The lobbyist, a major GOP fundraiser called Stephen Payne, this week was asked to resign from a Department of Homeland Security advisory panel after he was surreptitiously videotaped by the London Sunday Times. In excerpts of the tape posted by the newspaper, Payne offers to arrange meetings for an exiled former president of Kazakhstan with senior U.S. administration officials in return for a six-figure fee, including a quarter-million-dollar donation to the $200 million fundraising effort for the George W. Bush presidential library and museum.

Yikes Yogi if it ain’t shades of deja vu!

Ex-Wife of Pardoned Financier Pledged Money to Clinton Library

How much do it cost for a pardon? –pardons apps at the lil botique pardon office @ DOJ be backed up from the Clinton years. Lots of celebs with money to burn on lawyuhs to make a pardon application an eighth grader could write’cept for the letters of rec from the well heeled and uber Beltway connected.

Back way back to Feb. 9, 2001

The Congressional committee looking into former President Bill Clinton’s last-minute pardon of the financier Marc Rich was told today that Mr. Rich’s former wife, Denise, had pledged ”an enormous sum of money” for Mr. Clinton’s presidential library.

[Huh? A lil socialite lady who done wrote songs for Patti Lebelle and shows up at the Puff Daddy of many babies’ parties on Long Island regularly, and she done refused to testify to da Congress.]

But little else emerged about the pledge because Ms. Rich refused to testify, citing her constitutional protection against self-incrimination.

Today’s confrontational hearing also focused on questions about whether the senior Justice Department official who weighed in on the Rich pardon had been influenced by conversations he had with Mr. Rich’s lawyer about becoming attorney general in a Gore administration.

The official, Eric H. Holder Jr., deputy attorney general, said he had twice told colleagues he was ”neutral” on the pardon issue. But it was unclear whether some of these discussions had taken place before the outcome of the election had been determined.

The committee’s chairman, Representative Dan Burton, Republican of Indiana, pointedly raised the possibility of a ”quid pro quo” by asking Mr. Holder whether he had ever sought the help of Mr. Quinn, a longtime close adviser to former Vice President Al Gore, in becoming attorney general in a Gore administration.

”You wanted something from Mr. Quinn — the attorney general’s job,” Mr. Burton said. ”And he wanted something from you — a pardon for Marc Rich. That’s a quid pro quo.”

Mr. Holder acknowledged having made mistakes but said, ”My actions in this matter were in no way determined by my desire to become A.G.”

That’d be Obama’s Holder now.

And more deja and more vu:

After Mining Deal, Financier Donated to Clinton

Late on Sept. 6, 2005, a private plane carrying the Canadian mining financier Frank Giustra touched down in Almaty, a ruggedly picturesque city in southeast Kazakhstan. Several hundred miles to the west a fortune awaited: highly coveted deposits of uranium that could fuel nuclear reactors around the world. And Mr. Giustra was in hot pursuit of an exclusive deal to tap them.

Unlike more established competitors, Mr. Giustra was a newcomer to uranium mining in Kazakhstan, a former Soviet republic. But what his fledgling company lacked in experience, it made up for in connections. Accompanying Mr. Giustra on his luxuriously appointed MD-87 jet that day was a former president of the United States, Bill Clinton.

Upon landing on the first stop of a three-country philanthropic tour, the two men were whisked off to share a sumptuous midnight banquet with Kazakhstan’s president, Nursultan A. Nazarbayev, whose 19-year stranglehold on the country has all but quashed political dissent.

Mr. Nazarbayev walked away from the table with a propaganda coup, after Mr. Clinton expressed enthusiastic support for the Kazakh leader’s bid to head an international organization that monitors elections and supports democracy. Mr. Clinton’s public declaration undercut both American foreign policy and sharp criticism of Kazakhstan’s poor human rights record by, among others, Mr. Clinton’s wife, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York.

[Whoops!]

The monster deal stunned the mining industry, turning an unknown shell company into one of the world’s largest uranium producers in a transaction ultimately worth tens of millions of dollars to Mr. Giustra, analysts said.

Just months after the Kazakh pact was finalized, Mr. Clinton’s charitable foundation received its own windfall: a $31.3 million donation from Mr. Giustra that had remained a secret until he acknowledged it last month. The gift, combined with Mr. Giustra’s more recent and public pledge to give the William J. Clinton Foundation an additional $100 million, secured Mr. Giustra a place in Mr. Clinton’s inner circle, an exclusive club of wealthy entrepreneurs in which friendship with the former president has its privileges.

Mr. Clinton’s Kazakhstan visit, the only one of his post-presidency, appears to have been arranged hastily. The United States Embassy got last-minute notice that the president would be making “a private visit,” said a State Department official, who said he was not authorized to speak on the record.

Indeed, in December 2005, Mr. Nazarbayev won another election, which the security organization itself said was marred by an “atmosphere of intimidation” and “ballot-box stuffing.”

After Mr. Nazarbayev won with 91 percent of the vote, Mr. Clinton sent his congratulations. “Recognizing that your work has received an excellent grade is one of the most important rewards in life,” Mr. Clinton wrote in a letter released by the Kazakh embassy. Last September, just weeks after Kazakhstan held an election that once again failed to meet international standards, Mr. Clinton honored Mr. Nazarbayev by inviting him to his annual philanthropic conference.

Within 48 hours of Mr. Clinton’s departure from Almaty on Sept. 7, Mr. Giustra got his deal. UrAsia signed two memorandums of understanding that paved the way for the company to become partners with Kazatomprom in three mines.

A Profitable Sale

Records show that Mr. Giustra donated the $31.3 million to the Clinton Foundation in the months that followed in 2006, but neither he nor a spokesman for Mr. Clinton would say exactly when.

In September 2006, Mr. Giustra co-produced a gala 60th birthday for Mr. Clinton that featured stars like Jon Bon Jovi and raised about $21 million for the Clinton Foundation.

In February 2007, a company called Uranium One agreed to pay $3.1 billion to acquire UrAsia. Mr. Giustra, a director and major shareholder in UrAsia, would be paid $7.05 per share for a company that just two years earlier was trading at 10 cents per share.

Both Mr. Clinton and Mr. Giustra at first denied that any such meeting occurred. Mr. Giustra also denied ever arranging for Kazakh officials to meet with Mr. Clinton. Wednesday, after The Times told them that others said a meeting, in Mr. Clinton’s home, had in fact taken place, both men acknowledged it.

“You are correct that I asked the president to meet with the head of Kazatomprom,” Mr. Giustra said. “Mr. Dzhakishev asked me in February 2007 to set up a meeting with former President Clinton to discuss the future of the nuclear energy industry.” Mr. Giustra said the meeting “escaped my memory until you raised it.”

Wednesday, Mr. Clinton’s spokesman, Ben Yarrow, issued what he called a “correction,” saying: “Today, Mr. Giustra told our office that in February 2007, he brought Mr. Dzhakishev from Kazatomprom to meet with President Clinton to discuss the future of nuclear energy.”

Bush Library; Clinton Library; Clinton Foundation. Dirty Money is the source.

Just struck me that this is not the same as KylerBoy saying he knows that any other people never seriously considered putting Patrick Fitzgerald on a list. They may have tried but failed.

When Karl says that he was certain that he did not,

have any conversations with anyone in the White House — or in the Justice Department –

Does an e-mail or text message or hand-written note count as a “conversation”? To an expert parser like Rove, such distinctions can be important.

Of course, they’ll blame it all on Bill Clinton, who had to point out, “It depends on what the meaning of ‘is’ is.”

Bob in HI

As a result of the raids, Ms. Katz said, the F.B.I. has “essentially shut down his office and made it impossible for the office to carry out its function.”

That seems like a benefit of keeping him.