April 17, 2018
CLEVELAND, Ohio - After initially not disclosing who paid him to give speeches in 2017, former U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich filed an amended ethics disclosure showing he was paid $20,000 by a group sympathetic to the Syrian government. Syria's President Bashar Assad has been accused by multiple intelligence agencies of using chemical weapons on his own people in the long-running Syrian Civil War. The revelation comes when Kucinich has been dogged by his connection to Assad, whom he met with in 2017, in the gubernatorial race. Kucinich, a longtime critic of American involvement with foreign conflict, has questioned whether Assad used chemical weapons.
Kucinich's ethics filing shows a payment of $20,000 from the Association for Investment in Popular Action Committees. Paul LaRudee, treasurer for the organization, described the group as an umbrella nonprofit for other nonprofit organizations. Among those is the Syria Solidarity Movement, which LaRudee said provided funding for Kucinich to attend a conference hosted by the European Centre for the Study of Extremism in London on April 5-6, 2017. LaRudee described the group as a human rights organization, but the group's website includes multiple posts supportive of the Syrian government.
