Hermain Cain adviser, Gordon, linked to British scandal involving ‘rogue pro-Israel foreign policy’

As usual, Max Blumenthal gets to the heart of the Liam Fox/Atlantic Bridge scandal. An excerpt of a piece up at Alakhbar on the connections between Herman Cain adviser J.D. Gordon and the disgraced British lobbyist Adam Werritty. Read the whole piece to get a full picture of Gordon. I’m always snuffling for lobby stuff: 

The Atlantic Bridge scandal began soon after the election of Tory Prime Minister David Cameron, who appointed Liam Fox, a leading Conservative, as minister of defense. Fox gallivanted around the globe on taxpayer-funded junkets beside his best friend, a lobbyist named Adam Werritty, who served as Atlantic Bridge’s executive director. Fox, who founded Atlantic Bridge with the stated mission of fostering better ties between British and American conservatives, allowed Werrity to masquerade as his personal envoy in explicit violation of British parliamentary rules. Meanwhile, Werritty leveraged hefty donations from wealthy British pro-Israel lobbyists to advance a radical right-wing agenda at home and a rogue pro-Israel foreign policy abroad.

While Fox and Werritty orchestrated clandestine schemes that bordered on criminality, Gordon acted as their man in Washington. Gordon’s public relations firm, J.D. Gordon Communications, was given a lucrative contract with Atlantic Bridge and still lists the group as one of his clients on his website. The amount Gordon was paid from the British-based group remains undisclosed. According to the blog Think Progress, Gordon was also a partner in a consulting firm, Gordon Cohen Strategies, which managed the US operations of Atlantic Bridge. Gordon’s business associate, Lee Cohen, was listed as the “Washington D.C. Director” of Atlantic Bridge while Werritty served as its executive director.

In October, the United Kingdom Charity Commission shut down Atlantic Bridge’s operations after it determined that the non-profit was no more than a tax-exempt shell for international corporate lobbyists. Fox was forced to step down from his post as defense chief. At the heart of the charges against Fox is that he allowed Werritty to escort him on as many as 18 government trips, giving his close friend access to highly sensitive meetings with foreign officials that may have compromised British national security and in any case was an illegal if not inappropriate relationship.

Those meetings included a chat with Meir Dagan, then the chief of Israel’s Mossad, at a national security conference in Israel discussing sanctions against Iran. Through his strangely intimate relationship with the Mossad, Werritty gained entrée to certain Iranian opposition groups, reportedly encouraging them to escalate their campaign against the Iranian regime.