Trump Campaign Manager’s Firm Turned Blind Eye to Burma Rapes
BETSY WOODRUFF
06.20.16 1:00 AM ET
... his newest big hire is a K Street veteran whose old firm once enthusiastically defended a military junta that used rape as a weapon of warand tried to malign the reputations of the human rights groups that worked to protect women and girls from the military rapists.
Jim Murphy, who became Trumps new national political director earlier this month, was a managing partner at JLM Consulting when Trump hired him. Previously, he was a managing partner at the DCI Group lobbying firm from June 2002 until June 2012. For his last four years there, according to his LinkedIn page, he was also president. The firm is famous for making fake smokers rights groups to defend Big Tobacco, and for creating an astroturf campaign in favor of Social Security privatization (a campaign that belly-flopped).
In 2002, when Jim Murphy was a managing partner there, the DCI Group worked for a the Burmese military government. As part of that work, it issued press releases saying the countrys military wasnt responsible for systematically raping ethnic minority women.
... Reports from activists on the ground and from the U.S. State Department indicate that the military was, in fact, using rape as a weapon of war when DCI represented itand still does so to this day. One former U.S. official who worked in Burma while DCI contracted with the countrys government said the firms statements on the issue were propaganda and baloneyall in defense of a military regime that human rights activists held responsible for the systematic rape, torture, and murder of countless ethnic minority women ...
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/06/20/trump-campaign-manager-s-firm-turned-blind-eye-to-burma-rapes.html