Weigel

Susan Rice’s Investments Have Ties to Iran. So Do John McCain’s.

Adam Kredo is out with a scoop about Susan Rice: the possible Secretary of State (and current UN Ambassador, which isn’t a bad job) has “investments of hundreds of thousands of dollars in several energy companies known for doing business with Iran.”

Financial disclosures reveal that Rice has had $50,001-$100,000 in Royal Dutch Shell, a longtime purchaser of Iranian crude oil.

Will this be used by the McCain troika to attack Rice? Possibly not. A source points me over to McCain’s financial disclosures, which reveal $1,000 to $15,000 in the JP Morgan International Value Fund. What’s the second-biggest holding in that fund? Why, Royal Dutch Shell, of course. McCain has another $1,000 to $15,000 stake in the JPMorgan Emerging Markets Equity Fund, which invests in China’s CNOOC, which has contracts to “develop some of Iran’s biggest oil and gas fields.”

Why haven’t we heard much about these McCain investments? You might have heard of them in 2008, when ABC News revealed that both McCain and Obama had (at that point much larger) investments in funds that invested in Royal Dutch Shell. There’s so much money invested in these companies that political foes risk mutually assured destruction if they go after them. Rice has far more money in Royal Dutch Shell than McCain does, but if this becomes a question of who has what politically troubling investments, it gets messy.