Rubio’s Campaign Fundraiser Ex-worker for Gambia’s Beheading,anti gay, anti human rights Regime
On Tuesday, ThinkProgress reported that Jennifer Lukawski, one of the hosts of a Marco Rubio campaign fundraiser scheduled for Wednesday, recently served as a registered foreign agent for a western African regime known for its human rights abuses — including repeated threats to behead gay people. In response, Pasamba Jow, spokesman for the Democratic Union of Gambian Activists, has called for Rubio to remove her from the host committee for the event.
BGR Group principal Jennifer Lukawski registered with the Department of Justice in 2013 to lobby for the government of The Gambia, as part of a $45,000 a month (plus expenses) contract her firm signed with the regime. She and BGR agreed to “advocate and help build support for increased political and economic assistance from government and non-governmental organizations for The Gambia’s adolescent and adult female education programs.”
In an interview, Jow told ThinkProgress that his group and several allied organizations organized a massive protest in June 2013 against BGR’s arrangement. “We devised a strategy, jammed their fax and phones,” with calls from human rights activists from around the United States and abroad. Opponents of His Excellency Sheikh Professor Alhaji Dr. Yahya Abdul-Azziz Jemus Junkung Jammeh, who seized control of The Gambia in a 1994 military coup and has since earned widespreadinternational criticism for human rights violations, also distributed flyers outside BGR’s Washington, DC headquarters.
Jow said the Gambian-American community was outraged that a U.S. lobbying firm, co-founded by former Republican National Committee chairman and Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour, would try to “sanitize Jammeh.” “He’s a very evil man,” Jow said, noting Jow’s repeated calls for the beheading of gay and lesbian citizens and his regime’s record of disappearances and other human rights violations. A few months after the protests, BGR and The Gambian government terminated their arrangement. Jow believes that, once the protests brought the arrangement to light, BGR decided it was “too much for them, for $45,000, to want to be defending a tyrant like that.”
But less than two years later, Jow expressed great disappointment that Jennifer Lukawski would go from lobbyist for the Jammeh government to Rubio bundler. “For Senator Rubio to be taken seriously, he has to show he can defend the rights of all Americans. To do that, he’d be sending the wrong signal by having on his team someone who hobnobs with a dictator who threatens to behead people just because they happen to be gay or whatever,” he observed. “If you’re the president of the United States, you’re seen as the chief democrat in the world, person with the moral authority to talk about democracy. You cannot have people who hobnob with vicious tyrants.” Jow acknowledged that Rubio might not have known about Lukawski’s record, but noted that it is the responsibility of those who want to be president to thoroughly vet staff and fundraising team members: “He should drop this lady.”
In a speech last week outlining his self-described “Rubio Doctrine,” Rubio claimed President Obama has “embraced regimes that systematically oppose every principle our nation has long championed.” But the Rubio campaign and Lukawski have not responded to ThinkProgress inquiries for this story.
BY JOSH ISRAEL
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