Former Sen. Bob Dole has worked for months furthering Taiwan’s interests with the Trump campaign and the transition team — efforts aside from his likely role facilitating a controversial phone call between the president-elect and the leader of the island nation, according to disclosure forms filed with the Justice Department.
The Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office, the official representative of the Taiwanese government in Washington, paid Dole’s law firm, Alston & Bird LLP, $20,000 a month to advocate on Taiwan’s behalf in the U.S., according to public documents first reported by BuzzFeed that were filed in accordance with the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
The disclosure comes after Dole, a former Senate majority leader who represented Kansas for 35 years before resigning to run for president in 1996, told The Wall Street Journal on Monday his law firm “may have had some influence” in setting up the call.
But documents filed on Nov. 30 revealed that within the previous six months, Dole had on behalf of Taipei convened a meeting between embassy staff and Trump’s transition team, arranged a telephone briefing with a Trump campaign policy director, and set up a meeting between a Taiwanese ambassador and Sen. Jeff Sessions, Trump’s pick to be attorney general. The documents also say the former senator “coordinated with the Trump campaign regarding a participation in a U.S. delegation to Taiwan” and worked to further Taipei’s goals at the Republican National Convention and in the party’s platform.
Dole, 93, endorsed Trump for president in May and was the only former Republican presidential nominee to attend the GOP convention in Cleveland.
The documents indicate the law firm was paid tens of thousands of dollars over the course of the ongoing arrangement, in which Dole agreed to work in his capacity as Alston & Bird’s special counsel assisting Taiwan with its agenda “as it relates to the U.S. administration and Congress.”
Earlier disclosures state that Dole sent letters requesting meetings with Taiwanese officials to former Secretary of State Colin Powell and former secretaries of Homeland Security Tom Ridge and Michael Chertoff.
No U.S. president has spoken directly with a Taiwanese leader since 1979, when the Carter administration established diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China. While maintaining relations with Taiwan, the U.S. has refused to recognize its sovereignty.
Trump’s call with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen angered Beijing, which lodged an official protest as observers on both sides of the Pacific scrambled to determine if the president-elect intended to disrupt nearly four decades of U.S. policy.
More from U.S. News
Donald Trump’s Taiwan Call Signals Rocky and Potentially Dangerous Diplomacy Ahead
Donald Trump Bashes ‘Saturday Night Live’ in Tweetstorm
Trump’s Taiwan Call Shows He Has a Lot to Learn About China
Bob Dole Lobbied Trump Team for Months on Taiwan originally appeared on usnews.com
