Steele Cultivates Foreign Ambassadors, GOP Wants Him to Fundraise

In more strange news from the RNC’s Michael Steele, Politico reports that it has obtained an email indicating that the RNC has been trying to set up meetings between the chairman and foreign ambassadors to the United States:

Steele’s outreach to foreign representatives heading into the final stretch of the mid-term election cycle is exasperating senior Republicans, already fed up with the controversial chairman’s knack for bad publicity.

“They can’t give any money and they can’t vote,” said former RNC Chairman Jim Nicholson of the ambassadors. “I don’t know why you’d take time to do it.”

Particularly as the RNC heads into its tense summer meeting and an all-important midterm election cycle, Republicans are having a hard time fathoming why Steele is attempting to make time for foreign dignitaries. But Steele’s interest in cultivating contacts abroad is hardly new:

As Maryland’s lieutenant governor he spent more than $60,000 of state money for at least seven trips overseas, heading to such places as France, Austria, South Africa and Israel for what his staff at the time said were trade missions.

After he left office in 2007, Steele was hired onto a global law firm, then called LeBoeuf, Lamb, Greene & MacRae, in part because of the relationships he had developed abroad.

“Based in the firm’s Washington, D.C. office, he will focus on corporate securities, government relations and international affairs with an emphasis on Africa,” the firm announced when Steele joined, noting that as lieutenant governor he had been “deeply engaged in the state’s business and economic development activities, forging key international relationships to expand Maryland’s global economic interests.”