Lavishing lawmakers with six-figure campaign donations is not the only way banks and investment houses influence the legislative process.
They also hire the top aides of those lawmakers, who can trade on relationships with their old bosses to pick up the phone and, say, arrange an impromptu session with Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, or Chris Dodd, chairman of the Senate Banking Committee.
In the past year, top bailout recipients, including Goldman Sachs Group and Citigroup, have dispatched dozens of former congressional staffers and ex-government officials to lobby their former bosses on the financial rescue package, Mother Jones reports.
Besides one-time aides to Democratic and Republican leaders, the magazine found that many of the lobbyists hired by financial institutions are ex-employees of congressional committees on banking, finance, and commerce, former Treasury officials and in one case, a top aide to Rahm Emanuel, now the White House chief of staff.
Goldman Sachs, which has more than 30 ex-government officials working as registered lobbyists on staff, also tapped one-time House Majority Leader Richard Gephardt (D-Mo.) to represent its interests on issues related to the Treasury Department’s Troubled Assets Relief Program.
Other insiders lobbying for Goldman Sachs include Faryar Shirzad, a former top economic aide to President George W. Bush and also Republican counsel to the Senate Finance Committee; as well as former SEC commissioner Richard Y. Roberts, now a principal at lobby firm RR&G LLC.
Citigroup, which spent nearly $8 million on lobbying in 2008, is particularly adept at recruiting government insiders.
Leading its huge in-house staff is Nicholas E. Calio, senior vice president of global government affairs, who worked for both George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush as assistant to the president for legislative affairs assistant.
James “Jimmy” Ryan, former senior counsel to Majority Leader Reid, is another heavy hitter on the Democratic side. Ryan accompanied CEO Vikram Pandit to a recent meeting with Reid - although the senator’s spokesman Jim Manley discounted the notion that Pandit received any special treatment.
Another star on the Democratic side is Robert Getzoff, a vice president for federal government affairs who until 2007 served as senior counsel to then-Rep. Rahm Emanuel.
“To the best of our knowledge there has not been direct contact between Getzoff and Rahm in several months,” an Emanuel aide told Mother Jones.
Other in-house lobbyists include Robert Schellhas, a chief of staff to former Rep. Rob Portman, a Republican from Ohio, and Michael P. Andrews, formerly of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission
Besides its own staff, the banking giant has also hired more than a half-dozen lobbying firms, who themselves depend on hiring veterans of the legislative and executive branches.
Robert Cogorno, a Citigroup lobbyist who works for Elmendorf Strategies, is a former Gephardt aide and one-time floor director for Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), the No. 2 House Democrat.
(Cogorno also lobbies for Goldman Sachs, as does his boss, Steven Elmendorf, Gephardt’s former chief of staff.) A Hoyer spokeswoman told Mother Jones that Cogorno has not lobbied the House majority leader on banking matters.
Also on Citigroup’s lobbying team is DC attorney Robert Barnett, a former chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC).
Another new addition to Citigroup’s forces is DC Navigators, which registered in January to lobby for the bank on TARP issues. Handling the account is Cesar Conda, former Vice President Dick Cheney’s domestic policy chief.
Under current lobbying rules, lobbyists are only required to disclose if they lobby the House, the Senate, or the executive branch, and, in general terms, which bills or issue areas they lobbied on. They don’t have to identify the legislators or aides they contacted, or what they discussed with lawmakers.
The Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007 strengthens some limitations on aides-turned-lobbyists, but former congressional staffers still need only wait a year before returning to the Hill to lobby their former bosses and colleagues.
Click here to sign up for the Muckety Newsletter
1 Comments
#1. Pat 04.17.2009
America must curb its obvious threat that allows politicians and now their staffs to rope off the areas that permit them to be first at the till of taxpayers taken hostages.
Like the preferred beneficiaries of the United States Taxpayer Trust fund rather than elected representatives, it is what caused the first American revolution, and there is no reason to suspect that humanity is not capable of creating the conditions that necessitate another.
Term limits and lobbying limits may be the only cure for this egotistical affliction.
Leave a Comment