Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Who Is Foster Freiss?

He's Susana Martinez's biggest individual contributor in her last campaign finance report. (Not for the whole campaign. That honor still goes to Bob Perry, the Houston developer best known for funding the infamous Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.)

Freiss is well known in conservative and Christian Right circles. His web site, where he discusses his views on several issues, is HERE.

He made his fortune in a management firm called Freiss Associates, which he stared with his wife Lynn in 1974. Business Week profiled him in 2001.

Freiss was a featured speaker at last June's Western Conservative Summit, in Colorado, along with U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn. and right-wing pundits Michelle Malkin and Dick Morris.

Mother Jones did a short political profile of him back in 1997. Then, the magazine reported, he was vice president of the Council for National Policy, which MJ called "the secretive group headed by former Attorney General Edwin Meese that includes Oliver North and Pat Robertson and influenced the fundamentalist planks in the GOP's 1996 platform."

Besides contributing to conservative causes, Freiss also is a philanthropist, donating and helping raise millions for disaster relief.