The Best People

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The Best People Page 10

by Alexander Nazaryan


  EO 13770 was titled “Ethics Commitments by Executive Branch Appointees.” Political appointees to executive branch positions came from outside the civil service and were nominated to their posts by the president. Under the new order, all such appointees had to pledge that they would not lobby the agency to which they were appointed for five years after leaving it; they would abide by restrictions regarding contact with agency officials; would not lobby foreign governments after working for the administration; would not accept gifts from lobbyists; and would follow other regulations.

  Raj S. Shah, the deputy White House press secretary, grandiosely called it “the most sweeping Executive Order in U.S. history to end the revolving door” between 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and the lobbying firms of K Street, singling out the injunction against foreign lobbying in particular. In some ways, the order was not dissimilar from what the Obama administration had in place: in fact, some parts of the executive order appeared to have been taken wholesale from the Obama version, thus making for an ironic and telling ethical transgression of its own.

  The news of EO 13770, and any debate over its relative merits, was utterly lost in the furor over Executive Order 13769, which had been signed that Friday night, banning travelers originating in seven majority-Muslim countries from entering the United States. Hastily written and announced to the public like a minor-league pitching change, EO 13769 sent protesters to airports and into the streets. That made EO 13770 something between an afterthought and a joke.

  The difference between making a rule and enforcing it was the difference between consulting a map and actually traveling the route. With his farcical transition press conference on January 11, Trump had indicated that Bannon’s populist revolution was not on his agenda. That project, however dubious, would have required selfless men, not men like Steve Mnuchin and Wilbur Ross.

  According to Norman L. Eisen, who served as President Obama’s chief ethics lawyer, the executive order on ethics was sabotaged by the very people in the executive branch charged with implementing it. Eisen claimed that the widespread granting of ethics waivers by the administration—in effect, permits to violate the new rules—completely undermined the executive order. “They’ve made a mockery of the executive order and of ethics in general,” he said, claiming that the Trump administration had “virtually no standard” on how such waivers are granted.

  Eisen found Trump officials’ contention that their executive order was virtually equivalent to the one that guided the Obama administration preposterous: “It’s an ethics calamity of a kind we have never seen in modern presidential history.” Only six months into the presidency, there were seventy-four lobbyists already working in the administration, forty-nine of them in agencies they once lobbied on behalf of clients.

  There were plenty of men and women in the Trump administration who had no interest in doing free commercials for Ivanka Trump. Many of them had served under George W. Bush, and they understood the contours of federal employment: what they could do, what they could never get away with, what bad optics would do to their careers, which could involve working in Washington, with Washington, long after their terms in the Trump administration were through.

  Trump’s cabinet members, for the most part, lacked this same awareness. Some were new to government. Some were new to Washington. Conway’s free commercial, Priebus telling Shaub to not meddle in presidential affairs, were signs that they could do as they pleased. The boss would not mind, and the public would never know.

  Chapter 5

  Alligators and Lily Pads

  For such a pedestrian word, “lobbyist” summoned up a glorious carnival of sleaze. If scandal was upon Washington once more, a lobbyist was most definitely to blame. Not that any such blame would ever be credibly pinned in time for the public accounting the lobbyist had long deserved. Others would be dragged before congressional committees, forced into shows of contrition. The lobbyist was too quick, too smooth, the firm he worked for too powerful. Washington would never expel him because Washington needed him too much.

  That was how lobbying had come to be seen by the early twenty-first century, and if that depiction was not entirely fair, it was also not entirely undeserved. It would be impossible to understand how Washington worked—and thus the reality of what truly powered the legislative and executive branches of government, cabinet departments included—without understanding lobbying, for no other reason than that lobbyists were the bees that pollinated the flowers.

  What replenished K Street was the steady flow of talent from Capitol Hill. There were 425 former members of Congress as of 2018 who worked as registered lobbyists. The number of former congressional staffers plying the same trade was in the thousands: 69 alumni of Hillary Clinton’s time as the junior U.S. senator from New York are or were registered lobbyists, giving her first place in this category. There was nothing surprising about this migration. A junior legislative aide in Congress could expect to make about $40,000 per year. As a lobbyist, she could easily triple or quadruple her salary.

  Lobbying the federal government was by 2018 a $3.3 billion annual enterprise, one that until 2016 had a lobbying group of its own, the Association of Government Relations Professionals. In 2018, the Center for Responsive Politics concluded that there were 11,444 registered lobbyists in Washington, as well as thousands more working as “shadow lobbyists,” doing the work of lobbying without adhering to the rules. There was the National Association of Ordnance and Explosive Waste Contractors, as well as the U.S. Association of Reptile Keepers, not to mention the Beer Institute. If there was a cause, there was a lobbyist.

  America’s first lobbyist was William Hull, hired in 1792 to advocate for Virginians who had fought in the American Revolution. Some decades after that, gun-maker Samuel Colt found himself in need of a patent extension. To this end, he hired Washington lobbyists who “have at different times presented pistols to certain members,” as a later investigation found.

  As for the dreaded term itself, a popular—though, unfortunately, probably apocryphal—story dates it to the administration of Ulysses S. Grant, the decorated Civil War general who would come to preside over one of the most corrupt presidential administrations in American history. Grant took an evening drink and cigar at the Willard Hotel, a couple of blocks from the White House. Those looking to win an audience with the president convened in the lobby of the Willard, a work of baroque splendor. (Historians have disputed that Grant’s postprandial habits had anything to do with the advent of “lobbying” as a term of art, as it appears to have shown up in the English language as early as 1777.)

  In 1875, Congress began an investigation into the granting of an improper subsidy to the Pacific Mail Steamship Company. Among the culprits was Samuel Cutler Ward, known as “the King of the Lobby.” Ward defended his honor before the House Ways and Means Committee: “I do not say I am proud—but I am not ashamed—of the occupation.” Ward knew that lavishing lawmakers with food and drink was often all it took and “proceeded upon the comfortable axiom,” as a biographer would write, “that the shortest distance between a pending bill and a Congressman’s ‘aye’ lies through his stomach.”

  No one lived this lesson as thoroughly as Jack A. Abramoff. By the time his career in Washington was over in 2005, and prison loomed, Abramoff had become the symbol of the Washington that Trump would run against. He was the swamp creature nonpareil, dragged from its lightless deep so that the whole nation could see what had become of American politics.

  “I hope he goes to jail and we never see him again,” said a Republican U.S. senator from Montana who eventually returned campaign contributions from the man who had come to be known as Casino Jack. “I wish he’d never been born, to be right honest with you.”

  By 2018, the façade of 801 Pennsylvania Avenue was shared by outlets of Wells Fargo, the coffee chain Paul, the salad chain Chopt, and several other unremarkable shops. Across the street was the concrete brutalist headquarters of the FBI, while on the next block, se
t back from the street, was the Trump International Hotel.

  There was a time, nearly twenty years ago, when 801 Pennsylvania Avenue—located almost exactly between the White House and the U.S. Capitol—was the place to be. Between 2002 and 2005, this was the home of Signatures, one of the restaurants Abramoff owned in Washington, during a brief period when he owned all of Washington, or at least acted like he did.

  There were places around Washington, like the charmingly fusty Tune Inn of Capitol Hill or the warm and rambling Old Ebbitt Grill across the street from the White House, that did not care to announce themselves as refuges for the powerful, which is probably why the powerful sought them out, savoring the chance to have a beer and burger without being bothered.

  Signatures was for people who hungered to announce their arrival on the scene. A May 2002 review in The Hill, a paper for the city’s political class, gushed that “Signatures has the feel of a successful venture, including some silent investors with deep pockets, a prime location…a skilled chef and imaginative menu,” which included the then rare delicacy of Kobe beef from Japan. The review noted that the restaurant was owned by a group called Livsar Enterprises, among whose silent partners was “a prominent lobbyist” recently profiled by the New York Times. That lobbyist was Abramoff.

  A product of Beverly Hills, Abramoff had gone to college at Brandeis University in Boston, where he headed the College Republicans chapter. He graduated in 1981 and went to Washington. He became the national chairman of the College Republicans upon his arrival in the district, then went to law school at Georgetown, graduating in 1986. He made a couple of movies, did some work for the apartheid South African government. In 1994, Jack Abramoff joined his first lobbying firm.

  Abramoff’s genius was in his understanding Washington exactly as it was, not as it should be or had once been. He saw Washington without her makeup and loved her anyway. Judging by the politicians who sold their votes to him, Washington loved him right back. He worked by seducing staffers on the Hill and, eventually, their bosses, the members of Congress themselves, while convincing interests foreign and domestic that he was a figure of Rasputin-like influence within the Republican Party. His method was simple, but effective. Horace M. Cooper, who had been an aide to Representative Dick Armey, the influential Republican from Texas, was feted with tickets to see all the major Washington sports teams in action, as well as with seats to performances by Bruce Springsteen, the Dixie Chicks, and other acts. Who could say no to such largesse?

  Plenty said yes. Republicans who turned out to have had dealings with Casino Jack, whether directly or not, included President George W. Bush, Texas attorney general John Cornyn (later the senior U.S. senator from that state), and Iowa senator Charles E. Grassley. There were Democrats, too, including U.S. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada and Tom Harkin of Iowa.

  Abramoff’s clients were stunningly diverse. They most famously included six Native American tribes from which he reaped $66 million, even as he derided their members as “plain stupid” and “monkeys.” Other clients included the governments of Malaysia and the Northern Mariana Islands.

  Downfall awaited Abramoff in 2005, after a whistleblower—another lobbyist—brought his trade secrets to light. The following year, a pained-looking Abramoff appeared on the cover of Time magazine as “the man who bought Washington.” He was supposed to be a symbol of the city at its most venal, but the truly frightening thing was not what Abramoff got wrong but, rather, what he got right.

  Abramoff left prison in 2010. He wrote a book about corruption and became a spokesman against lobbying. This did not last. By 2016, he was back at it, trying without success to broker a meeting between Trump and the Congolese president, Denis Sassou-Nguesso. The effort failed. As the Trump administration approached the end of its first year, Abramoff appeared on Fox News, where Tucker Carlson asked him if Washington had changed since the halcyon days when Signatures was a hot table.

  In response, Abramoff laughed. “Washington, basically, is the same swamp it used to be,” he said, “but they rearranged the alligators and the lily pads.” From anyone else, this would have come across as calculated cynicism. Coming from Abramoff, it had the harsh texture of truth.

  Every president had done such rearranging. In 1992, about a month and a half before the presidential election, the Washington Post reported, “High-profile staff members from various Washington lobbying firms are actively campaigning for Democratic nominee Bill Clinton,” further noting that “Democratic lobbyists see the chance of expanding their influence and gaining new business if Bush is ousted.”

  The Post spoke to one lobbyist who predicted a Clinton victory, and the windfall that would bring to firms like his, Hill and Knowlton. “I think Clinton is going to win,” that lobbyist said. “And we may well be the place to go if you want advice and counsel about how the new administration will affect your business, your cause or your country.” The lobbyist’s name was Frank Mankiewicz. He was once a top aide to Robert F. Kennedy. When Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles in 1968, it was Mankiewicz who announced the killing on television. There was nothing uniquely ignoble about his turning to lobbying, but it was a sign of where true power had come to reside in Washington.

  Barack Obama’s eight years in office were marked by a remarkable lack of major corruption-related scandal, but that was not because his administration shunned lobbyists. To the contrary, it welcomed them like every other administration. There were lobbyists on his transition team, despite promises they would be kept out. Democratic power lawyer Lanny Davis, a top Clinton aide, dismissed this incongruity. “From George Washington to George W. Bush, there has been a role for the lobbyist that is perfectly appropriate and good for democracy,” he told the Washington Post. “The notion that there is something wrong per se with lobbying is ridiculous.”

  Lobbyists had access to the Obama administration, if not always to the White House itself in the most literal terms. Diagonally across the street from the White House, on Pennsylvania Avenue and Seventeenth Street, there was an always crowded outlet of Peet’s Coffee, the Berkeley-based chain, by the time that Trump took office. During the Obama presidency, this was Caribou Coffee, and it played more or less the same function as the Willard’s lobby may have in Grant’s time.

  Inviting lobbyists on campus would have required them to be recorded in Secret Service visitor logs, which could be subject to Freedom of Information Act public disclosure. But there were no disclosure laws pertaining to a coffee shop, even if privacy would be in short supply. Some other meetings with lobbyists were held at the White House Conference Center and at the Council on Environmental Quality, both located in the genteel row houses of Jackson Place, in sight of the White House. These could also be kept secret.

  “We don’t believe there’s anything untoward about these meetings, and we don’t think that represents any special access for lobbyists,” one White House official told the New York Times in 2010 about the Caribou Coffee klatches. This was untrue. The Obama staffers were trying to keep their lobbyist meetings secret by, paradoxically, holding them in public. The Obama administration did release its visitors’ logs, though only after a lawsuit. Even then, the logs were incomplete.

  Lobbyists were never more empowered than with the election of Donald Trump. He ran as their scourge; he would govern as their benefactor.

  Trump may have banished Chris Christie from his transition, but when it came to actually making the four thousand political appointments for the executive branch that were the responsibility of the president, Trump inevitably turned to K Street, whose lobbying firms were clustered just north of the White House. That gave lobbyists enormous power in molding the Trump cabinet. Once the right people were in place, they could steer the federal government where they pleased.

  What happened to draining the swamp and deconstructing the administrative state? There was no time, no will, at least not for the project as Bannon had envisioned it. He understood this as well as anyone
. Washington was, as he put it, a “company town,” and Trump was now its mayor. Trying to tear everything down was not going to be a very smart program, even if that had been the program he promised. But there were other promises, other imperatives, namely on trade, healthcare, and national security. “Draining the swamp is very important, don’t get me wrong,” Bannon said. “But you need to get the economy going again.”

  Opportunists rushed in. Savviest in gaining access to the new administration was the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank that opposed virtually every idea Bannon championed. The man who ran Heritage until the spring of 2017, Jim DeMint, made no pretenses about being an intellectual. A former U.S. senator from South Carolina, he was associated with the Tea Party and spent the first term of the Obama presidency in a state of perpetual resistance. When he took over Heritage in 2013, the think tank forswore its philosophic roots, taking on the reactionary dogmatism of its new leader.

  Trump’s lack of commitment to conservatism, his disregard for that movement as anything other than a means of winning the presidency, was not a problem for DeMint, who moved toward Trump as others backed away. The gamble proved auspicious, and Heritage was rewarded with dozens of appointments within the Trump administration, even as other conservative groups struggled to gain a foothold in the West Wing. The foundation was also instrumental, along with the Federalist Society, in selecting Trump’s two successful Supreme Court nominees, Neil M. Gorsuch and Brett M. Kavanaugh.

  “Here’s the brutal reality,” Bannon explained. “There was not a deep bench of talent that could step in to the government and run things. Now, we should have done a much better job of getting Trump people into the administration,” the former chief strategist added, showing a reflectiveness that did not come across in his spirited public appearances. “Absolutely, much better job. It’s one of the things that Trump didn’t fight.”

 

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