Tag Archives: lobbyists

Mayor Pete To Return Donations From Lobbyists

Axios reports: South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg announced in an email on Friday that the campaign will no longer accept contributions from federal lobbyists, and plans to return $30,250 to those who have already donated. The decision comes one day after former Vice President Joe Biden announced his presidential candidacy at the home of a Comcast executive, per Politico. Buttigieg …

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REVEALED: At Least 187 Trump Appointees Are Former Lobbyists, Many Now Oversee Their Former Industries

ProPublica reports: When the Trump administration took office early last year, hundreds of staffers from lobbying firms, conservative think tanks and Trump campaign groups began pouring into the very agencies they once lobbied or whose work they once opposed. Today we’re making available, for the first time, an authoritative searchable database of 2,475 political appointees, including Trump’s Cabinet, staffers in …

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Trump Offers Job Of National Security Adviser To Michael Flynn, Paid Lobbyist For Turkish Government

That swamp is SO drained, you guys. The Associated Press reports: President-elect Donald Trump offered former military intelligence chief Michael Flynn the job of national security adviser as he began to build out his national security team Thursday, according to a senior Trump official. The move came as Trump made his most direct foray into foreign policy since the election, …

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REPORT: The Real Reason Paul Singer Is Backing Rubio

According to International Business Times, billionaire investor Paul Singer’s backing of Marco Rubio may be tied to Rubio’s position on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. At a discounted price, Singer purchased debt owed by Argentina and is suing them for full repayment. And Rubio can help with that. They write: Bloomberg reports that Singer’s firm, Elliott Management — through a …

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Perkins Attacks Apple Over Fired Lobbyist

“Tech giant Apple was outed for firing an Alabama lobbyist who had supported natural marriage when he was a state legislator! Like FRC’s Craig James, who never mentioned his views on the job, Jay Love got the boot for voicing his opinion years earlier as a state legislator. A local Alabama newspaper smoked Love out in a hit piece that …

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Apple Cuts Ties With Anti-Gay Lobbyist

Via the Washington Blade: Apple Inc., the technology giant whose CEO recently came out as gay, has terminated its contract with an Alabama lobbyist it recently hired who has an anti-LGBT record, according to the three sources. Former Alabama State Rep. Jay Love, who served in the Alabama Legislature between 2003 and 2013, appears on the Alabama Ethics Commission list …

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Top Oil Industry Lobbyists

Last year the oil and gas industry spent over $145 million to lobby Congress for legislation that would help their businesses. In completely unrelated news, ConocoPhillips, the #1 oil lobbying corporation, just announced record-breaking 2011 profits of $12.4 billion. Almost 90% of that profit was used to buy back stock shares to enrich their top investors. Some might says those …

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100% Bought By The Koch Brothers

Americans For Prosperity, the Koch Brothers-backed lobbying group, has posted a “scorecard” of the members of Congress based on how often they voted the way the Koch Brothers wanted them to. Above are those with a 100% grade.

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It Pays To Be A Lobbyist

If that first name seems familiar to you, it’s because he used to be the chairman of the House committee that oversees the drug industry. Whom he now lobbies for to the tune of many millions annually. One of his recent successes was continuing the ban on importing prescription drugs from Canada. More on him and a longer list at …

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Bachmann Vs. Newt On Freddie Mac

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Lobbying Firm Offers To “Undermine OWS”

According to a leaked memo, a DC-based lobbying firm often hired by banks pitched its clients on how they could undermine Occupy Wall Street by planting unsavory news items about its participants, among other tactics. CLGC’s memo proposes that the ABA pay CLGC $850,000 to conduct “opposition research” on Occupy Wall Street in order to construct “negative narratives” about the …

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Former Sen. Larry “Wide Stance” Craig Is Trolling Halls Of Congress As A Lobbyist

Now that his two year post-Senate “cooling off” period is over, totally not gay toe-tapper Larry Craig is once again trolling the halls of Congress, but this time it’s as a lobbyist. Craig’s firm, New West Strategies, wouldn’t actually confirm lobbying was now part of his portfolio. “I didn’t say that,” said Mike Ware, a principle at New West, adding, …

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Health Insurance Lobby Gave $86M To Fight Health Care Reform

A coalition of insurance companies donated over $86M to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to fight the passage of health care reform. The Chamber is notoriously run by GOP-insiders. The spending exceeded the insurer group’s entire budget from a year earlier and accounted for 40 percent of the Chamber’s $214.6 million in 2009 spending. The expenditures reflect the insurers’ attempts …

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Barney Frank Bans Contact With Former Staffer Turned Lobbyist

Under congressional rules, government employees who become lobbyists (usually for the industries they once regulated), are barred from contacting their former employers for one year. Today Barney Frank took that one step further, banning staffers on the House Financial Services Committee from ever speaking with a former coworker now working as a banking industry lobbyist. By law, [Peter] Roberson is …

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Another Round For The House

Elizabeth Benjamin at the NY Daily News forwards her readers the above chart regarding the rules for lobbyists who want to buy drinks or food for members of Congress today. The accompanying email from the Lobbying Compliance Center begins: “In a town with many Irish pubs, it’s to be expected that Washington, D.C., would go all out for St. Patrick’s …

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Our Drug Puppet Congress

The New York Times reports that 42 members of the House read health care reform statements into the official record that were ghostwritten by lobbyists from pharmaceutical giant Genentech. E-mail messages obtained by The New York Times show that the lobbyists drafted one statement for Democrats and another for Republicans. The lobbyists, employed by Genentech and by two Washington law …

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Mark Buse Worked For Freddie Mac

I totally missed it when I was looking at the list of his lobbying clients, but the Washington Post and others are reporting that openly gay McCain chief of staff Mark Buse once worked for Freddie Mac as a lobbyist. When mortgage giant Freddie Mac feared several years ago that Sen. John McCain was too outspoken on the issue of …

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Mark Buse: McCain’s Lobbyist Insider

It certainly didn’t turn out to be the biggest story of his day, but yesterday PBS ran an interview with John McCain’s gay chief of staff Mark Buse. From the transcript: JUDY WOODRUFF: Just to recap quickly the evolution of your time working for him [John McCain]. You started in 1984 as an intern when he was a member of …

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