As one of her first official undertakings, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gathered a platoon of revolving-door corporate lobbyists and consultants around her to hit up major corporations for six-and-seven figure donations for a pet cause.
The story — involving the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai — demonstrates Clinton’s unique closeness with K Street and corporate America, but it also provides a clear lesson in the true role lobbyists play in Washington: Lobbyists often are not the lever by which business influences politicians, but the tool politicians use to extract wealth and power from business.
Here’s the background:
In the late 1980s, Congress forbade the use of federal funds for a U.S. pavilion at World Expos. The Bush administration generally declined to contribute a pavilion to the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai. As she came into office, Clinton decided that a pavilion was a priority, because Chinese officials saw the U.S. abstention as an insult.
So Sec. Clinton in 2009 set out to raise tens of millions of dollars from giant U.S. corporations. In order to do so, she called on her cadre of lobbyist friends. Their job was to hit up their clients and other corporations.
This fundraising effort was run by longtime Clinton operative Kris Balderston, described by authors Amie Parnes and Jonathan Allen as “the political fixer who could help her build unique networks connecting her State Department to other government agencies, the nonprofit sector, and the corporate world.”
Balderston today leads the Washington D.C. office of lobbying and public-relations firm Fleishman Hilliard. This is typical. All of the players in the Clinton world get rich by parlaying their “public service” into lucrative gigs lobbying or flacking for the corporate clients they were previously regulating, subsidizing, or otherwise working with.
Balderston brought in a crew of these revolvers.
In a June 2009 email, Balderston explained he “Spoke to Ginsberg, Sosnik (NBA), Mantz and they are engaged.” Ginsberg is Marc Ginsberg, appointed an ambassador by Bill Clinton, and in 2008 was registered as a lobbyist at APCO Worldwide. Doug Sosnik was an advisor to the NBA, a former political advisor to Bill Clinton, and a registered lobbyist. Jonathan Mantz is a longtime Hillary aide and a registered lobbyist at the K Street firm, Barbour, Griffith, and Rogers.
In one March 4 email, Balderston wrote: “Just a quick note to tell you that we are moving forward on the Expo funding. All came in at $500k, McGraw Hill at $200k, Intel at $250k more, Delos Living (a Mantz client) $250k, and CITI at a minimum of $2M brings us down to $3.7M.”
Mark Penn, widely distrusted on the American Left because of his long history of corporate consulting sprinkled amid his political and government jobs, also saw this as an opportunity. Penn emailed Clinton on February 22, 2010, “Wondering why no one called me since I have probably 20 clients from Ford, Microsoft, Intel, HP, Dell all very interested in Shanghai Expo as well as 100 people in China.”
Clinton wrote back, “Mark–thanks for the offer of help. I’d appreciate anything you can to do assist w the completion of the American Pavilion.” She then put Penn and Balderston in touch.
Balderston explained that “Dell, Intel, Microsoft (and about 20 others) all in but HP is not and Ford despite our best efforts keeps turning us down.” In its effort to get Ford to pony up, Balderston wrote that he was deploying lobbyists Dick Gephardt and Jim Blanchard, both former Democratic lawmakers.
Blanchard was a lobbyist at the time at the lobbying/law firm DLA Piper, who had Ford as a legal client.
Gephardt has in recent years represented many of the companies that Clinton and Team brought in to fund the Expo, including Boeing and General Electric.
This all reflects the aspect of lobbying most observers miss: the lobbyists are often more closely bound to the politicians they are supposedly swaying than they are to the clients they are supposedly representing. The result: the lobbyists serve largely to extract money from companies, and use that money to help their political friends, whose success will ensure the lobbyists more clients.
In this case, Hillary’s K Street friends got her enough money to build a pavilion at the Expo. This also roped these corporate executives further into Hillary’s circle, and — at least a little bit — made them invested in her success.
This is how wealth begets wealth, power begets power, and how on K Street, they are all intermarried.
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.
