One popular website, “Prison Planet,” greeted Sebelius’ nomination with the headline “Obama Picks Bilderberger for Health Secretary.”

It’s obvious why Bilderberg is a frequent target of conspiracy theorists, who’ve credited it with anointing aspiring presidents, selecting their running mates, creating the European Union and instigating the war in Iraq and the bombing of Serbia, among other coups.

Bilderberg meetings are closed to the press, participants are asked not to publicly discuss the proceedings and the attendee list is only occasionally released. As a result, the group has come to be viewed as a more publicity-shy cousin to the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations – other influential international think tanks that are staples of fringe group conversation.

Unlike Bilderberg, though, those organizations have opened their proceedings to public scrutiny, maintain websites and have long listed their members.

The Bilderberg group, in a rare press release last year, laid out a benign if vague mission: creating “a better understanding of the complex forces and major trends affecting Western nations.”

“Bilderberg is a small, flexible, informal and off-the-record international forum in which different viewpoints can be expressed and mutual understanding enhanced,” read the press release, which noted that a list of participants would be available by phone request between 9:00 AM and 5:00 PM on the second and third days of the conference.

The Bilderberg conspiracists first pounced on the Obama connection during the 2008 campaign, when news leaked in May that the candidate, who at the time was closing in on the Democratic presidential nomination, had initially tapped former Fannie Mae chairman Jim Johnson, a top Bilderberger, to help him select a running mate.

IRS filings show that Johnson as recently as 2006 was the treasurer of a non-profit group called American Friends of Bilderberg. The group has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years to pay for meetings--including $125,000 in total contributions from Bilderberg stalwarts Henry Kissinger and David Rockefeller in 2005 and 2006 plus $25,000 in 2005 from the Washington Post, whose chairman Don Graham has attended in the past.

Johnson did not return a message inquiring about his role at Bilderberg.

“The news further puts to rest any delusions that Bilderberg is a mere talking shop where no decisions are made,” reported Prison Planet. “It also ridicules once again any notion that an Obama presidency would bring ‘change’ to the status quo of America being ruled by an unelected corporate and military-industrial complex elite.”

One month later, in June, Johnson was joined at the 2008 Bilderberg meeting by Geithner, Holbrooke, Summers and Ross, as well as Obama’s first choice for HHS secretary, Tom Daschle, and Sebelius, who at the time was included on some short lists of prospective Obama running mates and who also attended the 2007 meeting in Istanbul, Turkey.

According to the Bilderberg press release, the meeting was designed to “deal mainly with a nuclear free world, cyber terrorism, Africa, Russia, finance, protectionism, US-EU relations, Afghanistan and Pakistan, Islam and Iran.” Approximately two-thirds of the 140 expected attendees came from Europe, according to the release, and the rest from North America.

Had the meeting been held outside the United States, that might have been the end of the Obama angle. But the conference, which took place from June 5 through 8, was held at a heavily guarded hotel in Chantilly, Va. in suburban Washington—coincidentally overlapping with an Obama campaign event in the area.

While Obama’s schedule indicated he was to fly home to Chicago for the weekend—and journalists were herded on a campaign plane under the impression they were headed there along with Obama—the future president slipped away for a private meetings and never actually boarded the flight.