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K Street profiting from the Trump revolving door

The Fulcrum
By The FulcrumApr 24, 2019
The Fulcrum
The Fulcrum staff.
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Lobbying firms linked to the Trump administration have made plenty of rain this year.

This seems no more true than with the firm created by Trump campaign fundraiser Brian Ballard after the 2016 election. Ballard Partners reported $4.2 million in revenue between January and March from a roster of clients recently expanded to include General Motors and Boeing and also featuring GEO Group, a private prison contractor hoping to benefit from an illegal immigration crackdown at the southern border.

The firm brought in $10 million in its first year and $18 million last year thanks to several "revolving door" moves. Faces at the firm now include Raj Shah, previously White House deputy press secretary, and Pam Bondi, a former Florida attorney general and Trump transition team member.

A Center for Responsive Politics survey of how K Street has been absorbing former Trump administration officials also found:

  • Turnberry Solutions employs former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke and Jason Osborne, who was a senior Trump campaign advisor.
  • Avenue Strategies has original campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and was co-founded by senior campaign advisor Barry Bennett.
  • Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck's D.C. office is run by Marc Lampkin, a major 2016 campaign fundraiser.
  • Holland & Knight has Scott Mason, who ran congressional relations for the campaign, and Lauren Maddox, a member of the Trump transition team.

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Kentucky has barred more than 158,000 of its residents from voting.

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A society’s capacity for change is often proportionate to the disaster’s depth. From the ashes of the Civil War, the ratification of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments would go on to play such an important role in the American polity that their passage is considered by some to be a “Second Founding” of American democracy. Amidst the backdrop of decades of political decay and voter cynicism due to gerrymandering, inequities in voter representation, and political gridlock, we do not have the luxury of hoping after the current administration that “things will go back to normal.” Depending on the scale of the mounting assaults challenging our Constitutional system—made even more dire with concerns that future elections may be disrupted or manipulated—we must be prepared to harness a potential groundswell to pass reforms that update our democracy in the most concrete and durable ways.

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A story like Jeffrey Epstein’s is easy to treat as an anomaly—one ambitious man, one grotesque circle, one horrific chapter of American life that many would rather seal shut and forget. But I keep coming back to a harder question underneath it: do we actually believe in equal accountability, or only in accountability for the people we can easily punish?

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