Turkish lobby firm has collected more than $12 million in fees
A committee of the House of Representatives took a principled stand, passing a bill that condemned the mass slaughter of Armenians by the Turks in 1915 as genocide. But this week the members of the House started to back off.
Heeding a warning from the White House that alienating Turkey could jeopardize U.S. interests in the Middle East, congressmen, like Democrat Allen Boyd of Florida, dropped their sponsorship of the measure. Said Boyd: “Turkey obviously feels they are getting poked in the eye over something that happened a century ago and maybe this isn’t a good time to be doing that.”
The Turkish lobby on Capitol Hill is awesome. As the New York Times reported, former Representative Robert L. Livingston has been the main lobbyist for Turkey in blocking the Armenian genocide measure. His firm has collected more than $12 million in fees in his perennial effort to block this legislation.Another lobbyist who has been pressing Congress to be kind to the Turkish point of view is Democrat Richard Gephardt, former House majority leader. Livingston’s firm gave more than $200,000 in campaign donations in the last election cycle.
http://www.wnbc.com/politics/14360725/detail.html