Curt Weldon’s FamilyRep. Curt Weldon (R-PA) thinks it was inappropriate for his opponent to bring his daughter to Washington so she could receive cancer treatments.
But it was okay for Weldon to bring his daughter to Washington to make money off her dad? Perhaps now is a good time to remind everyone of Weldon’s special relationship with his daughter.
The LA Times broke the story back in 2004 that Weldon’s daughter Karen, then in her late twenties, ran a lobbying firm that was raking in approximately $1 million a year - and by some strange coincidence, her three main clients all had developed a relationship with her father, Curt.
The clients? There was:
— “a plum $240,000 contract to promote the good works of a wealthy Serbian family that had been linked to accused war criminal Slobodan Milosevic.” Weldon and his daughter worked, without any apparent success, to get them visas.
— a Russian aerospace manufacturer who paid Karen Weldon’s firm $20,000 per month to promote its technologies, which included its “flying saucer.” Her firm also was to get ” a 10 percent finder’s fee if the company ‘[struck] a deal from a lead supplied’” by them. That little bonus had to be taken out of the subsequent contract, however, when they realized that it was illegal for a lobbyist to take a cut of a government contract. Weldon worked hard to win a contract for the firm.
— a $500,000/year contract from a Russian natural gas company called Itera International Energy Corp. to “‘create good public relations.’” She won the contract shortly before her father held a dinner at the Library Congress to honor the company’s chairman.
Weldon needs to search harder for that moral high ground.
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