Tuesday, February 26, 2008

JOHN MCCAIN

Team McCain Pushes Back Against Dean

The McCain camp held a conference call with Communications Director Jill Hazelbaker, Campaign Manager Rick Davis, and Trevor Potter, former FEC Chairman and John McCain 2008 General Counsel.

[By the way, how solid is the ground McCain is on when the guy making sure his FEC filings are on the up-and-up used to run the FEC?]

I joined in progress, and am fairly certain these comments were from Potter: "The bank was very clear on that yesterday, saying that they never recieved any collateral from us in the form of certificates from the matching funds program. It was clear that if any loan occurred, that no collateral in that form."

"The law does not establish any requirement that the FEC vote to allow someone out... We don't object to the commission voting, and they're welcome to do that. But we don't believe that it is required as a matter of law."

Q: Would have McCain have been able to get the loan without the possibility of matching funds?

Potter: "It's a hypothetical. We won't know. It's a question for what's inside the banker's brain, rather than inside our brain. We said, 'we are likely to withdraw from the system... if we can financially withdraw from that system, we will. The bank knew that was a possibility."

Rick Davis: "The way we read that wasn't a commitment for collateral. They're a bank, they're not in the business of running campaigns. They wanted to know 'what happens if.'"

Potter: "They had loaned us the money based on our projections of income and expenses. If we had put up the matching funds as collateral, we could have gotten a larger loan, probably twice the size."

Rick Davis: "We're not dealing with a vulnerability of law or ethics, we're dealing with a political issue. That's why I'm on this call - if was an issue of law, I would defer to Trevor. Obama started this attack, saying we were run by lobbyists. I would dare say that they have as many lobbyists on their campaign as we do. Then we had this hypocritical comment by Dean. We're happy to debate ethical standards and commitment to reform all day long."

Davis points out that McCain pushed for CFR after it had failed nine times. Once he was chair of the Indian Affairs Committee, he held hearings on Jack Abramoff. He went after Boeing on a procurement scandal in the defense budget.

"We hear a lot about change, but we see few people willing to spend their own political capital on actually changing things."

02/26 02:21 PMShare