{"id":379685,"date":"2018-10-04T23:34:18","date_gmt":"2018-10-04T22:34:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/how-saudi-money-keeps-washington-at-war-in-yemen\/"},"modified":"2018-10-04T23:34:18","modified_gmt":"2018-10-04T22:34:18","slug":"how-saudi-money-keeps-washington-at-war-in-yemen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/how-saudi-money-keeps-washington-at-war-in-yemen\/","title":{"rendered":"How Saudi Money Keeps Washington at War in Yemen"},"content":{"rendered":"
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It was May 2017. The Saudis were growing increasingly nervous. For more than two years they had been relying heavily on US military support and bombs to defeat Houthi rebels in Yemen. Now, the Senate was considering a bipartisan <\/span>resolution<\/a> <\/span>to cut off military aid and halt a big sale of <\/span>American-made<\/a> <\/span>bombs to Saudi Arabia. Fortunately for them, despite mounting evidence that the <\/span>US-backed<\/a>, supplied, and <\/span>fueled<\/a> <\/span>air campaign in Yemen was <\/span>targeting civilians<\/a>, the Saudi government turned out to have just the weapon needed to keep those bombs and other kinds of aid coming their way: an army of lobbyists.<\/p>\n

That year, their forces in Washington included members of more than two dozen lobbying and public relations firms. Key among them was Marc Lampkin, managing partner of the Washington office of Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck (BHFS), a company that would be paid nearly half a million dollars by the Saudi government in 2017. Records <\/a>from the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) show that Lampkin contacted Senate offices more than 20 times about that resolution, speaking, for instance, with the legislative director for Senator Tim Scott (R-SC) on May 16, 2017. Perhaps coincidentally, Lampkin reported <\/a>making a $2,000 contribution to the senator\u2019s political action committee that very day. On June 13th, along with a majority of his fellow senators, Scott voted <\/a>to allow the Saudis to get their bombs. A year later, the type of bomb authorized in that sale has reportedly <\/a>been used in air strikes that have killed civilians in Yemen.<\/p>\n

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Little wonder that, for this and his other lobbying work, Lampkin earned a spot on the \u201cTop Lobbyists 2017: Hired Guns\u201d list <\/a>compiled by the Washington publication the Hill.<\/p>\n

Lampkin\u2019s story was anything but exceptional when it comes to lobbyists working on behalf of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. It was, in fact, very much the norm. The Saudi…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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It was May 2017. The Saudis were growing increasingly nervous. For more than two years they had been relying heavily on US military support and bombs to defeat Houthi rebels in Yemen. Now, the Senate was considering a bipartisan resolution to cut off military aid and halt a big sale of American-made bombs to Saudi […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-379685","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/379685","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=379685"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/379685\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=379685"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=379685"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=379685"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}