Back in the 2008 presidential campaign between John McCain and Barack Obama, Senator McCain got some criticism for using Charlie Black, previously of the Black, Manafort, Stone & Kelly firm as a campaign consultant in part because of the firm’s background in lobbying in Washington for various dictators like Moi and Mobutu of African nations and Marcos of the Philippines. More recently, the spotlight has shifted to Paul Manafort and Roger Stone from that storied firm who have been convicted recently of multiple felonies related to their service to Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and in Manafort’s case also involving money laundering associated with more recent work for a Russian oligarch in Ukrainian politics.

Washington reporting that I saw during the 2008 campaign noting the Black, Manafort Stone & Kelly work for Moi had a significant oversight in accepting spin that the Moi relationship had concluded with the end of the Cold War and the beginning of active U.S. support for democratization in Africa, including the push on Moi to legalize non-KANU parties, which came to fruition in the December 1991 legalization of political opposition.

My guess is that reporters relied on an incomplete aggregator rather than going directly to the original Foreign Agent Registration Act filings (online at http://www.fara.gov). Regardless, the point is that Black, Manafort Stone & Kelly made a third filing for Kenya under Moi for March 1, 1992 to February 28, 1993 that covers Moi’s December 29, 1992 re-election. Along with the U.S. Executive and Legislative branches, Black Manafort Stone & Kelly were to lobby the IMF and World Bank and “public interest and activist groups such as the Black Caucus, Africa Watch, Environmentalists, National Democratic Institute, Civil Rights Lawyers, African-American Institute, Article 19 (journalists) and other activists and public interest groups.”

[Another discrepancy is that the summary list on the Justice Department website lists an incorrect name, a successor firm, for the Black, Manafort Stone & Kelly, Inc. filing for 1992-93.]

As I have written previously, see “My Joel Barkan Tribute“, US Ambassador Smith Hempstone, a George H.W. Bush political appointee, wrote in his memoir Rogue Ambassador that he had recommended to Moi that Kenya allow the National Democratic Institute (NDI) to observe that first post-independence multi-party election featuring FORD-Kenya (Jaramogi Oginga Odinga), Ford-Asili (Kenneth Matiba) and the Democratic Party (Mwai Kibaki) among others challenging Moi’s KANU. Moi vetoed NDI for the Election Observation Mission but went ahead to invite “sister organization” the International Republican Institute (IRI) for whom I served years later in 2007-08 as Resident Director for East Africa in Nairobi.

IRI and NDI are private District of Columbia not-for-profit corporations established originally at the Republican and Democratic National Committees, respectively. Along with two other special purpose democracy assistance not-for-profits associated with two other parents, the United States Chamber of Commerce and AFL-CIO (an affiation of labor unions), these four “core institutes” receive funding from the National Endowment for Democracy or NED, pursuant to 1983 legislation. NED receives direct funding from the United States Government and is also able to raise private donations, as are the four “core institutes”.

It never came to my attention one way or the other whether Black, Manafort, Stone & Kelly consulted Moi on the decision to reject NDI in favor of IRI or what Moi’s considerations might have been in taking that position. Nor of the State Department, USAID and/or others in the US Government and in IRI in going along.

Moi was re-elected according to the Electoral Commission of Kenya with approximately 36% of the vote.

The election was seen as badly flawed but nonetheless representing “the will of the people”. Presumably that would mean a recognition that within a year of opposition being legalized and with State resources deployed on behalf of Moi, a good 2/3 of Kenyans wanted to replace him, but without a runoff or a pre-election “deal” among the fledgling opposition parties Moi would be able to keep power and claim to have switched from a single-party authoritarian system to a “democratic mandate” without giving up power or persuading a majority of Kenyans that he deserved it.

After Bill Clinton defeated President George H.W. Bush and Ross Perot in the November 1992 elections, Bush launched Operation Restore Hope, landing Marines and Navy Special Forces on the beach in Somalia December 9 leading UNITAF, a new UN humanitarian mission to replace UNISOM I, the ultimate predecessor of the current AMISOM which began in 2007. See an early official postmortem on Operation Restore Hope from the United States Institute for Peace here.

In Kenya after 27 years the Moi family remains prominent in political and business matters in Kenya with the son of Moi’s original benefactor Jomo Kenyatta eventually succeeding Moi as president in 2013 after a 2003-2013 interregnum under Mwai Kibaki who was Moi’s Vice President for the first ten years of his presidency from 1978 to 1988.