While Pete Hegseth scampers around Capitol Hill – desperately pleading for votes to confirm him as defense secretary, despite his thin resume and ample scandals -- it’s easy to spot a white-maned wing man trailing just behind him. That would be Norm Coleman, the last Republican senator from Hegseth’s home state of Minnesota.

Beyond partisan loyalty and shared roots, Coleman has a powerful commercial interest in who oversees the US military and its mammoth budget. He happens to be one of the principal Washington lobbyists for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and, perhaps not coincidentally, a top fundraiser of dark money for GOP campaigns. And he also chairs the Republican Jewish Coalition, another dark-money outfit that spends millions backing GOP candidates with campaign ads centered around Jewish community concerns.

With this extraordinary network of political warchests and secretive donors behind him, Coleman exerts enormous influence over Republicans in Washington. He was a founder of the Congressional Leadership Fund SuperPAC, which he continues to chair, and also oversees the American Action Network, a tax-exempt “social welfare” group that uses tax-exempt donations from undisclosed donors to support GOP campaigns (as boasted by his bio on the website of his lobbying law firm, Hogan Lovells). Those two outfits, backed by tens of millions of dark-money dollars in every cycle, are wings of a single organization with a shared office and staff based only a block from the White House.

Despite Coleman’s longstanding service to the Saudi dictatorship, a spokeman for CLF has insisted that none of its funding comes from foreign donors. But as disclosed in a 2022 report by Responsible Statecraft and The Intercept, both AAN and CLF have promoted Saudi interests here. Between 2021 and 2022, those outlets reported that “Coleman wrote over 1,000 emails to House and Senate staffers…as part of his paid work for Saudi Arabia. Coleman and several of his law firm colleagues are registered as foreign agents of the Kingdom,” which pays well over $2 million a year to Hogan Lovells. The former Minnesota senator was among very few public figures willing to defend the Saudi regime publicly after the gruesome killing of Washington Post columnist and democracy crusader Jamal Khashoggi inside its consulate.

Should Hegseth prevail in his confirmation struggle, the Saudis and their premier lobbyist will enjoy renewed influence in the Pentagon and US decisions about weapons sales and America’s military posture toward Iran and other states in the Gulf region. But that would only reinforce the close and potentially corrupt ties between Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman and the Trump family, on whom he has lavished enormous sums of money through the country’s sovereign wealth fund, which gave a $2 billion investment deal to Jared Kushner and has a lucrative deal with the Trump Organization to promote its LIV golf consortium.

Trump’s Saudi grifting is even more open and brazen than Coleman’s conflicted lobbying setup. When the president-elect and his entourage attended an Ultimate Fighting Championship match at Madison Square Garden on November 17 in a post-election celebration, Yasir al-Rumayyan, the head of the Saudi sovereign wealth fund, was seated right next to him.

Joe Conason is founder and editor-in-chief of The National Memo. He is also editor-at-large of Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative reporting organization formerly known as The Investigative Fund. His latest book is The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism.