A female lobbyist had been turning up with him at fund-raisers, visiting his offices and accompanying him on a client’s corporate jet. Convinced the relationship had become romantic, some of his top advisers intervened to protect the candidate from himself — instructing staff members to block the woman’s access, privately warning her away and repeatedly confronting him, several people involved in the campaign said on the condition of anonymity.

When news organizations reported that Mr. McCain had written letters to government regulators on behalf of the lobbyist’s client, the former campaign associates said, some aides feared for a time that attention would fall on her involvement.

Not the first time that this has been talked about. Apparently the NYTimes was set to release this article last year. The fact that the story never went away is telling.EvangelicslsforMitt referred to this in January.

Here's the deal, folks: The New York Times has some damaging goods on John McCain, reportedly involving a female lobbyist. McCain threatened legal action if the Times printed the story. The Times backed off... for now. But you can be sure the Times will unload on McCain if he nails down the GOP nomination. Meanwhile, Tim Carney (of the Novak report) highlighted a smelly McCain deal in the Examiner last week. And today, the Washington Post reports that David Keene of the American Conservative Union "is examining a loan McCain took out to keep his campaign afloat."

Then, of course, there is his legendary, out-of-control, inexcusable temper. His profanity-laced tirade against the unfailingly decent John Cornyn last year during the immigration debate was something straight out of the Captain Queeg playbook. He was one step short of demanding that Cornyn be court-martialed for swiping the strawberries.

When John McAngry loses his halo, he has nothing left. He will be mincemeat for the liberal Democrats in the fall.

The Atlantic headline is "McCain/Lobbyist Story In The New York Times Finally Drops"

Here's another picture of her

We already have commented several times here that we think McCain is a *values* scumball but mostly for dumping his faithful wife after she waited, crippled, for him to come home from Vietnam. And then he married a rich bimbo. Looks like maybe that's why Cindy McCain was on all those drugs during the 2000 campaign-maybe to deaden the angst she had about her husband banging a side fling. (Update: Actually Cindy McCain's drug addiction happened much earlier and interestingly, it involved her stealing drugs from her company-the DEA was informed.)

P.S. I've been listening to Countdown and this isn't merely an issue of McCain screwing yet ANOTHER woman out of wedlock like he did his current wife, but it's also a tale of ethics. One of the people on Olbermann's show, Jonathan Alter, said that at the time there were some questions about this from an ethical standpoint from a committee in Congress. In other words, McCain was doing some unethical things with the client whose company appeared before the committee that McCain led.

The article also talks about the Keating scandal, which I don't know more about. Will look into more of this tomorrow but YOU can read about it at the NYTimes link, above.

P.P.S. McCain issued a statement which you can see is a non-denial denial.

Update: October 16, 2008-Iseman comes out of wherever the heck she was hiding and talks to partisan rag. And everybody in the article tells a different story. I will say this. Weaver sure had it right about how McCain has been damaged and made small by his personal, negative, unfounded attacks on Obama.  Another facet is that McCain is a philanderer who cheated on his crippled wife with a younger rich woman, who presumably also knew he was married (don't forget that this greatly angered and upset Ronald Reagan and wife Nancy). Also, the issue isn't and has not been merely whether he was cheating on his current wife with her, but also whether there was some improper influence peddling.

Weaver elaborated this morning in an interview with the National Review's Byron York:

[Weaver] said he "had no reason to think" that McCain might have been having an affair with Iseman, but he was concerned about word he had heard suggesting that Iseman was telling associates she had connections with McCain... "When you hear back from several people that this person is saying they can get anything done, then that is alarming," Weaver continued. So Weaver met with Iseman, at a Union Station restaurant, and told her to back off. He told me he didn't exactly say, "Get lost," but that that was the gist of it. "The discussion lasted all of five or six minutes in which I told her to cut that stuff out," Weaver told me. "I said, 'You need to stop this.'" Iseman's response, according to Weaver: "She was not happy."

That's not anonymous innuendo; it's hard, cold, on-the-record fact. Combine Weaver's admission with the Times first-hand reporting, which revealed that "a former campaign adviser described being instructed to keep Ms. Iseman away from the senator at public events, while a Senate aide recalled plans to limit Ms. Iseman’s access to his offices," and it's clear that McCain's top brass thought McCain's relationship with Iseman was a problem--whether it was "romantic" or not. (The Washington Post reports that "concern about Iseman's presence around McCain at one point led to her being banned from his Senate office, according to sources close to McCain.") Weaver says the "get lost" meeting was a matter of preserving McCain's political persona. "Our political messaging during that time period centered around... placing the nation’s interests before either personal or special interest,” he told the Times. “Ms. Iseman’s involvement in the campaign, it was felt by us, could undermine that effort.”

On McCain. McCain has been lying about a whole lot of things and I wondered a while back, since has been, why could he not also have beey lying about a relationship with Iseman?

Look. Very few people that are cheating with someone else want to admit it. Why not? Because they look like faithless, immoral scumballs. How many stories do you read of people who were even caught cheating and still lie about it, hoping to convince others of the lie through sheer bravado? (Who are you going to believe? Me or your lying eyes?).