quasha and McAuliffe. And they state that statements from other sources in the story were accurate.
There have been no new salvos from either side.
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