Stuart Stevens' Shady Past Clients, Revealed
- October 29, 2012 | 12:00 am
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“I’d tell them to you,” Romney joked, “but I’d have to shoot you.”
For Romney to brag behind closed doors that his consultants are using tactics honed in foreign elections is peculiar, to say the least. The well-traveled consultants he praised were almost certainly his chief strategist, Stuart Stevens, and Stevens’ longtime sidekick, Russ Schriefer. And before taking charge of Romney’s presidential campaign as its “Karl Rove equivalent,” Stevens helped lift at least two foreign strongmen into power, guiding them to victory in elections rife with irregularities and violence.
Stevens, whom The New Republic profiled in August, says he relishes politics “for the smell of napalm in the morning,” and, by his own admission, his political work is driven by something like a sublimated aggression—it provides “an outlet for my violent tendencies.” An article last month in Politico that portrayed Stevens as the target of vicious sniping within the campaign mentioned in passing that he worked in Albania and the Congo. But it didn’t name the leaders whose campaigns he ran: Albanian Prime Minister Sali Berisha and Congolese President Joseph Kabila, authoritarian figures who have alarmed human rights groups and, at times, the U.S. State Department.
The depth of Stevens’ involvement in the campaigns of Berisha and Kabila is evident from the LinkedIn profile of Joel Frushone, a former deputy at Stevens’ consulting firm, the Stevens & Schriefer Group. His resume says the firm managed almost every aspect of their election bids, from “high level multimedia campaigns” to “fundraising,” “policy development,” “in-depth opposition research,” and “political strategy, media plans and tactics”—virtually the same services Stevens provides Romney.
Frushone offered only a brief comment. “I know the intimate details of what we did there,” he said, “and it was all above board.”
According to an insider from the 2005 Albanian campaign, Stevens was recommended to Berisha by a Bosnian businessman and fixer, Damir Fazlic whom the U.S. State Department has described as “shady.” (State Department cables say Fazlic worked closely with Berisha on the campaign and received legal protection from his government. He has been followed in the Eastern European press by rumors of mafia ties. He did not reply to requests for comment.) Stevens was joined in Albania by a consort from Washington’s BGR Group, and the Americans had their work cut out for them: Berisha’s image needed serious rehab. His previous reign over Albania had ended in a surreal, almost apocalyptic catastrophe.
As an apparatchik in the country’s former Stalinist dictatorship, Berisha rode a democratic uprising to the presidency in the early 1990s and imposed a right-wing, one-party regime. While secret police kept order, monumental pyramid schemes grew to consume much of the GDP. When they crashed in 1997, Albania plunged into violent anarchy. Girding for civil war, Berisha surrounded himself with a paramilitary gang as his party handed out guns at campaign offices. In late 1997, he resigned under intense international and American pressure. The violence killed an estimated 2,000 people.
When Stevens was hired to resell Berisha’s leadership to the Albanian populace in 2005, Berisha’s image at home and abroad was that of a washed-up despot. Audaciously, Stevens and the BGR specialists set about crafting a platform based almost entirely on a pledge to reduce corruption. Thus, one of Eastern Europe’s most unsavory ex-rulers was resurrected as a crusading reformer.
more see: http://www.tnr.com/blog/plank/109214/stuart-stevens-shady-past-clients-revealed#
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