The meeting featured talk of emerging GOP Senate primary challenges, sources say. Cantor, Ryan headline Koch summit

Rep. Paul Ryan, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor and New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez secretly spoke to wealthy donors at the Koch brothers’ recently concluded summer gathering on the outskirts of Albuquerque.

The 2012 vice presidential candidate and No. 2 House Republican are return participants to the twice-annual seminar, which also drew wealthy donors and conservative nonprofit leaders including American Enterprise Institute President Arthur Brooks.


The meeting featured some discussion of the unfolding GOP Senate primary challenges to Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Sen. Mike Enzi of Wyoming, but no consensus opinion emerged, a source who attended the event told POLITICO. The source said that Cantor and Ryan both delivered presentations that were well-received by donors, as was Brooks’s speech on work as a source of happiness.

A spokesman for Cantor’s office declined to comment, while Ryan’s office did not immediately respond to questions.

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Rob Tappan, a spokesman for Koch Industries, the chemical, oil and manufacturing conglomerate controlled by Charles and David Koch, confirmed that the brothers held the meeting but declined to comment on specifics. The company has referred generally to past seminars as efforts to convene “some of America’s greatest philanthropists and most successful business leaders whose companies have created millions of jobs” to “discuss solutions to our most pressing issues and strategies to promote policies that will help grow our economy, foster free enterprise and create American jobs.”

The invitation-only seminars bring together wealthy donors to mingle with, and hear presentations from, Republican elected officials, conservative dignitaries and leaders of right-leaning groups backed by the Kochs’ network. They usually run from Sunday through Tuesday morning, and take place under extremely tight security, with organizers and guests sometimes renting out every room in the host hotel.

The most recent conference appears to have taken place at the Hyatt Regency Tamaya Resort in Bernalillo, N.M., which was completely booked and had its entrances blocked to traffic, Albuquerque TV station KOB reported. A reporter was turned away at a checkpoint nearly a mile from the resort and the station tracked a tail number from a private jet in the area to Koch Leasing.

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The Albuquerque Journal News website quotes an adviser to Martinez, Jay McCleskey, acknowledging that she “attended a private political event at the Tamaya where she gave brief remarks and had casual meetings with several national political leaders, including Majority Leader Eric Cantor and Congressman Paul Ryan.”

McCleskey declined to comment to the paper on the purpose or scale of the event, while an official with Americans for Prosperity, the Kochs’ primary political group, told the paper he was unaware of any meeting in New Mexico sponsored by the group.

The meetings are not, in fact, sponsored by AfP, though officials from the group typically attend.

The meetings generally attract top conservative talent, for whom they can be quite useful, providing an opportunity to build rapport with some of the movements’ deepest-pocketed backers. They are closely watched for signs of how and where the Kochs’ vast network will be involved in conservative political and policy fights.

Cantor and Ryan are both in the middle of nearly every piece of legislation that crosses the House floor. Cantor has been focused on an agenda meant to appeal to working families — an effort, that at times, has hit snags. In recent weeks, Cantor crafted a deal to extend funding for food stamps — but slashes the program by $40 billion. Ryan has been working with Democrats and Republicans to craft an immigration bill, and will certainly be key in the fall debate to raise the debt ceiling and extend government funding.

Ryan has developed deep ties to Koch World, having appeared at multiple events for AfP, and delivering a major speech at the Kochs’ summer 2008 donor summit on his “fiscal ‘Roadmap for America’s future,’” according to a program for that summit reviewed by POLITICO.

Other past attendees include Supreme Court justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, media stars Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and the late Andrew Breitbart, Govs. Chris Christie of New Jersey, Bob McDonnell of Virginia and Rick Perry of Texas, and Sens. John Cornyn of Texas and Jim DeMint of South Carolina, who has since resigned to head The Heritage Foundation, which has received funding from the Koch donor network.

The summer meeting is typically held in late June or early July, with the winter meeting preceding it by six months but the schedule was delayed this year to give the Koch political operation more time to assess the efficacy of its unprecedented spending in the run-up to the 2012 election. This year’s winter meeting, held in late April in Indian Wells, Calif., drew Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Rand Paul of Kentucky, as well as Govs. Nikki Haley of South Carolina and John Kasich of Ohio, according to a report in The New York Times.