Donald Trump may nominate for Treasury Secretary a Goldman Sachs banker whose biggest patron was George Soros. Alternatively, he could opt for the top bank lobbyist in D.C.
Trump’s pledge to “drain the swamp” appears headed for the same fate as President Obama’s promise eight years ago to end the reign of the special interests and “end the game-playing” in D.C.
In all corners of his transition team and his planned executive branch, President-elect Trump is placing lobbyists and Wall Street insiders. He’s not draining the swamp — he’s hiring the swamp creatures.
Steve Mnuchin was a Goldman Sachs banker who started his own investment firm seeded with money from George Soros. He then made huge profits by buying a failed bank off the government with help from a special tweak by regulators.
When Trump tapped Mnuchin as his campaign’s finance chairman, commentators noted the irony of a populist candidate railing against Wall Street and the elites while leaning on this Goldman-born-and-bred Yale alumnus to rustle up the funding for the whole operation. If the Goldman connection is too rich for Trump, he will have to go further down his depth chart, which the New York Times says includes former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty.
Pawlenty quit Mitt Romney’s campaign six weeks out from the 2012 election to take over the Financial Services Roundtable, a K Street lobbying operation whose members include Bank of America, Citigroup, JP Morgan, Wells Fargo, and General Electric.
Pawlenty, in this role, has lobbied for renewing the charter of the Export-Import Bank, a federal agency that subsidizes exporters and their lenders—and which Trump has said he opposes. Putting a corporate-welfare lobbyist for the biggest banks atop Treasury doesn’t really count as “draining the swamp.”
Rudy Giuliani is the frontrunner to be Secretary of State, media reports say. Apparently, if there’s anything this past election taught us, it’s that the voters want a baby-boomer liberal New Yorker tied up with lobbyists, shady foreign actors, and bankers to push an aggressive globalist foreign policy from Foggy Bottom.
Giuliani had his name on a lobbying firm up until 2016. While the former mayor was a named partner at Bracewell & Giuliani, the firm grew its lobbying from $4.7 million the year before he joined to a peak of $8.7 million in 2010. The firm’s clients in Giuliani’s decade there included Duke Energy, Bluefire Ethanol, the Council of Industrial Boiler Owners, and the Airborne Tactical Advantage Company.
The boiler owners weren’t Giuliani’s most noteworthy corporate client. Marxist terrorist organization Mujahideen-e Khalq (MEK) also paid “America’s Mayor” to advocate for the group, pleading on Capitol Hill and at Foggy Bottom to pull MEK off the list of foreign terrorist organizations, Josh Rogin reported in the Washington Post this week.
Giuliani Partners, Rudy’s other consulting venture, represented drugmaker Purdue before federal agencies regarding painkiller OxyContin, the New York Times reported in 2007.
Pete Hoekstra, the former congressman from Western Michigan, is a contender for a senior intelligence or Homeland Security job, according to various news reports. Hoekstra operates a lobbying and consulting firm, Hoekstra Global Strategies. Lobbying filings indicate Hoekstra lobbies Congress on tax credits for an energy company and federal contracts for a helicopter company.
Jeffrey Holmstead is a lobbyist at Bracewell LLP (they dropped Giuliani’s name at the beginning of the year) is on the short list for the Environmental Protection Agency, according to the Times. Holmstead has been a lobbyist for nearly a decade. Liberals blast him for representing “polluters,” but one of his clients, Duke Energy, was lobbying for mandatory climate caps late last decade while Holmstead represented them.
Corey Lewandowski and Newt Gingrich were in the early running for administration jobs, though early press reports suggest internal opposition. Lewandowski was an earmark lobbyist during the early days of the Tea Party. Gingrich was an unregistered lobbyist for government-backed mortgage-bubble-inflator Freddie Mac, for drug companies seeking Medicare subsidies, and for the ethanol industry.
Trump defends this K Street bonanza by saying it was unavoidable: “The whole place is one big lobbyist,” he explains. That excuse may be an accidental admission: His promises to reform Washington, to storm the castle, were promises he couldn’t keep.
Trump was always right about the corruption in Washington. He may prove himself clueless in how to uproot it. Or worse, he may just be fine with it after all.
Timothy P. Carney, the Washington Examiner’s senior political columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]. His column appears Tuesday and Thursday nights on washingtonexaminer.com.
