It would seem the Obama administration, which hasn’t had time to
hold conversations with senior military officials involved in
such a critical national security issue as the war in
Afghanistan, has been spending far more time assisting President
Barack Obama’s adopted hometown, Chicago,
than the White House has previously divulged, using the
President’s and White House senior staff’s presence at global
policy meetings to lobby foreign ministers, diplomats and members
of the International Olympic Committee.
This morning’s Wall Street Journal reported on
some of the heretofore unknown efforts undertaken by the Obama
White House to lobby “unaligned” nations involved in the
International Olympic Committee’s selection of the site for the
2016 Summer Olympic Games.
The money quote: “The Chicago backers have pinned their hopes in
part on winning the support of about a dozen African nations, a
bloc of traditionally unaligned votes at the IOC. The
administration has tried to make its case in conversations on the
sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly, at the Group of
20 Summit, during a Capitol reception with African diplomats and
in a video of Mr. Obama personally pitching African IOC
members.”
“I think it’s safe to say that this administration has been far
more involved in lobbying and efforting this bid than officials
here have led folks to believe,” says a staffer assigned to the
White House Counsel’s Office, who says that amount of time being
spent on strategizing and assisting Chicago2016, the
entity that was formed several years ago to begin the bidding
process, and which will ultimately be responsible for overseeing
the Olympics in Chicago should the city receive the bid , was an
issue that had counsel staff attempting to determine whether it
was appropriate for White House resources to be used to assist in
the Chicago bid. “It was made clear to us that this was something
the President and First Lady were very committed to,” says the
source.
According to the White House source, both the State
Department and the National Security Council were asked for
assistance in preparing briefing materials for use during the UN,
G-20, and overseas trips to Europe and Africa in meetings with
foreign officials, particularly in
the “unaligned” African countries.
It isn’t just the Obamas — and their ties to the most
senior members of Chicago 2016 are far more extensive than the
mainstream media has bothered to uncover.
For example, as it stands, Obama senior adviser
David
Axelrod’s firm, AKPD Message
and Media, which employs his son, and which owes Axelrod money,
is one of the contractors on the Chicago Olympics bid. Senior
presidential adviser Valerie Jarrett
has been deeply involved in the strategizing for the
Olympics bid since before the 2008 election, and until accepting
her job in the White House she was a deputy chairwoman of the
Chicago Olympics Host Committee. Both have close ties to a number
of Chicago 2016 committee members.
Crain’s Chicago
Business reported
Monday that Jarrett and Chicago 2016 committee president
(and recent chief of staff to Mayor Richard Daley) Lori
Healey met with officials of the Department
of Housing and Urban Development to discuss financing options for
construction of the Olympic Village. According the HUD sources,
the Obama Administration will seek to use low-income housing
grant funding options to help the city build the Olympic Village,
and when the Olympics are over, some portions of the village will
be used for low-income rental and purchased
residences.
Healey and Jarrett’s relationship goes back years to
Healey’s times as a senior staffer on the city’s planning and
development department in the 1990s, around the same time that
Jarrett would have been running one of the city’s largest
low-income housing projects. Healey was also vice chair of the
Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) Board of Commissioners, which
would have overseen Jarrett’s company’s projects.
Another member of the Chicago committee is
Martin Nesbitt, who the New
York Times last December
identified as one of President Obama’s “closest
friends,” and whose wife is a close friend to
Michelle Obama. Nesbitt, the godfather to
one of the Obamas’ daughters, was also the Obama presidential
campaign’s treasurer, and is credited with introducing Obama to
Penny Pritzker, one of the most
influential fundraisers for Democrats in the United States. His
ties to Pritzker go back to a time when he worked for Pritzker’s
real estate companies, and she later invested in Nesbitt’s
airport off-site parking business, the Parking Spot, a company
that stands to make millions from the Olympics bid. The Pritzker
family, which holds a number of real estate properties in
Chicago, also stands to reap tens of millions from a successful
Olympics bid. Nesbitt is also the chairman of the board of
commissioners of the Chicago Housing
Authority.
Nesbitt did not join the board of Chicago 2016 until March
2009, when he replaced …
Valerie Jarrett, who resigned from the board to accept her post
in the White House.
