The Rubio-Bilderberg rumors caught fire last month. Rubio and the Bilderberg conspiracy

Mitt Romney isn’t very far into the vice presidential selection process. But according to a dedicated band of conspiracy theorists, the pick is all but a lock: Sen. Marco Rubio.

That’s the current thinking among a worldwide collection of activists who are obsessed with the secretive Bilderberg Group, an alternating roster of global power players who loom as large — if not larger — in the online fever swamps of the fringe as the Trilateral Commission or the Council on Foreign Relations.


( Also on POLITICO: Meet the Rubios)

The Bilderberg Group, which takes its name from the Dutch hotel where it first gathered in 1954, exists solely to bring together between 100 and 150 titans of politics, finance, military, industry, academia and media mostly from North America and Western Europe once a year to discuss world affairs.

Yet in the netherworld of conspiracy theory, the group is part of an insidious corporate-globalist scheme. And this year, the speculation holds, the Bilderberg Group is set to hold its annual meeting in the coming weeks at a Northern Virginia hotel where, among other things, they likely will select Rubio as Romney’s running mate.

Paranoid? Perhaps.

But like any good conspiracy theory, there’s just enough there to stoke questions. John Edwards’s speech to the Bilderberg Group’s 2004 meeting in Stresa, Italy, reportedly helped clinch his selection as that year’s Democratic vice presidential candidate. And Jim Johnson, the man who chaired that vice presidential selection process and initially was tasked with spearheading Barack Obama’s 2008 search for a running mate, is a leading Bilderberg member, while prominent Romney advisers including Robert Kagan and Vin Weber have attended past meetings, as have Bill Clinton, Donald Rumsfeld and top finance, media and tech executives.

“These are influential folks — and they’ve all got friends in American politics — so if they see somebody that impresses them or doesn’t, I expect that they would pass that view on,” said Weber, a former Minnesota congressman who has attended two Bilderberg meetings. “But I would tell all of those bloggers and protestors to save their outrage for a real conspiracy, because this is just a conference.”

That assessment is rejected as pure spin by the international community of Bilderberg obsessives. They’re convinced that the meeting is ground zero in an worldwide plot by big banks, mainstream media, defense contractors and governments to suppress working people around the world.

This year, anti-Bilderberg activists are planning an “ Occupy Bilderberg” protest outside the Westfield Marriott in Chantilly, Va., where they believe the group will hold its conference May 31-June 3.

The Rubio-Bilderberg rumors caught fire last month after veteran Washington Post columnist Al Kamen suggested that the Florida senator’s appearance before last month’s Summit of the Americas in Colombia could boost his veepstakes prospects, just as Edwards’s 2004 Bilderberg speech did.

That was enough for the popular anti-government website Infowars to conclude in a blaring headline: “Washington Post Suggests Bilderberg Group to Pick Romney’s Running Mate,” while a website called the Globalist Report also relied on Kamen’s column for a post asking: “ will Mitt Romney be attending the next Bilderberg Group meeting?”

Radio host Alex Jones, a hero on the anti-government fringe who also runs Infowars, this month told the Russian government-funded cable network Russia Today that at their upcoming meeting Bilderberg attendees will decide on “wars with Iran, ways to censor the Internet … how to sell the public on more banker bailouts” and “how to ram through carbon taxes.”

But the most immediate issue on the agenda, he said, will be a decision on “Should the elite get behind Mitt Romney or Barack Obama? Both men are bought and paid for by the same financial interests, and so the discussion will be which candidate can basically con the American people into laying down to tyranny for another four years.”

The pending Bilderberg meeting is “one of the most important globalist meetings ever,” said Jones, who has tried to crash past Bilderberg meetings and called for “tens of thousands” to turn out at the Marriott.

The annual meetings, which alternate between Europe and North America, are funded partly by a nonprofit group that gets donations from regular participants.

The Washington Post Co. and its chairman Don Graham, a frequent attendee, have donated $100,000 over the past few years, according to tax filings. They also show repeat donations from Bilderberg regulars such as David Rockefeller (who has given a total of $150,000 since 2004), Henry Kissinger ($90,000) and mega-Romney donor Henry Kravis and his wife ($145,000).

Over the years, the meetings have drawn Obama cabinet members Tim Geithner and Kathleen Sebelius, not to mention Margaret Thatcher, Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, King Juan Carlos of Spain, Tony Blair, Condoleezza Rice, Rick Perry and top officials from BP, Barclays and the Bank of England.

More recent guest lists have been heavy on politically active techies, including Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes and Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt — both of whom have assisted Obama — and Peter Thiel, who co-founded PayPal and was the first major investor in Facebook. He has donated $125,000 to the Bilderberg nonprofit and contributed $2.6 million to a super PAC supporting Ron Paul’s bid for the GOP presidential nomination.

Ironically, Paul, whose libertarian sensibilities have made him a darling of the Bilderberg conspiracists, has expressed discomfort with the influence of the Bilderberg Group as well as organizations that host similar confabs — the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations.

“And my biggest concern is what they preach: Keynesian economics and interventionism and world planning,” he told POLITICO in 2009.

Such concerns are not uncommon on the far edges of the anti-government spectrum of thinking, where the far left and the far right find common cause over their distrust of Wall Street and Washington. The rise over the past few years of the tea party and Occupy protests has spread similarly strong anti-establishment messages. And that’s expanded the audience for conspiracy theories about U.S. government involvement in the Sept. 11, terrorist attacks and plots hatched at Bilderberg, Trilateral and the Council on Foreign Relations.

Even so, Bilderberg remains a preeminent focus of such conspiracy theorizing, perhaps because it’s more secretive than other confabs.

Participants are barred from revealing the identities of other attendees or what they talked about and the group doesn’t issue public minutes, policy statements or resolutions. In recent years, the group has opened up a bit, creating a website on which it lists some attendees and panels on its website at the end of its meetings.

It lists a panel at the 2007 meeting in Istanbul called “Democracy and Populism,” in which Weber participated. He began by telling attendees, “It’s difficult to identify or define exactly what populism is. But I can tell you this isn’t it.” The joke fell flat, recalled one attendee, though former deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz got a kick out of it, laughing out loud.

Kagan, the Romney foreign policy adviser, said the conspiracy theories give Bilderberg too much credit.

“Mostly, with all due respect to all of them, it’s a lot of vaguely uninteresting people giving vaguely uninteresting lectures and then having nice meals in nice places,” said Kagan, who has only attended one such meeting. “People getting together to talk about world politics is not any more exciting than anybody thinks it is.”

Neither he, nor Weber are attending this year, and Rubio is not expected to go, according to a source close to him.

The Washington Post’s Kamen, meanwhile, laughed when told how his column had spawned a theory that the Bilderberg meeting was going to tap Rubio as Romney’s running mate.

“They’re misreading the item,” he told POLITICO. “It’s bizarre.”

Of course, Bilderberg theorists would point out, Kamen’s ultimate boss, Graham, is a Bilderberger himself.