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Sheldon Adelson: Wild card

By KENNETH P. VOGEL | POLITICO | April 31, 2015

LAS VEGAS — Luxury buses pulled up to the front entrance of the private hangar here where Sheldon Adelson keeps his corporate jets, dropping off Republican donors to hear Jeb Bush speak.

But Adelson arrived late — and in more extravagant style, pulling right into the massive structure in his Maybach limousine with dark tinted windows trailed by a second Maybach carrying glaring bodyguards.

The grand entrance was vintage Adelson. And it kicked off a Republican Jewish Conference four-day retreat this past weekend in which the 80-year-old casino mogul wowed his guests with a distinct blend of megawatt GOP politics and Vegas opulence, keeping them — and the political class, as a whole — waiting and wondering about what would come next.

The guessing game is creating anxiety among Republican Party elites eager to avoid a repeat of 2012, when Adelson and his family dumped more than $20 million into a super PAC supporting Newt Gingrich’s long-shot GOP presidential campaign. The Adelsons went on to give even more money to help Mitt Romney, but by the time he was the party’s nominee, the damage was done. The infusion to boost Gingrich roiled and prolonged the primary and hurt the party’s chances of winning the White House.

When Adelson summoned Bush and Govs. Chris Christie of New Jersey, John Kasich of Ohio and Scott Walker of Wisconsin to Las Vegas for the annual spring RJC meeting, GOP stalwarts hoped it might mean the megadonor was committing to get behind one of the establishment favorites for 2016, and not going rogue again.

But interviews with Adelson intimates, an analysis of his political alliances and reporting from the Las Vegas retreat suggest that the headstrong billionaire isn’t a new man, but the same gambler he has always been: a true wild card.

“If anybody tells you what Sheldon is going to do, or how or why he is going to do it, they don’t know Sheldon. Sheldon makes up his own mind,” said Ari Fleischer, a longtime Adelson confidant. Fleischer, an RJC board member, was scheduled to lead a board discussion about what Republicans are doing to improve on their 2012 effort.

The possibility that Adelson might use his checkbook to upend the 2016 primary “is worrisome,” Fleischer conceded, though he stressed the same could be said of other very wealthy Republicans.

The new big-money political landscape — in which a handful of donors can dramatically alter a campaign with just a check or two — explains both the eagerness of busy governors to make pilgrimages to Las Vegas, and the obsession with divining Adelson’s 2016 leanings.

All manner of national media flocked to Adelson’s Venetian casino and resort hotel, which hosted the RJC meeting. But reporters were kept away from Adelson by coalition staff, as well as casino and personal security, and his team turned down interview requests, including for an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

As Adelson whizzed around his Venetian kingdom on a motorized scooter during the retreat, he was often trailed by GOP operatives, politicians and fellow donors eager to assess his state of mind, advise him on what he should do or just lavish him with praise and gratitude.

The son of poor Jewish immigrants, Adelson was raised in a working-class Massachusetts town. He amassed a fortune estimated at $40 billion today by following his gut and bucking conventional wisdom, forging a business- and family-travel industry in Las Vegas and rushing into the uncertain middle-class gambling market in the Macao region of China.

He donates huge sums to Israeli causes and has ramped up his domestic political giving in recent years, culminating in an unprecedented $100 million spending spree in 2012. Despite his paltry success rate, he has said he intends to spend even more in future campaigns.

At a closed-press Saturday night gala, Adelson quipped that he couldn’t oblige a request from the RJC for a $50 million contribution because the group’s executive director, Matt Brooks, didn’t have change for $1 billion.

Neither Adelson’s speech nor his private conversations over the weekend provided those closest to him with any clearer sense of which way his gut was leading him in the 2016 presidential race, leaving all grasping at clues.

“His priority is Israel. So, if you look at his vetting process, I haven’t sat in any of the meetings, but I assure you that the first question is ‘tell me where you are on the safety and security of the state of Israel,’” said GOP bundler Fred Zeidman, a Houston private equity investor who is friendly with Adelson.

All the prospective candidates who turned up in Vegas stressed their support for Israel in speeches and private meetings with Adelson. There were several veiled swipes at GOP politicians and prospective presidential candidates with more noninterventionist foreign policy perspectives, like Sens. Rand Paul of Kentucky and Ted Cruz of Texas, who are considered unlikely candidates for Adelson’s support. Yet most of the governors who were invited to Vegas have fairly limited foreign policy chops.

Walker conceded as much in a Saturday speech, explaining foreign affairs is “not an area that governors typically look at,” though he mentioned that he is commander in chief of the Wisconsin National Guard. He also sought to forge cultural common ground with RJCers by explaining that he lights a menorah at the governor’s mansion during Hannukah and named one of his two sons Matthew — which means “gift from God” in Hebrew.

Christie’s efforts at playing the Israel card backfired when he inadvertently used a term [occupied territories] for disputed Middle East territory during a Saturday speech that offended Adelson and some of his guests. The New Jersey governor apologized in a private meeting in the casino mogul’s Venetian office shortly afterward.

The foreign policy deficit may, in fact, be a side effect of another factor Adelson has identified as important, according to sources close to him — “executive experience.” That could potentially rule out prospective candidates with more hawkish foreign policy attitudes, like Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida.

Kasich of Ohio played straight to Adelson.

“Hey, listen, Sheldon, thanks for inviting me,” Kasich told Adelson during a Saturday luncheon speech.

“Sheldon and I were kind of talking about his background. I come from a little town outside of Pittsburgh called McKees Rocks — it was very blue collar,” Kasich said, in one of several Adelson-related non sequiturs.

Even when he discussed his effort to clamp down on prescription drug dissemination, he said Adelson — who took as many as 25 medications in a day in 2001 to manage pain from a neurological condition, and whose wife, Miriam Adelson, is a physician who specializes in treating drug addiction — “is someone who knows about this.”

Some possible candidates who seem to meet Adelson’s criteria either weren’t invited or didn’t come to Las Vegas, including former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee. He has both executive experience and a track record of supporting Israel, but seems to face electability hurdles similar to those that hamstrung Gingrich.

Yet late last year, when Adelson at a Zionist Organization of America dinner presented the Adelson Defender of Israel award to Huckabee, he called the ordained Southern Baptist minister “a great politician,” as well as “a great person, a great American and a great Zionist.” Since then, the two have met privately twice — once with their spouses — and are “very good friends [who] share a deep commitment to Israel,” according to a source close to Huckabee.

Mel Sembler — a Florida mall developer, former U.S. ambassador to Italy and major GOP rainmaker — in 2012 urged Adelson to halt his Gingrich super PAC funding stream for the good of the party, as did fellow RJC board member Zeidman. As Sembler boarded a bus taking donors from Adelson’s Palazzo hotel to the Bush speech at the private hangar Thursday night, he suggested that Adelson may have recalibrated his approach based on the 2012 failure. “Sheldon has his own mind, but he’s learned. He’s learned a lot. He’s matured.”

Plus, Zeidman suggested that Adelson’s personal feelings on the various 2016 possibilities won’t factor into his decision as they did in 2012. “None of them have a 20-year history like Newt Gingrich did,” Zeidman said of the former House speaker’s relationship with Adelson.

The goal of hearing from the candidates was to start a vetting process that will produce a consensus — one that includes Adelson — of the best candidate, according to Sembler.

“We’re going to talk about that one,” he said. “We’re going to support the best candidate we can possibly get. That’s who we’re going to support.”

Adelson may have done that in his closed-door meetings with the candidates (he also met privately with House Speaker John Boehner, who was in town for other business). But when it came to the official RJC sessions, the mogul was often late and frequently seemed more interested in kibitzing than in official business. “He mingles pretty good,” remarked Rep. Billy Long of Missouri, as he left a Friday evening Shabbat dinner at which the Israeli ambassador to the U.S. spoke.

Adelson — who is not known as a morning person and also was nursing a cold — skipped Saturday morning speeches from Walker and former Ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton. He entered the hall midway through Christie’s address, walking with the help of a bodyguard to a reserved seat in the front row as Christie talked about his governing style.

He showed up 20 minutes late to a Friday morning RJC board meeting, zipping up to the entrance on his scooter flanked by two Hebrew-speaking bodyguards, one of whom helped him to his feet to walk into the meeting. As other board members queued up to greet him, Adelson perused the breakfast buffet of bagels, lox, pastries and eggs, using his fingers to sample a pinch of shredded cheddar cheese in a serving bowl. The spread was certified kosher by Rabbi Tzvi Braunstein and the Chabad of Southern Nevada, according to an agenda.

“Who let you in here?” he demanded when POLITICO approached. “You can’t come in. This is a private meeting,” he said, rejecting a question about whether he’d try to avoid a costly and protracted primary this time around. “You can ask anything you want, but you’ll have to talk to the wall, because I’m not talking to you,” he said, as one of his bodyguards stepped in, ushered POLITICO from the room, and later called hotel security to bar the reporter from the adjacent hallways.

At the meeting, board members got a briefing on Senate races and were informed of efforts by the group to assist hawkish allies including Sens. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, and GOP Senate nominee Bill Cassidy of Louisiana in their 2014 Senate primaries. The weekend’s private events drew appearances by Reps. James Lankford of Oklahoma and Cory Gardner of Colorado, both running for Senate, as well as Rep. Sean Duffy of Wisconsin.

Other closed-press sessions included a scotch tasting, a poker tournament and a panel on “the lessons of 2012 and the current path forward for the GOP.” Then there were VIP discussions and photo ops with former Vice President Dick Cheney, Walker and Kasich, four Jewish prayer services for the more devout, and a Saturday night gala featuring a speech by Cheney. He warned against “what I sense to be an increasing strain of isolationism, if I could put it in those terms, in our own party. It’s not taking over, by any means, but there is without question a body of thought now that’s supported by many Republicans and some candidates that the United States can afford to turn its back on that part of the world.”

Cheney said “it’s crucial” to have candidates with muscular foreign policies and for Republicans to “take back the Senate and take back the White House so we can deal with what has been developing” around the world.

Regardless of any shared ideology on foreign policy or other issues, an adviser to former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum suggested it’s distasteful for the party’s prospective candidates to be flocking to court Adelson.

“It sets a bad precedent for a billionaire to say ‘come hither’ this early on, and some people actually do,” said John Brabender, who was a leading strategist on Santorum’s 2012 presidential campaign and is helping him build a political foundation that could serve as a springboard to a 2016 campaign. Santorum, who is an ardent defender of Israel, didn’t attend the RJC meeting, and Brabender questioned the optics for the possible 2016 rivals who did. “I don’t know why any prospective candidate wants to be seen as the mainstream Republican, because that’s got negative connotations among most Republican primary voters.”

The narrative that holds Adelson went rogue in 2012 and now is realigning himself with the GOP mainstream is flawed, asserted RJC president Matt Brooks, who works closely with Adelson. “The notion that somehow he was a rube and got duped and made awful investments in 2012, and has all these lessons to learn, is misreading what happened,” said Brooks. “The fact is, Republicans got wiped out all across the board. So it’s not like everybody else won and he was the outlier who put his money into losing causes.”

Except that Adelson is distinct from other conservative megadonors in his willingness to choose sides in primaries, then go it alone, seemingly immune from peer pressure. The only conservative donors who rival his spending power, Charles and David Koch, mostly avoid major involvement in primary fights and focus instead on building consensus among a wide network of donors. Plus, they try — increasingly unsuccessfully — to keep a lower profile.

Still, there is growing overlap between Koch world and the Adelson-RJC crew, with Adelson attending a 2012 Koch donor seminar and Tim Phillips, president of the Kochs’ Americans for Prosperity group, attending his first RJC meeting last weekend.

Democrats have mostly kept their deepest pockets in line, thanks to a smaller universe of super PACs and megadonors, and greater ideological unity — not to mention the rallying of deep pockets behind early presumed front-runner Hillary Clinton.

“The parties have to some degree switched procedures,” said Fleischer. “Republicans used to be the hierarchical, organized party.” Now, though, “Democrats, because they have the White House, and because so many of them are lined up behind Hillary, if she runs, are the hierarchical party, at least for the moment.”

Still, he said, all it takes is one headstrong billionaire to throw everything into chaos, and nobody can stop it.

“If you think that people like Sheldon or George Soros or Tom Steyer are going to be influenced by the thinking of others, you don’t know the mindset of highly successful, entrepreneurial individuals who have made it their own way their whole lives,” said Fleischer. “At the end of the day, these individuals are going to do what they think is the best right thing to do, and it may not necessarily be reflective of the good of the greater party.”

Also on POLITICO:

2016ers woo Vegas donor crowd

Christie apologizes for ‘occupied territories’

Kasich bonds with Adelson in Vegas

May 5, 2015 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Militarism, Wars for Israel | , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Top Jewish Non-Profit Heads Leading Iran Sanctions Call

By Marsha B. Cohen | LobeLog | December 19, 2013

The Forward recently released its annual list of top-earning heads of Jewish non-profit organizations and the results of an independent analysis revealing not only that they earned more than the top leadership of non-Jewish nonprofits, but that several were egregiously overpaid.

Not noted by the analysts is that most of them spend a considerable portion of their time clamoring for more and stricter sanctions against Iran, something that has little to do with their stated organizational mission statements that include social justice, equality, human rights, and the well-being of the Jewish people.

Several of these de facto Iran sanctions lobbyists earn more than the President of the United States ($400,000 per year).  Five earn over half a million dollars a year.

Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean and founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center (SWC), #2 on the Forward list, was paid $751,054 in 2012. Hier was ranked “by far the most overpaid CEO” according to the Forward‘s Salary Survey, earning more than twice what a head of an organization the size of SWC is expected to make. The Wiesenthal Center’s Museum of Tolerance opened in 2003 “to challenge visitors to confront bigotry and racism and to understand the Holocaust in both historic and contemporary contexts.” But illustrating the old adage that “when you’ve got a hammer, everything looks like a nail,” Hier has been in the forefront of promoting analogies between contemporary Iran and Nazi Germany. Amid warnings that a 2006 rumor that Jews in Iran would be forced to wear yellow badges was untrue, Hier’s corroboration of its veracity reportedly served as the basis for the Canadian National Post publishing the bogus claim as though it were fact. (Jim Lobe was among the first to spot and discredit the National Post story, leading to its retraction.)

Hier has repeatedly denounced the idea of negotiations with Iran, mocked Iranian leaders, and accused Iran of emulating North Korea in its negotiations with the 6 world powers known as the P5+1. He has also placed the SWC in the forefront of opposition to a negotiated deal with Iran and in favor of imposing new sanctions as soon as possible.

Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) is #5 on the list with a 2012 salary of $688,280. Forward‘s Salary Survey found Foxman to be overpaid by 70%. The National Director of the ADL since 1987, Foxman has been accused in recent years of diverting the ADL from its self-described mission of fighting anti-Semitism and all forms of bigotry in the U.S. and abroad to putting the ADL “firmly on the side of bigotry and intolerance.” From dabbling briefly in Islamophobia during the Park 51 “Ground Zero Mosque” debate three years ago to the detriment of his organization, Foxman has since attempted to redeem himself by climbing on the Iran sanctions bandwagon.

After what was supposed to be an unpublicized meeting between the White House and the heads of prominent hawkish Jewish groups, Foxman, who was among them, seemed to confirm reports that Jewish organizational leaders, himself included, were willing to take a “time out” from vigorously campaigning for new and more crushing Iran sanctions. Less than two weeks later, however, Foxman blasted the Obama administration for an agreement Foxman claimed would not only roll back the sanctions regime prematurely but also “legitimize Iran as a threshold nuclear state.” While he said he wanted to give the Obama administration “a chance to demonstrate that they could make real progress on this issue,” Foxman took issue with “some of the points of the tentative agreement to be acted upon November 20 in Geneva.” Refraining from enacting additional sanctions was a “luxury” the U.S. did not have,” Foxman said.

On Dec. 6 Foxman told Haaretz that he was embarrassed “by how our government has accepted the threats of blackmail by the Iranians against even discussing new sanctions.” Berating the Obama administration’s “hysterical” reaction to the prospect of new anti-Iran sanctions, Foxman fumed, “I would have liked them to tell Tehran: we are a democracy, and you can’t tell our legislators or us what we can or cannot discuss.” Foxman has never expressed criticism of Israeli leaders for telling Americans and U.S. legislators what they may and may not discuss. On Thursday, Foxman came out in strong support of the Nuclear Weapon Free Iran Act which the White House has vowed to veto.

Matthew Brooks, the executive director of the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) since 1990 (#7), received a salary of $563,372 in 2012, an overpayment of 93% according to the Salary Survey. A cursory glance at the RJC website reveals the organization’s vitriol against Iran diplomacy and Democrats, foremost among them President Obama. Several times a week the RJC sends out e-mails touting the need for more sanctions and skewering the notion of any diplomatic approach to Iran. The RJC’s Chairman of the Board of Directors is multi-billionaire casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, who recently proposed that the U.S. attack Iran with nuclear weapons.

Howard Kohr, the Executive Director of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) since 1996 and its CEO since 2013 (#8), pocketed at least $556,232 in 2012 from AIPAC, and, according to AIPAC’s IRS 990, $184,410 in additional compensation. While the public face and voice of AIPAC is usually its president (a philanthropic board of directors activist chosen for a two-year term), it is Kohr who actually runs the organization.

During Kohr’s 17-year tenure, “the Iranian threat” moved to the forefront of the AIPAC policy agenda. AIPAC was a driving force behind the formative Iran Libya Sanctions Act of 1996 and has claimed credit for the passage of the Iran Refined Petroleum Sanctions Act in 2009. In 2011, Kohr dismissed the “the Arab Spring” as a diversion and called upon AIPAC activists to refocus members of Congress on the centrality of the Iran issue. In June 2012, AIPAC declared the talks between Iran and the P5+1 a failure and demanded the acceleration of  “crippling economic sanctions” by Congress.

AIPAC has since maintained its support for tightening sanctions, notwithstanding the historic Nov. 24 interim agreement between Iran and world powers. An AIPAC Policy Memo issued on Nov. 25  insisted that Iran should not be allowed any uranium enrichment capability whatsoever — a non-starter for Iran. It also demanded that Congress press the administration to fully enforce existing sanctions, prohibit any increase in Iranian oil sales, limit the repatriation of Iranian funds to $3-4 billion, sanction companies attempting to re-engage with Iran’s economy, and closely monitor humanitarian aid destined for Iran.

Kohr recently suggested that AIPAC could back away from confronting the Obama administration on sanctions and instead direct its energies toward shaping the terms of the final deal with Iran. Nevertheless, two of AIPAC’s favorite senators from both parties, Robert Menendez (D-NJ) and Mark Kirk (R-IL), are at this moment actively working with AIPAC to push for new sanctions, notwithstanding the warnings by the Obama administration that additional sanctions will violate the interim accord and put the entire diplomatic process at risk. In the House, Steny Hoyer (D-MD) and Eric Cantor (R-VA), both among the top recipients of largess from AIPAC-linked pro-Israel PACs, have also threatened to impose new sanctions on Iran, though Hoyer appears to have acquiesced to appeals from the administration to hold off for now (see Jim Lobe’s recent piece).

AIPAC also pays $466,912 salary to Vice CEO Richard Fishman, who was managing director until 2013. Fishman also serves as executive director of the America Israel Educational Foundation (AIEF), a tax exempt organization that brings members of Congress on “educational” junkets to Israel.

David Harris, executive director of the American Jewish Committee (AJC) for the past 23 years (#11), also tops the half million mark with a salary of $504,445. Iran has also moved to the center stage of the AJC’s agenda in recent years. Harris’s niche in a crowded field is alleged Iranian support for terrorism. On Jul. 1, a few weeks after Hassan Rouhani was elected as Iran’s new President, Harris charged that Rouhani was implicated in the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish Center in Buenos Aires; this was more than a week after Alberto Nisman, the Argentine prosecutor in the AMIA case, had informed Times of Israel editor David Horovitz that Rouhani was neither under indictment nor accused of any involvement. Harris was the first of Jewish head honchos invited to the White House in late October to deny that any agreement had been reached with Jewish groups about lessening their pressure for sanctions.

January 24, 2015 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment