If President Trump is really committed to the promise of draining the swamp, he needs to start paying attention to his 2016 campaign associates.
Last week, a former Trump appointee and transition official, Robert Wasinger, bailed on the White House to go work as a lobbyist. Now we’re reading about a handful of former campaign associates who are looking to turn their connections to the president into lucrative lobbying deals with foreign interests.
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Former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, for example, is actively courting foreign governments and looking to strike it rich doing consulting work on overseas elections, Politico reported this week.
Drain the swamp indeed.
Lewandowski’s partner, Barry Bennet, said not too long ago that their firm would eschew this exact behavior. Things change fast.
“We’ve met with a bunch of people,” Bennett said more recently. “It’s a big market, that’s for sure.”
Lewandowski’s firm, Avenue Strategies, has hired several ex-Trump campaign staffers.
Trump signed an executive order on Jan. 28 imposing a lobbying waiting period of five years on all of his appointees. The order also came with a lifetime ban on lobbying work for political parties and foreign governments.
However, as noted by Politico, the executive order doesn’t apply to Trump’s former campaign associates.
Other examples of former Trump associates who are now seeking a big payday in foreign lobbying include Bryan Lanza, who served as the Trump’s campaign’s former deputy communications director, and Mike Biundo, who worked as a senior adviser on the president’s 2016 campaign.
Then there’s Brad Gerstman, whose firm helped Trump with his 2015 campaign announcement, who said recently he was, “in advanced talks with a whole bunch of these foreign nations.”
Let’s not forget the lobbying firm SPG, which hired three former Trump staffers shortly after the election.
SPG, which is the only group so far with connections to Trump to snag a deal with a foreign client, moved fast to hire Stuart Jolly, who worked as the national field director for the Trump campaign. The lobbying shop also hired Robin Townley, who served in the White House as the National Security Council’s senior director for Africa, and Jacob Daniels, who worked for the Trump campaign in Michigan.
Townley exited the White House after an undisclosed security clearance issue went awry.
Like many of the Trump campaign associates who’ve fallen back on lobbying, they all maintain they’re not selling White House connections to the highest bidder.
“I am not abusing my relationships at all,” Jolly told Politico. “I love the guys that I brought on the campaign and worked with, and I want to support them as friends.”
