Corporations Generous To Barbour Group

When GOP Chairman Haley Barbour asked, special interests opened their checkbooks to the tune of $5.2 million for the nonprofit group he founded.

Many had business pending before the Republican Congress.

Bank and check records obtained by Senate investigators provide the first accounting of the donors to Barbour’s National Policy Forum, a nonprofit group.

The NPF’s checks from 1993 through 1996 read like a Who’s Who of Corporate America - $75,000 from Coca-Cola and $200,000 from lumber maker Georgia Pacific.

Fourteen of the Republican Party’s 20 top donors in the 1996 election also gave money to the NPF, records show. Four tobacco companies among the GOP’s highest donors - Philip Morris, RJR Nabisco, Brown and Williams and U.S. Tobacco - directed $375,000 extra to Barbour’s nonprofit.