(WMR) -- In a case of “premature election-action,” the McCain campaign named Washington über-lobbyist William E. Timmons, Sr. as the head of his presidential transition team. Timmons, according to a report in Time magazine, is being assisted by former Navy Secretary and 9/11 Commission cover-up co-conspirator John Lehman.

The public selection of a transition team head prior to the election is practically unprecedented in modern American politics, another indication that the American public is being psychologically primed for another stolen presidential election and the fait accompli of a McCain-Palin administration prior to the November 4 election.

Timmons, along with his son, have built up Timmons & Company as a deep-pocketed lobbying firm in a city full of lobbying firms. Timmons represents anything but change for a McCain administration. In fact, Timmons is tied to all the bêtes noires of the Republican Party over the last generation and a half: Watergate, Tongsun Park and Koreagate, and the Ford administration and its two top advisers, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. Timmons was Richard Nixon’s congressional liaison who tried to derail the impeachment of Nixon for the Watergate scandal.

Timmons was also very close to Nixon and Ford Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. In 1980, a number of Ronald Reagan campaign aides were livid when Timmons became a top campaign aide to Reagan as deputy campaign manager for operations and convention manager. Timmons, who became a top oil industry lobbyist having counted the American Petroleum Institute among his top clients, was politically close to George H. W. Bush, who later became Reagan’s running mate.

The following is what muckraking journalist Jack Anderson wrote on July 14, 1980, about Timmons’ coming on board the Reagan campaign: “But it is Timmons’ work as a lobbyist that may prove to be a political liability to the Reagan campaign. While his penchant for rich and powerful clients would not disturb conservative Republicans, his devotion to their causes might not sit well with the moderates and Democrats Reagan needs to win over this fall.”

McCain has shown that, in choosing Timmons to head his transition team, he is catering to the wealthiest of Republicans and not to the moderates he needs to win over in November. The Palin selection was the first nail in McCain’s coffin with moderates, the selection of Timmons was the second.

The Nixon Library lists a number of Timmons’ papers and documents from the Nixon administration, including those dealing with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Laos, Vietnam (including meetings with Charles Colson), busing, the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) system being pushed by Washington Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson (whose office was a bevy of anti-Soviet aides who would become the top neocons in the Reagan and George W. Bush administrations), the Black Caucus, and Mutual and Balanced Force Reductions.

Perhaps not coincidentally, Timmons also became a top lobbyist for the office of the Governor of Alaska. Alaska is also a top oil producing state. Timmons’ clients have also included a number of utilities and natural gas companies, Standard Oil of Indiana, Northrop, Grumman, Chrysler, the National Rifle Association, recently-nationalized Freddie Mac, Visa USA, Anheuser-Busch, the American Council of Life Insurers, and the American Medical Association.

McCain, who bemoans the influence of lobbyists in Washington, has hypocritically appointed, quite prematurely, one of Washington’s most powerful Republican lobbyists as his transition team head. That fact, alone, represents one of the biggest outrages perpetrated by John McCain on the American electorate.

Timmons also brings his fair share of scandal baggage into the McCain team. On February 23, 2007, the Washington Post reported that Timmons was connected to Tongsun Park, the South Korean lobbyist whose Georgetown Club catered to the whims and tastes of Washington’s top politicians and policymakers during the 1970s.

The Post reported that Park and Timmons worked together to prevent the U.S. ouster of Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, who now sits in a French prison after being released and transferred to France after years of incarceration in a U.S. federal prison in Florida. Noriega was imprisoned for his involvement in narcotics smuggling into the United States. Noriega also was at the center of the Iran-contra scandal, providing weapons and money for CIA-supported Nicaraguan contras with money from the Colombian Medellin drug cartel. The scandal was directly tied to the office of then-Vice President George H. W. Bush and involved the elder Bush, National Security Adviser John Poindexter, Secretary of State George Schultz, Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams, White House operative Oliver North (code named “The Hammer”), CIA officers Duane “Dewey’ Clarridge and Clair George, and Mossad officers.

Park was sentenced last year to five years in prison for taking $2.5 million in UN “oil-for-food” revenues from Saddam Hussein to provide a back channel between Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz and UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali to ease UN sanctions on Iraq imposed after the U.S. “Desert Storm” attack on Iraq in 1991, following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. Aziz, like Noriega and Park, finds himself incarcerated and unable to reveal information that could be damaging to the Bushes and McCain’s transition team head. Timmons was a top adviser to George H. W. Bush’s 1988 presidential campaign and served on George W. Bush’s transition team in 2000. Timmons also advised Bob Dole in his 1996 presidential campaign.

In 2000, Timmons & Company former President Tom C. Korologos helped Defense Secretary-nominee Rumsfeld in his transition and Timmons ensured that Mitch Daniels from Indiana became the head of the Office of Management and Budget at the White House. Daniels is now the governor of Indiana. Korologos is married to former Reagan Labor Secretary Ann McLaughlin, the ex-wife of The McLaughlin Group’s host John McLaughlin. Korologos was appointed by George W. Bush as U.S. ambassador to Belgium.

Previously published in the Wayne Madsen Report.

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