George Soros, John McCain, and Immigration

Senator John McCain’s Institute for International Leadership, formed from the remains of his failed 2008 presidential campaign, has accepted large donations from individuals and institutions infamously known for:

• Supporting the Clinton Foundation;
• Providing shady speaking deals for former President Bill Clinton; and
• Having ties to radical open-borders advocacy groups.

The Daily Caller reports the veteran senator’s Institute has accepted more than $100,000 from OCP, S.A., a Moroccan state-owned phosphate company operating in the Western Sahara, a region that holds half of the world’s phosphate reserves (Morocco’s “white gold”). McCain has lavishly praised the King of Morocco, calling the country in 2011 a “positive example to governments across the Middle East and North Africa,” despite the fact that the monarchy seized Western Sahara in 1975. Since the occupation, Morocco has dominated the region by force in defiance of U.N. resolutions and declarations by other international bodies.

Charles Ortel, a retired Wall Street investment banker and philanthropy law expert, told the Daily Caller that “high government officials such as John McCain, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama should not get involved with vehicles like these where substantial sums can be funneled over time in ways that at best, reeks of impropriety” if not outright corruption.

Perhaps more troubling is the fact that McCain’s Institute has accepted contributions of as much as $100,000 from billionaire liberal activist-funder George Soros and from Teneo, a for-profit consulting firm whose corruption CRC covered during the 2016 election. Teneo has long helped enrich the Clintons through lucrative speaking events and business deals.

An improbable friendship developed between the Republican Senator and the liberal activist billionaire in the aftermath of a Savings & Loan industry scandal during the George H. W. Bush administration, when the two men bonded over campaign finance “reform.”

Immigration is another area where the senator and the liberal magnate agree to a certain extent. McCain famously crossed the aisle to work with Ted Kennedy on amnesty for illegal immigrants, while Soros has directed funds on a massive scale toward open border organizations that want to make it illegal for local police to cooperate with Immigration and Custom Enforcement. The latest success of these groups is a bill working its way through the California legislature that would make it a criminal offense for landlords to threaten to evict known undocumented tenants. The bill would also potentially punish business owners for cooperating with federal authorities.

These men’s ties should be troubling to Americans in general who support border security and safety, especially after the recent brutal murder of a seventeen-year-old Muslim girl in northern Virginia. The killing was not a hate crime, as many initially believed, but a road rage incident committed by Darwin Martinez Torres, an undocumented citizen of El Salvador.

McCain recently claimed no involvement with the institute bearing his name: “I am proud that the institute is named after me, but I have nothing to do with it.” Yet his campaign money launched the Institute, his wife continues to be involved in operations, and many of its staffers are his former campaign workers.