Reply #22: more info: US: The Hazy Story of the Lincoln Group

[UpInArms]

http://www.corpwatch.org/print_article.php?id=12840

It's tough to follow the history of Lincoln Group, a contractor that won a $100 million contract with the Special Operations Command to assist with psychological operations. The common denominator to the firm's history is Christian Bailey, listed on its Web site as executive vice president, capital markets. After graduating from Oxford University in England in the 1990s, Bailey moved to the San Francisco area around 1998, and in 1999, founded Express Action, an e-commerce company he apparently later sold. In the Nov. 15, 2002, issue of HedgeWorld Daily News, Bailey was identified as the founder and chairman of a New York-based hedge fund called Lincoln Asset Management. On March 1, 2003, the Alternative Investment News reported that Lincoln Asset Management had an initial $100 million in commitments to underwrite a leveraged buyout fund to acquire defense and intelligence companies.

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While the group's current Web site does list noteworthy examples of successful endeavors apparently part of its MNC-I work, some find it curious that a firm set up by two thirty-something guys has come so far so fast. Also giving pause has been the company's apparent tendency to solicit staff by way of internships. And it is curious that records of Bailey's Republican affiliations have disappeared from certain Web sites since the JPSE contract was announced.

Bailey was a founder and active participant in Lead21, a fund-raising and networking operation for affluent young Republicans, some of whom have gone on to serve in the Bush administration. Click on the links to Lead21's site today and no mention of Bailey is to be found. But on a subscriber business and social networking site, there's an archived e-mail of Bailey discussing setting up a New York branch of Lead21, and his "personal network," which lists a half-dozen members of the organization's current board, including the chairman of the California Republican Party and the senior policy adviser to the Justice Department's chief information officer. "These are going to be the big supporters, the big donors to the Republican Party in five years' time," Bailey told The New York Times in an Aug. 31, 2004, video interview during a Lead21 party at the Republican convention in New York.

Neither JPSE nor Lincoln Group responded to verbal or written requests for interviews, but the Project on Government Oversight has reservations. "Any time we see leaders who cultivate political influence for a particular party suddenly receive major government contracts, it sends up red flags," says POGO spokeswoman Beth Daley.

...more at link...

So, just who is Christian Bailey?

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article333629.ece

The office building situated at 1420 K Street NW has nothing obvious to commend it other than its prime location. Just a couple of streets from the north-west gates of the White House, it sits in the heart of lobbying land - the K Street corridor that represents one of the most crucial centres of power, influence and money in the United States.

This grey building, neighboured to one side by an off-licence and to the other by a travel agent, is home to the Lincoln Group, a previously little-known "business intelligence" company headed by a heretofore little known young Briton, Christian Bailey, an Oxford graduate and consummate net worker. He is at the centre of a mounting storm of controversy surrounding the Bush administration's covert propaganda war in Iraq.

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