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Tag: Rahm Emanuel
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Citigroup, Goldman Sachs recruit lawmakers’ ex-aides
Lavishing lawmakers with six-figure campaign donations is not the only way banks and investment houses influence the legislative process.
They also hire the top aides of those lawmakers, who can trade on relationships with their old bosses to pick up the phone and, say, arrange an impromptu session with Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, or Chris Dodd, chairman of the Senate Banking Committee.
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MAP HINTS: Boxes with + signs can be expanded by doubleclicking. Solid lines are current relations. Dotted lines are former relations. For more options, right-click on a box or click on the map tools to the left. (Requires Flash)In the past year, top bailout recipients, including Goldman Sachs Group and Citigroup, have dispatched dozens of former congressional staffers and ex-government officials to lobby their former bosses on the financial rescue package, Mother Jones reports.
Besides one-time aides to Democratic and Republican leaders, the magazine found that many of the lobbyists hired by financial institutions are ex-employees of congressional committees on banking, finance, and commerce, former Treasury officials and in one case, a top aide to Rahm Emanuel, now the White House chief of staff.
Goldman Sachs, which has more than 30 ex-government officials working as registered lobbyists on staff, also tapped one-time House Majority Leader Richard Gephardt (D-Mo.) to represent its interests on issues related to the Treasury Department’s Troubled Assets Relief Program.
Other insiders lobbying for Goldman Sachs include Faryar Shirzad, a former top economic aide to President George W. Bush and also Republican counsel to the Senate Finance Committee; as well as former SEC commissioner Richard Y. Roberts, now a principal at lobby firm RR&G LLC.
Citigroup, which spent nearly $8 million on lobbying in 2008, is particularly adept at recruiting government insiders.
Leading its huge in-house staff is Nicholas E. Calio, senior vice president of global government affairs, who worked for both George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush as assistant to the president for legislative affairs assistant.
James “Jimmy” Ryan, former senior counsel to Majority Leader Reid, is another heavy hitter on the Democratic side. Ryan accompanied CEO Vikram Pandit to a recent meeting with Reid – although the senator’s spokesman Jim Manley discounted the notion that Pandit received any special treatment.
Another star on the Democratic side is Robert Getzoff, a vice president for federal government affairs who until 2007 served as senior counsel to then-Rep. Rahm Emanuel.
“To the best of our knowledge there has not been direct contact between Getzoff and Rahm in several months,” an Emanuel aide told Mother Jones.
Other in-house lobbyists include Robert Schellhas, a chief of staff to former Rep. Rob Portman, a Republican from Ohio, and Michael P. Andrews, formerly of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission
Besides its own staff, the banking giant has also hired more than a half-dozen lobbying firms, who themselves depend on hiring veterans of the legislative and executive branches.
Robert Cogorno, a Citigroup lobbyist who works for Elmendorf Strategies, is a former Gephardt aide and one-time floor director for Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), the No. 2 House Democrat.
(Cogorno also lobbies for Goldman Sachs, as does his boss, Steven Elmendorf, Gephardt’s former chief of staff.) A Hoyer spokeswoman told Mother Jones that Cogorno has not lobbied the House majority leader on banking matters.
Also on Citigroup’s lobbying team is DC attorney Robert Barnett, a former chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC).
Another new addition to Citigroup’s forces is DC Navigators, which registered in January to lobby for the bank on TARP issues. Handling the account is Cesar Conda, former Vice President Dick Cheney’s domestic policy chief.
Under current lobbying rules, lobbyists are only required to disclose if they lobby the House, the Senate, or the executive branch, and, in general terms, which bills or issue areas they lobbied on. They don’t have to identify the legislators or aides they contacted, or what they discussed with lawmakers.
The Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007 strengthens some limitations on aides-turned-lobbyists, but former congressional staffers still need only wait a year before returning to the Hill to lobby their former bosses and colleagues.
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This post is tagged with: Cesar Conda, Chris Dodd, Faryar Shirzad, Goldman Sachs Group, Harry Reid, Jimmy Ryan, Lobbying, Michael P. Andrews, Nicholas E. Calio, Rahm Emanuel, Recent Stories, Richard Gephardt, Richard Y. Roberts, Robert Barnett, Robert Cogorno, Robert Getzoff, Robert Schellhas, Vikram PanditRead related stories: Lobbying · Recent Stories
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Bush’s homeland security team hangs out shinglesApril 17, 2009 at 7:44am
Nearly every top member of the Bush Administration’s homeland security team has gone through the revolving door and re-emerged as a private consultant, where they can be expected to make big bucks off their expertise and contacts.
Rahm Emanuel agrees to be chief of staff
Fresh from his victory Tuesday, Sen. Barack Obama has tapped a fellow Chicagoan to be the White House enforcer.
Rep. Rahm Emanuel, D-Ill., announced today that he had agreed to be the president-elect’s chief of staff.
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“Obama wants a bad cop, so he can be good cop 90 percent of the time,” an unnamed Obama adviser told Politico.
The fourth-ranking Democrat in the House of Representatives, Emanuel, 48, was first elected in 2002. He won re-election Tuesday with nearly 74 percent of the vote.
In 2006, he was the driving force behind his party’s successful effort to take back the House in 2006.
As the head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, he vetted potential challengers to Republican candidates, making sure they had the money or could raise the money to run a real race.
His style, by all reports, did not include playing nice.
“Emanuel is hard-wired to go for the jugular,” Nina Easton wrote in Fortune at the time. “Politics Chicago-style are part of his DNA.”
Given that DNA, it’s not surprising that Emanuel has Democratic, as well as Republican, detractors.
“I love Rahm, but that’s a small group of us,” Democratic operative Paul Begala told Easton. “He’s not a beloved figure like Tip O’Neill or Dick Gephardt. Rahm’s there (at the DCCC) because they want to
win.”When Emanuel joins Obama, he will be returning to a familiar workplace, as he served as a senior adviser in the Clinton White House from 1993 to 1998.
Before that, Emanuel was director of finance in Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign.
In January 1999, Emanuel left politics, joining the investment bank then known as Wasserstein Perella & Co. In four years, he made a reported $18 million before leaving banking to run for Congress.
Given his connections to Bill and Hillary Clinton and his friendship with Barack and Michelle Obama, Emanuel has emerged as a link between two factions in the Democratic Party.
“There are people that know the Obamas better than Rahm does, there are probably people who know the Clintons better than Rahm does,” Ryan Lizza of The New Yorker magazine said this spring in introducing Emanuel in a video interview.
“But I don’t think there’s anyone in American politics that knows both the Clintons and the Obamas better than Rahm does.”
This dual connection left Emanuel, a superdelegate to the Democratic National Convention, unwilling to choose between Obama and Hillary Clinton until the primary season was over.
He endorsed Obama in June after Clinton conceded defeat and went on to work on Obama’s behalf.
In May, Emanuel told Lizza that he believed Obama’s first few weeks in office, if he were elected, would focus on the passage of the children’s health bill that President Bush vetoed last year.
“You want to show you can get something done,” Emanuel said.
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This post is tagged with: 2008 Barack Obama presidential campaign, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Politics, Rahm Emanuel, Recent StoriesRead related stories: Politics · Recent Stories0 Comments
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Obama convenes economic advisers, calls for swift action on economyNovember 7, 2008 at 4:37pm
In his first news conference as president-elect Barack Obama laid out the top priority of his first 100 days: A package of spending that he hopes will stimulate economic growth and aid a struggling middle class.
Rahm Emanuel does mitzvah (finally) for Obama
The big news out of Barack Obama’s appearance before a pro-Israel lobby group today was not his predictably strong defense of Israel, but the surprise emissary who accompanied him to make personal introductions to its board.
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MAP HINTS: Click expands a name. Control+Click centers map on a name. Solid lines are current relations. Dotted lines are former relations. For advanced tools choose Tools > Options from the menu at top. More help. Not seeing the maps? Please go here to check for the latest version of Java.The go-between with the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee was Rep. Rahm Emanuel, a fellow Chicagoan and a onetime civilian volunteer to the Israeli army and son of a Jerusalem-born pediatrician.
Until today, Emanuel, a superdelegate, had remained uncommitted in the Democratic presidential contest because he is close with the Clintons after serving six years in Bill Clinton’s White House. “I’m hiding under the desk,” he had said as the only Democrat in Illinois’ congressional delegation who had not endorsed Obama.
But if Emanuel didn’t step into the breach until after Obama became the presumptive Democratic nominee, his advocacy with AIPAC leaders today likely helped mollify concerns among some members that Obama may be too sympathetic to the Palestinian cause or too soft on Iran. Later, his office released a statement saying that he also endorsed Obama.
Emanuel, the fourth-ranking Democrat in the House, is the son of Benjamin Emanuel, who worked with a Zionist paramilitary organization in Israel in the 1940s. The elder Emanuel emigrated to Chicago where he met his wife, Martha Smulevitz, an American Jew who worked as an X-ray technician.
Before his family moved to the lakeshore suburb of Wilmette, Rahm Emanuel attended Bernard Zell Anshe Emet Day School, a Jewish high school endowed by billionaire Sam Zell. Inheriting his father’s passion for Israel, Rahm Emanuel worked as a civilian volunteer in Israel in the 1991 Gulf War, rust-proofing brakes on an army base in northern Israel.
Beyond Emanuel’s private introduction to AIPAC’s executive board, Obama sounded all the important themes in his public remarks. He vowed to stop Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon and insisted Jerusalem will remain the undivided capital of the Jewish state.
“Let me be clear. Israel’s security is sacrosanct. It is non-negotiable,” he said. “The Palestinians need a state that is contiguous and cohesive, and that allows them to prosper . . . But any agreement with the Palestinian people must preserve Israel’s identity as a Jewish state, with secure, recognized and defensible borders.”
Obama got several standing ovations, including sustained applause after observing, “We must not allow the relationship between Jews and African Americans to suffer. This is a bond that must be strengthened. Together, we can rededicate ourselves to end prejudice and combat hatred in all of its forms.”
Whether Emanuel will now act as a go-between in the tougher negotiations between Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton remains to be seen.
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1 Comments
#1. Pat 04.17.2009
America must curb its obvious threat that allows politicians and now their staffs to rope off the areas that permit them to be first at the till of taxpayers taken hostages.
Like the preferred beneficiaries of the United States Taxpayer Trust fund rather than elected representatives, it is what caused the first American revolution, and there is no reason to suspect that humanity is not capable of creating the conditions that necessitate another.
Term limits and lobbying limits may be the only cure for this egotistical affliction.
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