Free Republic

A wide ranging congressional investigation into Countrywide Financial will dig into how the mortgage giant went about picking government officials to offer its VIP program, according to aides involved with the inquiry. Thanks to an agreement between Republicans and Democrats reached late Friday night, any name of a member of Congress involved in the VIP program will head straight to the ethics committee, while redacted copies of those documents will be given to the House Oversight and Government Reform. But the committee has cast a much wider net, looking into whether lobbyists or others in Washington helped identify mid-level Hill...

Lobbyists and government watchdogs are applauding revisions made by the White House on Friday to lobbying restrictions on stimulus funds. After completing a 60-day review last week, the administration modified the rules to extend a speaking ban not just to lobbyists but to others who contact government officials about specific stimulus projects. But that ban only occurs now after a grant application has been filed for the project. Those interested in the project have to file their views in writing with administration officials, which will then be disclosed on the Internet. All contacts with lobbyists will still have to be...

President Obama may not have announced any detailed new programs Tuesday night, but his words will provide special interests large and small much food for thought. Touching on big-money industries such as financial services, housing, energy, healthcare and education, Obama laid out an ambitious agenda even as he pledged to rein in government spending. “Now is the time to jumpstart job creation, re-start lending and invest in areas like energy, healthcare and education that will grow our economy, even as we make hard choices to bring our deficit down,” Obama said. With that short but profound litany of priorities, the...

Washington’s influence industry is humming steadily while the national economy is declining in what several economists predict will be the worst recession in 50 years. More than half a million Americans lost jobs last month, and the value of most 401(k) plans plunged, yet government and public-relations pros in town expect to make a lot of money over the next two years. Fueling the industry along K Street is an anticipation of sweeping changes that President-elect Obama and the newly emboldened Democratic Congress will pursue together — from ending Bush-administration tax cuts to enacting the broad health reforms proposed during...

Three major trade associations announced a changeover in leadership Friday as Washington prepares for a new administration and a Congress with extended Democratic majorities in both houses. Frank Bowman resigned as president and chief executive officer of the Nuclear Energy Institute. Bowman was selected as the leader of NEI in August 2004. “After much deliberation about the right course of leadership for our industry and the Nuclear Energy Institute during this period of dramatic change in Congress and the White House, I am resigning as president and chief executive officer at the Nuclear Energy Institute,” Bowman wrote in his resignation...

Hillary's Mystery Money MenRuss Baker & Adam Federman Thu Oct 18, 2:04 PM ET The Nation -- In the Clintons' pursuit of power, there is no such thing as a strange bedfellow. One recently exposed inamorata was Norman Hsu, the mysterious businessman from Hong Kong who brought in $850,000 to Hillary Clinton's campaign before being unmasked as a fugitive. Her campaign dismissed Hsu as someone who'd slipped through the cracks of an otherwise unimpeachable system for vetting donors, and perhaps he was. The same cannot be said for the notorious financier Alan Quasha, whose involvement with Clinton is at least...

Lost amid all of the jubilation of the Obama victory was the announcement by the Obama transition team that it had set up a separate transition program beyond the one that is paid for by the American taxpayer. Called the "Obama/Biden Transition Project," it is a 501(c)4 tax-exempt organization, with no limits on the contributions it can receive and no requirements to divulge the names of individuals or organizations that give it money. Traditionally, the victorious campaign has set up inaugural funds, as well as funds to deal with legal costs and other expenses to close down the campaign. Others...

A Barack Obama presidency and stronger Democratic majorities on Capitol Hill signal a power shift beyond the White House and Congress. Expect new faces in corporate offices and trade association suites downtown, even if Democrats don’t imitate the K Street Project, the campaign by Republicans to fill lobbying slots with their own. The shift was already under way before Tuesday, prompted by the Democratic takeover of Congress two years ago, though the impact of that victory has been mostly limited to a move away from the all-GOP business model and toward shops that offered well-connected Democrats. Corporate offices and trade...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Disgraced former lobbyist Jack Abramoff, whose corruption scandal shook up Washington's power elite and contributed to the Republican loss of control in Congress, was sentenced on Thursday to four years in federal prison. Judge Ellen Huvelle issued the sentence on conspiracy and other charges after federal prosecutors recommended leniency due to Abramoff's cooperation in pursuing corruption cases against lawmakers and former administration officials. He faced a maximum of 11 years under a plea deal reached in 2006.

As most of Washington met last week to fret over the economy, Harry Reid was attending a less-noticed summit. The Senate majority leader had summoned the titans of more than a dozen industry trade groups to a Capitol Hill meeting, where he delivered a crisp message: Get with our program, or get demolished. Anyone remember the "K Street Project"? Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and conservative activist Grover Norquist designed it to pressure the business community into hiring GOP lobbyists, supporting GOP causes, and giving money to GOP candidates. The press was shocked, shocked, to discover such behavior, and...

Disturbed by troubling connections and unflattering publicity, John McCain has just purged several prominent Washington lobbyists from his presidential campaign. Surely his intentions are laudable, but if Sen. McCain is consistent in ridding his campaign of such compromised people, he will find himself riding lonesome on the Straight Talk Express. That's because nearly all of his advisers, fundraisers and top staffers have worked on K Street, starting with his campaign manager, Rick Davis, and his senior adviser and spokesman, Charles Black. From the beginning, the McCain team has been thoroughly infested with representatives of corporate special interests, from the campaign's...

Around noon today, the powers-that-be at NEWSWEEK posted "A Convention Quandary" on our website. In the story, investigative ace Michael Isikoff reported that the man chosen by John McCain's presidential campaign to run this summer's GOP convention--Arizonan Doug Goodyear--was causing some headaches within the ranks. The problem? Goodyear is CEO of DCI Group, a consulting firm that earned $3 million last year lobbying for ExxonMobil, General Motors and other clients--not the most convenient association for a candidate who's already struggling to reconcile his reputation as an anti-special interests crusader with the sizable number of lobbyists on his senior staff. Further...

PR executive Doug Goodyear voluntarily steps down after past ties to Burma are revealed.

The number of people who make their livings trying to influence the federal government runs into the hundreds of thousands, an enormous figure given the fact that most lobbying is aimed at 535 members of Congress. The exact size of this lobbying army is hard to define, however, because the 30,000 or so people who register to lobby each year do so voluntarily (there is essentially no enforcement of lobbying registration laws), and only those who meet with lawmakers and their staffs directly are required to register at all. The majority of people who lobby do so indirectly, through tele-marketing,...

Democrats tell business to pay up or else. The late Milton Friedman used to rail against what he called corporate America's "suicidal impulse." By that he meant that the business community continually financed the very politicians who were intent on robbing their profits and slitting their throats. It's happening again. The latest quarterly Federal Election Commission Report on political giving, released this week, shows the majority of corporate money flowing to the Democrats. Firms like Comcast, General Electric, Federal Express and UPS have shifted campaign giving away from the GOP. Employees of five major defense contractors including Lockheed Martin, Boeing...

One weekday morning in mid-July, perhaps two dozen liberal organizers gathered around a conference table in an office building on Washington’s K Street. Their mission: American withdrawal from Iraq. In one sense, the location was unlikely; K Street is a symbolic address, like Madison Avenue or Fleet Street, in this case representing the capital’s thriving industry of trade associations and corporate lobbyists. Yet this was a group of mostly young progressives drawing meager salaries who had no ties to corporate America. Still, the venue was not inappropriate. Those arranged around the table represented the new face of the antiwar movement...

Washington lobbying firms, trade associations and corporate offices are moving to hire more well-connected Democrats in response to rising prospects that the opposition party will wrest control of at least one chamber of Congress from Republicans in the November elections. In what lobbyists are calling a harbinger of possible upheaval on Capitol Hill, many who make a living influencing government have gone from mostly shunning Democrats to aggressively recruiting them as lobbyists over the past six months or so.

WASHINGTON - In a burst of activity that ended 16 months of inaction, the House ethics committee on Wednesday opened investigations of a Republican and a Democrat who are subjects of federal bribery inquiries. One lawmaker is connected to convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Rep. Bob Ney (news, bio, voting record), R-Ohio, who had strong ties to Abramoff and accepted favors from him, will be investigated along with Rep. William Jefferson (news, bio, voting record), D-La. A former aide to Ney pleaded guilty last week, admitting he tried to corrupt the congressman. Two businessmen have pleaded guilty to bribing Jefferson. The...

WASHINGTON - A batch of 278 e-mails between lobbyist Jack Abramoff and a Bush administration official show a highly inappropriate relationship where gifts and business interests mixed freely and frequently, federal prosecutors said Friday. The prosecutors hope to use the e-mails in the criminal case against David Safavian, who is accused of lying and obstruction of justice in connection with investigations of an Abramoff-sponsored golf outing to Scotland in August 2002. The e-mails show that Abramoff and Safavian, then chief of staff at the General Services Administration, were in frequent contact, played golf often and traded workplace gossip. Abramoff showered...

Rep. Tom DeLay says he made the decision to leave Congress after taking a poll in his Texas district which showed he had no better than a 50-50 chance of winning reelection this November. In a long discussion with conservative journalists Tuesday afternoon, DeLay discussed the Republican primary he faced last month, which he won with 62 percent of the vote. While some observers called that an impressive win, given the controversy that surrounds DeLay, the congressman himself said that was when he knew he had a problem. "After the primary — you get a sixth sense about this stuff,"...

Lobbyists had a banner 2005, the year before simmering controversies involving Jack Abramoff and former Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham (R-Calif.) boiled over outside the Beltway and brought new pressures on Capitol Hill to keep lobbyists at arm’s length. Early returns on end-of-year revenues show strong growth all along Washington’s lobbying corridor. Several well-known firms reported a revenue jump greater than 20 percent, including Barbour Griffith & Rogers, Quinn Gillespie & Associates, the Federalist Group and the Livingston Group, as a series of policy and legislative efforts brought new business to K Street, from Social Security reform to a national energy...

Whence Abramoff? The Spend and Collect Beltway Party really knows Jack. BY DANIEL HENNINGER Friday, January 27, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST Jack Abramoff. Jack Abramoff. Jack Abramoff. Once the hunt's on, some names sound to the scandal born. Tongsun Park, Charles Keating, Elizabeth Ray, Fannie Fox, Susan McDougal. Now comes Jack, the central figure in what Beltway Democrats are trying to build into a bonfire that will burn down Republican control of Congress. Every time someone tells Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid that he, too, took money from Jack's clients, he starts jumping up and down like Rumpelstiltskin yelling, "This...

From The Hotline: January 18, 2006 That Mysterious K Street Project.... Care to peek inside the K Street Project? That sensitive Republican project designed to rid lobbying firms and trade associations of Democrats and populate them with staunch conservative allies of lawmakers? It's there, in plain view: at its website, www.kstreetproject.com. The project's mission statement engages in a bit of misdirection. The "K Street Project," it says, "is non-partisan research of political affiliation, employment background, and political donations of members in Washington DC's premier lobbying firms, trade associations, and industries." In other words -- anyone who adheres to free market...

When John Shadegg announced from his hometown of Phoenix on Friday that he is running for House majority leader, it appeared that the two leading candidates to succeed Tom DeLay had peaked. The reason is that Roy Blunt and John Boehner both are regarded as K Street candidates, whose selection might not be prudent for a Republican Party enmeshed in scandal. Neither Blunt nor Boehner is burdened with DeLay's connection to disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Like DeLay, each is closely associated with K Street (the capital's big and brassy lobbyist community). Unlike DeLay, neither is viewed by ardent ideological conservatives...

'K Street Project,' now mired in scandal, aimed to ensure GOP control... In 1995, they named it the "K Street Project," a kind of affirmative action for Republican lobbyists, a program to expand GOP influence in the influence business. -snip- DeLay spokesman Kevin Madden said the K Street Project has been valuable on its own terms. -snip- Though little known outside Washington, the project has become an issue, even among Republicans. Rep. John Boehner, R-Ohio, one of the candidates to replace Mr. DeLay as majority leader, has vowed that if elected, "There will be no longer be a K Street...

Republican leaders in the Senate have had a plan in place for the last two months to "get ahead of" the Jack Abramoff scandal by coming up with a new proposal for lobbying reform. The leadership "decided in November that lobby reform for the Senate was a priority for this session," and Majority Leader Bill Frist placed Pennsylvania Republican Senator Rick Santorum in charge of it, Senate sources tell National Review Online.Santorum's efforts will be apart from the work of Senator John McCain, who has already introduced a proposal for lobbying reform. That proposal, McCain said in mid-December, "provides for...

The FBI searched offices of a prominent public relations firm Tuesday, looking for information about its client Saudi Arabia, law enforcement sources said. The firm, Qorvis Communications LLC, which was founded in 2000, bills itself as providing "communications for Wall Street, Main Street and K Street." Qorvis has offices in the District and Tysons Corner, and its clients also include Time Warner Inc. and the Urban League. The FBI searched three of the firm's offices Tuesday afternoon, sources said. Michael Mason, head of the FBI's Washington field office, declined yesterday to characterize the nature of the investigation or identify the...

Scores of soon-to-be-unemployed Democrats fear that their party’s electoral defeat could hinder their ability to find work on K Street, a traditional safe haven and source of employment for Capitol Hill staff. At a time when many Democrats are anxious about their ability to earn a living, some even fear that a conspiracy to blacklist aides to certain Democrats, such as Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.), could be afoot. Daschle, who is reviled by many congressional Republicans for his efforts to stop GOP initiatives and judicial nominees in the Senate, was defeated in this month’s election by former Rep....

Retiring House Democrats are feeling a cold draft from K Street as they seek post-congressional employment at lobbying firms, trade groups and corporations. By contrast, K Street is aggressively courting GOP lawmakers who have announced their retirements, suggesting that the business community is confident the GOP will retain the Speaker’s gavel in January and that business wants to fortify its Republican Rolodexes. The business community’s apparent preference for retiring House Republicans is stoking talk on Capitol Hill that the “K Street Project” is alive and well, even after the year’s plum lobbying job, the top slot at the Motion Picture...

<p>One way you can tell that Republicans have become the dominant political party in Washington is to watch them cash in.</p> <p>Rep. Billy Tauzin of Louisiana has announced that next Monday he will step down as chairman of the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee. Observers expect he will soon leave Congress to become the chief lobbyist for the pharmaceutical industry at an annual salary that's rumored to approach $2.5 million, a record for a trade association head. Mr. Tauzin isn't doing anything illegal, but what's good for him isn't good for the country or for the Republican Party. Their voters are already showing signs of concern that congressional Republicans are taking on the bad habits of the Democrats they ousted from power in 1994.</p>

The Promised Land By DAVID BROOKS Published: November 29, 2003 The history of American conservatism is an exodus tale. It begins in the wilderness, in the early 1950's, with Russell Kirk, Milton Friedman and William F. Buckley Jr. writing tracts for small bands of true believers. Conservatives crashed into the walls of power during the Goldwater debacle of 1964, and then breached those walls with Reagan's triumph 16 years later. But even with Reagan in the Oval Office, Republicans were not the majority party. Democrats controlled the House, and few Reaganites actually knew how to run a government. In 1994,...

Anyone watching today?

<p>Whatever its artistic or commercial merits, and they're paltry, there's no questioning K Street's ( * 1/2, 10 ET/PT)lofty aims. Produced by George Clooney and film director Steven Soderbergh, this largely improvised half-hour mixes actors, politicians and spin doctors to tell the story of a mythical political consulting firm run by the all-too-real James Carville and Mary Matalin.</p>

Senate Shows HBO's 'K Street' the Door Thu Sep 11, 4:31 PM ET WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Real-life lobbyists may be welcome but George Clooney (news) and his gang of actors filming a new television series "K Street," about Washington's corridors of power, have been kicked out of the Senate.   "This is not a movie set," Sen. Trent Lott, Mississippi Republican and Senate Rules Committee chairman, told Reuters. On Thursday, the Rules Committee and the Ethics Committee sent a joint letter to Senate members and staff reminding them that Senate rules prohibit any use of Senate space for commercial programming....