A Republican congressman in one of this fall’s key U.S. Senate races helped secure earmarks for three former clients of the lobbying firm where his son is an executive, records show.
In an unusual twist, U.S. Rep. Denny Rehberg of Montana, who is in a hotly contested race with first-term Democratic Senator Jon Tester, co-sponsored earmarks with Tester for MSE Technology Applications, the Rocky Boys Indian reservation and Salish Kootenai College.
Rehberg led Tester 53-43 in a May 2 survey by Rasmussen Reports. Their contest is one of a half dozen that Republicans hope will put them back in power in the Senate, which now has a 53-47 Democratic majority.
All three of the earmark recipients have previously employed A.J. Rehberg’s firm, Gage International, as lobbyists, and the three entities were listed this week on Gage’s online list of former clients.
Christopher Bond, a spokesman for Rehberg, dismissed the earmarks, saying “Denny has been a leader in the House to end the practice of earmarking completely; that wasn’t a popular move on K Street and he’s taken heat for it, but it was the right thing to do.”
Bond also said that “Senator Tester campaigned against earmarks, then hypocritically became one of their biggest defenders in Washington. This type of hypocrisy is a pattern for Tester, and despite getting himself elected on an anti-lobbyist platform, Tester is now the number-one recipient of lobbyist campaign cash in Congress.”
A reporter’s telephone call seeking a comment from a Tester spokesman was not returned.
MSE has received millions of federal dollars for defense-related research, while Rocky Boys got money to supply clean drinking water and the college got money to improve its curriculum.
A.J. Rehberg is not registered as a federal lobbyist, but he is Gage International’s president, according to the firm’s website. Other Gage officials are registered to lobby and lobbied for entities as varied as the travel website Expedia.com and the Mongolian government.
Earmarks – directions from Congress for a federal agency or program on how to spend a certain amount of tax dollars – have drawn widespread criticism as a method for senators and representatives to divert public money from other uses to pork projects in their states or districts.
Rehberg, Montana’s sole representative in the House, renounced earmarks two years ago, before Congress imposed its own moratorium on the practice last year.
“The culture of spending in Washington, D.C. is broken and our mutual bosses in Montana have joined Americans from around the country in sending a clear message: we simply can’t afford to continue the practice of earmarks,” Rehberg wrote to Tester and Sen. Max Baucus in 2010.
All three men — the entire Montana delegation on Capitol Hill — co-sponsored the earmarks in question.
A six-term House member, Rehberg has gotten at least $113,000 in contributions from people and PACs affiliated with private firms for whom he requested earmarks since 2008, according to data compiled by two watchdog groups, Taxpayers for Common Sense and WashingtonWatch.com.
Congress began requiring earmark disclosure in 2008.
Tester received at least $22,000 from people who listed an employment affiliation with his private earmark recipients.
Both men in the Montana race have taken heat for their ties to lobbyists: Liberals have thumped Rehberg for criticizing lobbyists while his son works for a lobbying firm.
And Rehberg has criticized Tester for accepting more campaign cash from lobbyists this year than any other member of Congress, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics (CRP) — Rehberg himself is No. 10 on the list.
A former top aide to Tester also now lobbies on behalf of the banking industry that Tester helps regulate, as a member of the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee.
Both Montana politicos have sought numerous earmarks in their careers: Rehberg sponsored 40 solo and 186 total earmarks, while Tester sponsored 23 by himself and 257 total, according to tallies by the LegiStorm website. Rehberg is serving his sixth term in the House, while Tester was first elected to Congress in 2006.
Advanced Acoustic Concepts, a company that got a $2.5 million earmark that Rehberg sponsored solo in 2008, has given the congressman $32,500 over the years. That makes the firm one of Rehberg’s 20 largest all-time donors, according to CRP.
Rehberg had also sought a $6 million earmark for the firm that year, Washington Watch said. Advanced Acoustic has also received more than $10 million in earmarks sponsored by other members of Congress, including the late U.S. Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa.
Another major donor to Rehberg is MSE, an engineering services firm that is one of Butte’s largest employers. Rehberg, Tester and Baucus co-sponsored three earmarks for the firm that were funded, worth a combined $18 million, and Tester sponsored an additional $1.6 million for it.
Employees of the company and its PAC have also donated more than $32,000 to Rehberg’s campaigns, and $5,500 to Tester’s. The two men have also sought other earmarks for the firm that weren’t funded, including an $8 million request in 2010, according to Washington Watch.
Company officials have previously told the Montana media that MSE was at one point 100% funded by federal earmarks, and that Tester had helped convince the federal Agriculture Department to guarantee a $5 million loan to the firm in 2010.
MSE paid Gage $372,000 in 2004-06 for lobbying services, records show. The lobbying firm was known during most of that time as Giacometto Group, named for founder Leo Giacometto, who had been chief of staff to former U.S. Sen. Conrad Burns, R-Montana.
It was Burns who was beaten at the polls by Tester in 2006. Burns is now a senior advisor to the lobbying firm.
Gage’s site says the younger Rehberg also oversees some of the firm’s business ventures in Mongolia, including a uranium-mining project and Mongolia’s Pepsi bottling franchise. (Aside from its main office near Capitol Hill in DC, Gage also maintains an office in the Mongolian capital of Ulaanbaatar.)
It’s not clear from the company’s site or available public records when the younger Rehberg began working for Gage. The Associated Press said last year that he started with Gage in 2008.
The AP said the congressman had sought the counsel of the House Ethics Committee on the issue.
“Denny and A.J. have taken it a step further, establishing a professional firewall. There’s an understanding between them that they just don’t talk shop together,” Rehberg spokesman Jed Link told the AP then.
“Denny also made it perfectly clear to GAGE that hiring A.J. would neither help nor hurt their standing with him or his office. A.J. being on staff has no impact whatsoever,” Link said.
Even so, a congressional ethics expert took a dimmer view of the situation today.
“I think it’s always a problem when a member of Congress is involved in, when they’re pushing for, things that financially benefit their family members,” said Melanie Sloan, executive director of the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.
“I think the fact that Mr. Rehberg’s son is lobbying on issues means that Congressman Rehberg should be staying out of them,” she said.
Another former Gage client is the Rocky Boys reservation in rural north central Montana, where about 3,500 members of the Chippewa-Cree tribe reside, according to the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs. Rocky Boys paid $100,000 to Gage in 2004-05, according to lobbying disclosures.
Rehberg, Tester and Baucus co-sponsored $22 million in earmarks in 2008-10 to help supply clean drinking water to Rocky Boys and the towns near it. The project, which involves laying 54 miles of water pipe, has a total price tag of nearly $300 million.
A third former Gage client that got an earmark co-sponsored by Rehberg, Tester and Baucus is Salish Kootenai College. The small school on the Flathead Indian reservation in Northwestern Montana received a $238,000 earmark for curriculum development, co-sponsored by Rehberg and Tester, in 2009.
The school had previously paid Gage $70,000 for lobbying services in 2004-05, records show.
Officials with MSE, the Rocky Boys tribal office and the Salish Kootenai College president’s office did not return a reporter’s call seeking comment for this story.
Mark Tapscott is executive editor of The Washington Examiner. Jennifer Peebles is the newspaper’s data editor.
