Political Contributions
Winnick helped Democratic National Committee chairman Terry McAuliffe turn a $100,000 stock investment into $18,000,000. Winnick later donated $1 million to President Bill Clinton's presidential library. In 1998, former U.S. president George H. W. Bush gave a speech in Tokyo on behalf of Global Crossing, for which he was compensated with $50,000 of Global Crossing stock, which he sold in 1999 and 2000 for more than $4.5 million.
Global Crossing's political contributions were fairly evenly distributed between Republican and Democratic parties; Winnick tended to favor Democrats and co-chairman Cook Republicans. In 2000, the company gave $250,000 each to the Republican and Democratic Conventions. In 1999, the company hired former assistant attorney general Anne Bingaman, married to Democratic New Mexico Senator Jeff Bingaman, as a Washington lobbyist, paying her $2.5 million between January and June 1999 to try to block licensing of an AT&T, MCI, and Sprint consortium cable from the U.S. to Japan. The large donations have been suggested as a reason why investigations against the company's upper management did not result in criminal charges, despite the size of the bankruptcy and the large amount of circumstantial evidence that some sort of malfeasance had occurred.
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“The merely political aspect of the land is never very cheering; men are degraded when considered as the members of a political organization.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)