Doolittle speaks little

Early last year, two little-known nonprofit groups paid for Rep. John T. Doolittle (R-Calif.) and his 12-year-old daughter to travel to South Korea and Malaysia. Their last stop was the Berjaya Beach & Spa Resort on the Malaysian island of Langkawi, where they bunked at an oceanfront chalet staffed with a personal butler, got massages and rode water scooters on Burau Bay.
Doolittle's junket, which cost $29,400, was among the most expensive privately sponsored trips by members of Congress in recent years. The two groups that split the bills were not ordinary nonprofits. They were fronts for vigorous lobbying campaigns bankrolled by foreign entities and were operated by a Washington lobbying firm, Alexander Strategy Group, according to public records and people who worked with the firm.
For five years beginning in 2001, the Korea-U.S. Exchange Council and the U.S.-Malaysia Exchange Association treated 12 members of Congress and 31 Capitol Hill staffers and their relatives to nearly $500,000 in trips that included stops at U.S. and overseas resorts, records show.
The two nonprofits and the lobbying firm behind them have drawn the attention of the FBI. People associated with Alexander Strategy, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said federal investigators have asked them whether the groups were conduits for a foreign government and a foreign corporation to finance congressional junkets.
Records show that the Korea-U.S. Exchange Council was funded by the Hanwha Group, a South Korean conglomerate. The stated goal was to enhance the influence of Hanwha's chairman, Seung Youn Kim, a controversial figure once jailed for violating Korean financial law in his purchase of Sylvester Stallone's Hollywood mansion. Lobbyists for the U.S.-Malaysia Exchange Association filed reports stating that their funds came from a Malaysian energy firm and that the work was "on behalf of the government of Malaysia."
Federal law prohibits members of Congress from knowingly accepting overseas travel from foreign governments except as part of a cultural interchange program approved by the State Department. The travel in this case was not part of such a program, government officials said. House rules ban members from taking trips paid for by lobbyists or foreign agents. Nonprofits and their officers are prohibited under federal tax law from using a charitable organization for private commercial gain. More on the story.