Podesta Group, which lobbies in Washington on account of the Albanian
government, and which has been paid with more than 1 million EUR by the Albanian tax payers’ money, has
brought its representative, a former high-rank official of the US State Department.
Top Channel has discovered that Bay Fang, who has worked from 2011 until May 2013 as deputy assistant at the Bureau of Europe and Euro-Asia, has arrived in Tirana one week ago.
The United States magazine “Foreign Policy” has dedicated an article to her hiring by Podesta Group. The article is titled: “Podesta snags State Department deputy assistant secretary”.
The article says that Fang has left the State Department by the end of May and started working for Podesta on June 3rd.
Right after that she was urgently sent to Albania, while the electoral campaign had started and the relations between the Albanian Prime Minister and the United States Ambassador entered an unusual climate.
Her arrival to Tirana raises a series of questions for Bay Fang and the US State Department, as the former employer of Fang.
Fang’s duty in Podesta has conflict of interest, and it goes against the US laws for state employees who leave public administration duties.
This law is known as “One year cooling off period”.
The law states: “A one-year ban on representing, aiding, or advising a foreign government or foreign political party with the intent to influence a decision of an employee of a U.S. department or agency. Generally, representation of, or aid or advice to, a foreign commercial.”
This limitation, the so called “one year cooling off period”, limits contacts with the agency and even contacts related to the legislation of policies, personnel decisions or other official issues.
This is specified on law 18 U.S.C 207(d), which clearly sanctions that the so called “one year cooling off period” includes former US State Department secretaries and all high-rank former officials, and certainly this category includes Bay Fang, who has worked in a State Department unit that covered Albania. Now she works in Albania for one political party that is already engaged in an electoral battle.
For this clear conflict of interest of Bay Fung, Top Channel asked a comment from the US State Department, including the United States Deputy Assistant Secretary for European and Eurasian Affairs, Philip Reeker; Jonathan Moore, Director for Central and Southern Europe, and also the US Ambassador to Tirana, Alexander Arvizu.
So far, the State Department has not answered to Top Channel’s inquiry, but unofficially it has been told that they are discussing this issue.
The protagonist of this story, Bay Fang, has not answered to Top Channel for an interview regarding this matter. Mrs.Fang was seen in Tirana’s luxury hotels, where she has established contacts with representatives of foreign observing missions and with international press correspondents, as a representative of Podesta.
Who is Bay Fang?
After a 11-year-old career in journalism and as a correspondent for the diplomatic cases of the “Chicago Tribune” during the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, she was employed in 2009 by the American State Department as communication adviser for Southern Afghanistan.
After that she returned to Washington, where she worked for the Euro-Asia bureau, which covered Albania too.
Since June 3rd she has been hired as a strategist at the Podesta Group.
Top Channel
