May 16, 2008

John McCain vows: no foreign agents on campaign team (Juan Hernandez?)

The John McCain campaign is requiring all their staff members, volunteers, and vendors to disclose lobbying links and the like:

No person working for the Campaign may be a registered lobbyist or foreign agent, or receive compensation for any such activity.

I'm going to guess that "foreign agent" is meant in the legalistic sense, i.e., someone would have to be registered with the Department of Justice as a Registered Foreign Agent under FARA to qualify: usdoj.gov/criminal/fara. The three top campaigns already include registered foreign agents.

The new McCain edict brings us to Juan Hernandez, a McCain staff member who's his Hispanic outreach director. He's also a former cabinet-level official with the Mexican government who worked directly with Vicente Fox and he's appeared on several cable TV shows promoting a "free flow" of people between Mexico and the U.S.

McCain was asked about him a few months back but Hernandez was still doing outreach for McCain last I heard. He's also been a Senior Fellow at the McCain-linked think tank the Reform Institute for a couple years.

However, a search of the FARA database (which is flawed) shows no matches for his name, so I'm going to guess he's going to continue to be associated with the campaign. Until such time, of course, as people start asking McCain why someone who presumably took an oath to the Mexican government is now doing outreach for him to U.S. voters.

Posted to Politics at May 16, 2008 12:05 PM