McCain asks staff to disclose lobbying ties

A memo from McCain's campaign manager, Rick Davis, also instructs staff to make certain they are no longer registered as lobbyists or foreign agents.

It was issued following the resignations of Doug Goodyear, who was to run the Republican National Convention, and Doug Davenport, a regional campaign director for the mid-Atlantic states. Both worked for DCI Group, a consulting firm hired to improve the image of Myanmar's military junta.

"I found out that two people had, some years ago, been involved with the government of Burma, so I needed to fix the problem, and we needed to fix it policy-wise," McCain told reporters Friday on his campaign bus.

Past lobbying work does not automatically disqualify someone from working for the campaign. Davis and another senior adviser to McCain, Charlie Black, were longtime lobbyists but now have severed their lobbying ties.

Like Goodyear and Davenport, Black and Davis have lobbied for foreign governments. And the campaign has other staffers and advisers who are registered lobbyists.

Advisers include former Texas Rep. Tom Loeffler, who lobbies for the European Aeronautic Defence and Space Co., or EADS, which with Northrop Grumman Corp. won a lucrative contract to provide air refueling tankers for the Air Force. McCain helped scuttle an earlier contract that would have gone to a different aircraft manufacturer, Boeing Co.

A staffer, Susan Nelson, also lobbied for EADS. Campaign spokeswoman Jill Hazelbaker refused to comment on any individual aides but said they must sever their ties or leave the campaign. Advisers or other part-time volunteers must disclose their ties and, if they have lobbied, stay away from campaign policymaking, under the new policy.

On Thursday, when the policy was announced, McCain fired an energy policy adviser, Eric Burgeson, who represents energy companies as a lobbyist.

The campaign also asked Craig Shirley to step down as a member of McCain's Virginia leadership team because he was behind an independent group that has been criticizing Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama on the Internet. That is because McCain's new policy states that no one with a campaign title or position may participate in so-called 527 groups, which can raise unlimited amounts of money for television ads not controlled by campaigns.

Aides would not say Friday if the memo prompted any other departures from the campaign.

Democrats have spent months pointing out the lobbying ties of Davis, Black and other McCain advisers. They argue that McCain's relationships with lobbyists belie his reputation as a reformer of money in politics.

"Senator McCain asking his lobbyist pal Rick Davis to 'clean the lobbyists' out of his campaign is like a farmer asking a fox to guard the hen house," Democratic National Committee spokesman Damien LaVera said Friday. But Democrats have ties to lobbyists, too, and the debate is likely to persist.

Clinton's top aide, Mark Penn, was demoted after word surfaced that he had met with Colombian government representatives to help promote a trade agreement that Clinton opposed. Penn worked as the chief executive of the public relations firm Burson-Marsteller.

Obama, does not take contributions from lobbyists, but does have advisers who are lobbyists. He has not released a complete list of the lobbyists who advise him.

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Associated Press writers Glen Johnson in St. Albans, W.Va., and Jim Kuhnhenn in Washington contributed to this report.