About $250,000, apparently. The Times of London did an undercover investigation into prominent Republican fundraiser Stephen Payne.
They caught Payne on video saying that, in exchange for a contribution of $250,000 to the Bush presidential library fund, he could help coordinate this "former President" of a central Asian country (actually an undercover agent working for the paper) meeting with Vice President Cheney and perhaps Secretary of State Rice. (emphasis mine)
During an undercover investigation by The Sunday Times, Payne was asked to arrange meetings in Washington for an exiled former central Asian president. He outlined the cost of facilitating such access.
"The exact budget I will come up with, but it will be somewhere between $600,000 and $750,000, with about a third of it going directly to the Bush library," said Payne, who sits on the US homeland security advisory council.
It's clear as day: for a certain contribution, you can meet with (arguably) the second most powerful person in the world. Money buys access. That's a corrupt system at work.
And as we testified before Congress last year and as the article also points out, there is currently no disclosure requirement -- for anyone except a registered federal lobbyist, which Payne ought to be, frankly -- for contributions to a presidential library. None. If the Times of London hadn't done this investigation, we'd have no idea about Payne's actions.
And we can only assume that the same thing has happened numerous times, through Payne and likely through other prominent fundraisers. After all, Payne himself is also getting rich off this corrupt access-buying scheme. (emphasis mine)
He said initially that the "family" of the Asian politician should make the donation. He later added that if all the money was paid to him he would make the payment to the Bush library. Publicly, it would appear to have been made in the politician's name "unless he wants to be anonymous for some reason".
Payne said the balance of the $750,000 would go to his own lobbying company, Worldwide Strategic Partners (WSP).
A wealthy family gets access to the most powerful decision makers in the world. A sleazy lobbyist/fundraiser takes a six-figure cut for setting up the meeting. The public is completely in the dark, and that's how a presidential library gets built.
As I said near the bottom of the article
It makes it very hard to know what they might be getting and how [the donors] might be taking advantage of that access to shape public policy and decisions.
