Randy Scheunemann - McCain's pit bull / carer

Randy Scheunemann , McCain's top foreign policy adviser, is a key figure in the NATO expansion campaign: he has been a top lobbyist for British Petroleum, several major defense contractors, and various Baltic and Central European governments.

He worked with Bruce Jackson, a former vice president in charge of planning for Lockheed-Martin and Pentagon official, on the U.S. Committee for NATO.

Scheunemann has been an American adviser to the Georgian government and a registered lobbyist for Macedonia, Romania, and Latvia, as well as a corporate lobbyist for BP America and Lockheed-Martin.

Scheunemann was a founding member of the Project for a New American Century and a co-founder and director of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. He is, in short, the embodiment of all the pressure groups and special interests who profit, materially and ideologically, from the renewal of the Cold War.

Scheunemann is also a member of the Board of Directors of the International Republican Institute, which McCain chairs.

Scheunemann's experience working on the Hill dates back to the mid-1980s, when he began working for a number of congressional committees. According to his biography on the PNAC website, between 1986 and 1993 Scheunemann "served on the staffs of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and the House Republican Policy Committee." He then went on to become a senior adviser to Republican presidential candidate Sen. Bob Dole (R-KS) in 1996, served on the 1996 Republican Platform Committee, and between 1993 and 1999 was national security adviser for Dole and Sen. Trent Lott (R-MS).

Scheunemann's PNAC biography states that during his time working on the Hill, he "was involved in Senate deliberations concerning the use of American military power in Somalia, the Korean Peninsula, Iraq, Haiti, and Bosnia. He also served as coordinator for Senate Republican policy on UN reform, congressional-executive war powers, NATO enlargement, global climate change, economic sanctions, ballistic missile defense, and technology transfers to China."

Also during this period, Scheunemann helped draft what would later become one of his claims to fame—the 1998 Iraq Liberation Act, which made the toppling of Saddam Hussein an official U.S. policy goal and authorized $98 million for the Iraqi National Congress, a loose grouping of Iraqi dissidents led by Ahmed Chalabi that has been widely blamed for channeling false intelligence about Iraq (see Jim Lobe, "New Champions of the War Cause," Asia Times, November 6, 2002).

In 2001, Scheunemann moved from congressional work to the Pentagon, serving for a short time as a consultant to then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Scheunemann has worked closely with Bruce Jackson on NATO expansion issues. He has served as a board member for Jackson's U.S. Committee on NATO and as a registered lobbyist and/or consultant for a number of former Soviet and Eastern-bloc countries, including Latvia, Macedonia, and Romania (American Prospect, May 1, 2003).

Scheunemann's lobbying firm, Scheunemann & Associates, has for several years represented the National Rifle Association. In 2005, the firm also represented the Caspian Alliance, a consortium of oil- and gas-producing nations from the Caspian region. According to Opensecrets.com, Scheunemann's "client list" since 1998 has included BP, Cuba Libertad, the Air Force Memorial Foundation, and the National Shooting Sports Foundation. Scheunemann has also led the lobbying firms Orion Strategies and the Mercury Group. The Mercury Group, for which Scheunemann served as president, has lobbied on behalf of Swiftships Shipbuilders, Barrett Firearms Manufacturing ( who made the sniper rifles given by the CIA to the mujahadeen which have turned up inNorthern Ireland and Iraq) , BP America, Lockheed Martin, National Shooting Sports Foundation, and Sporting Arms and Ammunitions Manufacturers.

At a Council on Foreign Relations event in D.C. on 7th March, as a Hillary adviser touted Clinton's foreign policy experience, Randy reportedly chimed in with: "Please keep running those 3:00 a.m. ads about who you want to answer the phone, because we like those."