Hassan Nemazee

Hassan Nemazee

Hassan Nemazee (born January 27, 1950) is a multimillionaire Iranian-American investment banker and convicted felon.

Meeting in Syria

Verbatim from Eli Lake of the NY Sun in February 15, 2008:

WASHINGTON — One of the national finance chairmen for Senator Clinton presidential campaign left Damascus last night after a visit there as part of a RAND Corp. delegation to meet with Middle Eastern leaders.

According to the Syrian press, the RAND delegation met with President Assad on Wednesday, the day the world learned that a Hezbollah master terrorist, Imad Mugniyeh, was slain in a car bombing in the Syrian capital.

The New York Sun confirmed the presence of the Clinton campaign official, Hassan Nemazee, on the RAND delegation through two sources familiar with the trip. In addition, the night manager of the Four Seasons Hotel in Damascus told the Sun: "Mr. Hassan Nemazee has been checked out of the hotel. He left the night of the 14th."

The Clinton campaign offered no comment last night. Mr. Nemazee's assistant in New York would only say Mr. Nemazee was traveling.

The Sun reported Tuesday that the RAND delegation trip to Syria was headed by Zbigniew Brzezinski, a foreign policy adviser to Mrs. Clinton's rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, Senator Obama. Mr. Brzezinski was the national security adviser to President Carter.

On Wednesday, Mr. Brzezinski issued a statement to the Syrian press that said the talks with Mr. Assad "dealt with recent regional developments, affirming that both sides have a common desire to achieve stability in the region, which would benefit both its people and the United States."

Mr. Brzezinski endorsed Mr. Obama in August and has advocated for America to engage Syria and Iran as part of a grand bargain to stabilize Iraq. This was a key recommendation of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group and has been a Democratic default position on the war since last January. In March, the speaker of the House, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat of California, paid a visit to Mr. Assad in a tour of the Middle East.

Mrs. Clinton, who at times has advertised herself as more hawkish on foreign affairs than her rival for her party's nomination, has taken a different stand on the issue. Mrs. Clinton called Mr. Obama "naïve" when he said last summer he would meet with foreign adversaries.

But the presence of Mr. Nemazee, a former fund-raiser for Senator Kerry's presidential campaign in 2004 and a close ally of the Clintons, raises questions for some analysts about what Mrs. Clinton would do as president with regard to Syria, a nation General Petraeus until recently has said was facilitating the travel of Al Qaeda terrorists into Iraq and the United Nations is investigating for its role in the assassination of Lebanon's president, Rafik Hariri. The three-year anniversary of his murder was yesterday, bringing supporters of the slain leader to the streets of Beirut.

Mrs. Clinton's Senate office issued a statement marking the anniversary. It said, "The United States and the international community have a strong interest and a moral responsibility to hold Syria and Iran accountable for their defiance of United Nation resolutions 1559, 1680 and 1701. And the Special Tribunal for Lebanon created by resolution 1757 should be established as soon as possible and its independence maintained."

A research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Tony Badran, praised that statement, but said the presence of Mr. Nemazee in the RAND delegation to Syria raised questions about Mrs. Clinton's support for Lebanon's democracy movement.

"Given that the visit coincided with that anniversary and the discovery that Syria was harboring one of the most wanted terrorists on the planet, this visit by a top finance chair raises certain questions about the policy she intends to pursue with Syria if she should become president," Mr. Badran said.

In 1999 Mr. Nemazee was nominated by President Clinton to serve as ambassador to Argentina but the nomination was eventually withdrawn. He is also one of the founders of the Iranian American Political Action Committee. Mr. Nemazee has said he disagreed with Senator Kerry's call for negotiating with the Iranians and favored instead a democratic regime change there.

A biography of Mr. Nemazee at the Iranian American Political Action Committee Web site lists him as a 1972 graduate of Harvard College who was born in 1950.

Top Democrat moneyman

On August 25th 2009, Hassan Nemazee, a top fundraiser for Hillary Clinton, was arrested and charged with forging loan documents in order to borrow $74 million from Citibank. He could face up to 30 years in prison.

Hassan Nemazee, who served as a finance director for Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign, began raising sizable sums for the Democratic National Committee in the mid-nineties. In 1998, in the midst of the Lewinsky affair, Nemazee collected $60,000 for Bill Clinton’s legal defense fund in $10,000 increments from relatives and friends.

The following year, President Clinton nominated the money manager and investor to be ambassador to Argentina. Then an article in Forbes raised questions about his business practices. Among other things, Nemazee, an Iranian-American, had magically turned himself into an “Hispanic” by acquiring Venezuelan citizenship in order to fulfill the minority-ownership requirement of a California public pension fund. The nomination was withdrawn.

That embarrassment did not, however, hamper Nemazee’s rise within the Democratic Party. By 2004 he was New York finance chair for John Kerry’s campaign, and in 2006 he served under Senator Chuck Schumer as the national finance chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC). During this period the committee raised about $25 million more than its Republican counterpart.

By 2008, Nemazee was one of Hillary Clinton’s inner circle, and was being publicly touted as a top foreign policy adviser. When another major fundraiser, a clothing manufacturer named Norman Hsu, was arrested and unmasked as a swindler, it was Nemazee who was trotted out to defend Ms. Clinton and argue that she knew little about Hsu.

But she should have known plenty about Nemazee. In 2005, Nemazee and his business partner, Alan Quasha, went deep into the Clinton circle to hire Terry McAuliffe, the Clinton confidante and former chairman of the Democratic Party, for Carret Asset Management, their newly acquired investment firm. During the interregnum between McAuliffe’s party chairmanship and the time he officially joined Hillary Clinton’s campaign as chairman, Nemazee and Quasha set McAuliffe up with a salary and opened a Washington office for him. There he worked on his memoirs and laid the groundwork for Ms. Clinton’s presidential bid.

In March 2007, Nemazee, at the behest of McAuliffe, threw a dinner for Ms. Clinton at Manhattan’s swank Cipriani restaurant, which featured Bill Clinton and raised more than $500,000. In 2008, after Barack Obama gained the nomination, Nemazee raised a comparable sum for him.

But it is not fair to characterize Nemazee as an embarrassment to Democrats alone. Nemazee’s profile is considerably more complicated. For legal representation in his current troubles, for example, Nemazee has retained Marc Mukasey, a partner in Rudolph Giuliani’s law firm and the son of Michael Mukasey, who served as George W. Bush’s last Attorney General.

Before moving into the Democratic camp, Nemazee had backed such Republican senators as Jesse Helms, Sam Brownback and Alfonse D’Amato. Nemazee’s business partner, Alan Quasha, who specializes in buying up troubled companies, has also played both sides of the partisan divide. Quasha gave to both Bush and Al Gore in 2000, and in the 2008 race gave to Republicans Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani as well as Democrats Barack Obama and Chris Dodd.

Nemazee’s role as a foreign policy adviser to Hillary Clinton can be better understood through his own Iranian connections. His father was a shipping magnate who was close with the Shah of Iran and served as the Shah’s commercial attaché in Washington; Nemazee was a founding member of the Iranian American Political Action Committee, a lobbying group. Recent strains have been reported between President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton over policy toward Iran. Clinton has advocated a harder line toward the Islamic fundamentalists who took over when the Shah of Iran was overthrown in 1979, while Obama has stressed dialogue.