Julie Finley

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Julie Finley is the United States Ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). She is a political appointee, having been nominated by President George W. Bush.

[edit] Career

Finley attended Vassar College and later worked for several media organizations including NBC's Office of Corporate Affairs, ABC News, and the Washington Post. She also worked for syndicated columnist Joseph Kraft.^[1]

Finley has been active in Republican politics for many years and served the party in a number of capacities. She was the Washington, D.C. Republican Party Chairman from 1992 through 2000 and the D.C. Republican National Committeewoman from 2000 to 2004. Finley also served as National Finance Co-Chairman for the Bush-Cheney 2004 campaign for Washington D.C. and as Co-Chairman of Team 100, the major fundraising arm for the Republican National Committee, from 1997 through 2004.^[1]^[2]

After her nomination to the position of OSCE Ambassador by President Bush and subsequent confirmation by the United States Senate, Finley assumed her duties in Vienna, Austria on August 18, 2005.^[2]

In November of 2005, in response to a report that press freedoms in Kazakhstan were being violated by President Nursultan Nazarbayev, Ambassador Finley made a controversial statement that seemed to dismiss the significance of the crackdown on the press. Addressing a Kazakh official in a speech during an OSCE session in Vienna, Finley stated, “When I was in Kazakhstan a couple of weeks ago I had the interesting pleasure of reading some of this [sic] newspapers that have been seized. Maybe you saved some readers some waste of time, anyway.”^[3]

The U.S. State Department had been pushing President Nazarbayev to respect press freedoms and Finley's comment was somewhat at odds with that message. According to The New York Times, the transcript for the speech was removed from the American mission’s website but had already been circulated independently by Western diplomats. Finley declined to comment to the Times about her statement, though a colleague indicated that the quote had been ad libbed and did not reflect the Ambassador's actual feelings about freedom of the press and other civil liberties in Kazakhstan.^[3]