Editor's note: The full document is available here.

Aug. 1, 2008 | As recently as last year, John McCain's senior
foreign-policy and national security advisor, a neoconservative who
played a leading role in pushing for a U.S. invasion of Iraq, was
trying to use his role in promoting the Iraq war to make money off
Iraqi oil. In a confidential memo, a company called World Strategic
Energy, for which top McCain aide Randy Scheunemann was an executive
consultant, told prospective investors that Scheunemann could help
World Strategic Energy win oil contracts in Iraq because he was
well-connected in the Iraqi exile community and had been a "key player"
in getting the U.S. involved in Iraq. The memo was first published by blogger and Salon contributor Lindsay Beyerstein, who wrote that
the 44-page brochure-style "placement memorandum" was being circulated to potential investors as late as 2007.

Scheunemann was pushing for the use of U.S. military force in Iraq
a decade ago. He was a director of the Project for the New American
Century, the neoconservative group that sent a public letter to
President Clinton in 1998 urging him to remove Saddam Hussein from
power. In 1998, while working for Republican Senate Majority Leader
Trent Lott, he helped author a bill that gave close to $100 million to
the Iraqi National Congress, the anti-Hussein exile group run by Ahmad
Chalabi. The World Strategic Energy document memo includes a photo of
Scheunemann with Chalabi. After working on McCain's failed presidential
bid in 2000, Scheunemann went on to become the head of the Committee
for the Liberation of Iraq, a non-government organization with close
ties to the Bush administration that was formed in 2002 and dedicated
to the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. The U.S. invaded Iraq in March
2003. "Randy Scheunemann was a key player in the U.S. involvement in
the Iraq war," says the memo. "[H]e coordinated the White House's
'Outside the Government' public relations campaign on Iraq while
administering relationships with key Iraqi leaders in exile." The
brochure says that thanks to Scheunemann, "some of the team's strongest
relationships are in Iraq."

Scheunemann is McCain's point man in articulating and defending
the senator's Iraq policy. McCain was also a major advocate of the
original invasion. The Worldwide document seems to portray Scheunemann
as attempting to profit off the war. It is unclear how much, if any,
money Scheunemann made from Worldwide.

The brochure lists the company's president as Stephen Payne, who
also appears in the photo alongside Chalabi. Payne recently stepped
down from a U.S. government advisory role after a report in the Sunday
Times of London showed that Payne, also a lobbyist, had offered a
foreign official meetings with top Bush administration officials in
exchange for a $250,000 donation to Bush's presidential library. The
paper reported that Payne had also boasted to a foreign official that
Scheunemann had been "working for me on my payroll for five of the last
eight years."

The McCain campaign did not return e-mails seeking comment on the document. Payne also did not return a similar call.