Cassidy
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ntbcw
james j cassidy H&K pwl memo mtg 21973 20 pp report
There were promotions galore yesterday at Hill & Knowlton, the public relations company.
John W. Hill, founder and chairman, moved, up to honorary chairman and chairman of the executive committee. Richard W. barrow, chief executive since April, takes the chairman's turning over the presidency to James J. Cassidy, an executive vice president and a Hill'& Knowlton man for 21 years, who will also be chief operating officer.
Cassidy & Associates is a Washington, D.C.-based government relations firm established in 1977 by Gerald S. J. Cassidy. The firm focuses on lobbying the United States government for corporations and organizations.
3 opensecrets ranks2 to #1 patton boggs http://www.opensecrets.org/revolving/
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American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has a history of defending controversial and harmful legislation, but the man behind ALEC’s public relations machine, Bill Meierling, has defended actions far worse than anything done by ALEC.
Two of Africa’s most notorious dictators hired Meierling to downplay their abuses of power and build political support for their authoritarian regimes: Equatorial Guinea’s Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo and Democratic Republic of Congo’s Joseph Kabila.
Meierling helped set up the information ministry of Equatorial Guinea for the country’s tyrant, Obiang, and in the Democratic Republic of Congo he advocated for Joseph Kabila’s illegal attempt at a third term as president.
A “former member of ALEC who grew disillusioned with the organization” sourced the materials for this story to the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), which were confirmed through Foreign Agent Registration Act filings. Anyone representing the interests of a foreign government has to register as a lobbyist and disclose their activities.
Meierling officially joined ALEC in January 2013as executive vice president for external relations and strategic partnerships. As head of the group’s spin machine, he has since retained that role and become the chief marketing officer. Meierling “manages crisis response and provides senior level counsel to investor-, government-, and public relations divisions of Fortune 500 member companies regarding state and federal advocacy; environmental, social and governance (ESG) activism; and other concerns.”
In Meierling, ALEC found an experienced propagandist who led the organization through a donor crisis and member exodus when its promotion of “Stand Your Ground” legislation was tied to the death of the unarmed Black teenager Trayvon Martin. He managed PR when Google’s executive chairman said ALEC was “literally lying” about the climate emergency, and when corporations again dropped ALEC for its keynote speaker David Horowitz’s racist and bigoted remarks at a 2018 annual meeting.
Meierling Assisted in Equatorial Guinea Propaganda Campaign
Before joining ALEC, Meierling ran his own PR firm, OpinionMakers International. Through OpinionMakers, he was hired in 2007 as asubcontractor of lobbying firm Cassidy & Associates to work for the Equatorial Guinea government and President Teodoro Obiang. He was paid handsomely, raking in $15,000 a month in fees for his firm. Cassidy and Associates made headlines with their work for Obiang when an executive bragged about how they were able to get Obiang off Parade Magazine’s top ten list of worst dictators. Obiang only “improved” to being ranked the world’s 13th worst dictator.
Meierling fondly recounted his time in Equatorial Guinea in an interview, saying, “I was brought there in the mid 2000’s to help train them and help prop up the information ministry within the country.” The Ministry to which he referred is not so much one of information as it is propaganda.In its 2007 Freedom of the Press Report, the organization Freedom House described Equatorial Guinea as having “virtually no independent media” and stated that “all domestic radio and television stations are owned directly by the government or by the president’s family. State-owned media are dominated by sycophantic coverage of the government and the president.” The country still ranks at the bottom of Freedom House’s rankings with no independent journalism or freedom of speech.
The coverage by state run media is so atrocious, a presidential aide once compared President Obiang to Godwhile on a radio interview in 2003. “He [Obiang] can decide to kill without anyone calling him to account and without going to hell because it is God himself, with whom he is in permanent contact, and who gives him this strength,” said the aide. Obiang uses the state controlled media to stay in office, most recently in 2016 when he won a sham election with over 90 percent of the vote.
“It was just an incredible opportunity to build something from the ground up and to work in a developing nation with the people and the government that was really interested in growing, changing, and telling their story,” Meierling said of his work in Equatorial Guinea.
As part of that job, Meierling specifically worked to spin the dictator’s dismal human rights record.
In August of 2007, Meierling wrote a press release highlighting a visit by the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detentions and the Equatorial Guinea’s supposed progress on “deprivation of liberty” and other human rights abuses.
Whatever progress allegedly occurred, however, was short-lived. In October of 2007, opposition party member Salvador Ndong Nguema died from injuries after being tortured in prison.
Later in 2010, four political opponents of President Obiang were abducted by Equatorial Guinean security forces in Benin after fleeing the country years earlier. They were held in the notorious Black Beach prison, where they allegedly confessed to a 2009 attempted coup. The military executed them after a brief military trial. Human rights observers viewed the military trial as a sham and believed the men were coerced to confess after being tortured.
Meierling also consulted with Equatorial Guinea on the development of its oil industry. In 2008, he wrote a press release for the government highlighting a trip by Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.) to the country’s new liquefied natural gas facility. A biography on Meierling for another PR firm that was recently removed described his work on the project and touted his connections to the Obiang regime. “When the Republic of Equatorial Guinea and Marathon Oilsought American support for construction of the world’s largest LNG export train from Bioko, Malabo, Equatorial Guinea to Elba Island, Georgia, the African nation’s leadership turned to him,” it said.
While the country’s oilfields have proven to be plentiful, the average citizen of Equatorial Guinea still lives in poverty. Despite having a per capita gross domestic product higher than that of Brazil and China, the country ranks 141st out of 189 on the United Nations Human Development Index.
Meierling has also worked for Obiang’s son, Teodorin, directly. In March, Meierling’s website listed Teodorin and his girlfriend at the time, Eve, as former clients for “reputation” management services, but the content has since been removed.
Teodorin has been the subject of numerous corruption investigations, and has assets have been seized by U.S., French, Swiss, and Brazilian authorities based on what the U.S. Justice Department characterized as “relentless embezzlement.”
According to a 2010 U.S. Senate investigation,
From 2004 to 2008, Teodoro [Teodorin] Nguema Obiang Mangue, son of the President of Equatorial Guinea, has used U.S. lawyers, bankers, real estate agents, and escrow agents to move over $110 million in suspect funds into the United States. Mr. Obiang is the subject of an ongoing U.S. criminal investigation, has been identified in corruption complaints filed in France, and was a focus of a 2004 Subcommittee hearing showing how Riggs Bank facilitated officials from Equatorial Guinea in opening accounts and engaging in suspect transactions.
The report attributed the success of Obiang and his family’s ability to embezzle funds to the help they received from numerous lawyers, lobbyists, and consultants to gain influence.
Meierling Assisted Congo Dictator in Misinformation Campaign to Keep Him in Office
In 2017, while working in his current capacity as chief marketing officer for ALEC, Meierling was paid $20,000 per month for public relations work by the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Meierling described the work done through a company called How Handy is That LLC as “strategic communications services” and reported that he would be “writing for, advising or representing the foreign principal.”
Documents disclosed in compliance with the Foreign Agents Registration Act show a series of op-eds appearing in the Washington Times in 2017, many of which attack Moise Katumbi, a candidate who was running in opposition to DRC President Joseph Kabila. While the articles are labeled as “sponsored,” none of them disclose the DRC government as the sponsor. One of the pieces authored by Meierling describes the electoral situation in the DRC as follows:
As President Joseph Kabila of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) readies his country and its government for Congo’s next free and fair national election, some of the very opposition groups with whom he worked to arrange next year’s vote are coordinating with powerful forces outside of DRC who are deploying millions of dollars in foreign money to influence its outcome, undermine its integrity and financially benefit from its aftermath.
Meierling brazenly misinformed readers about the elections in the DRC when he described them as being “free and fair.” At the time, Kabila was illegally holding office, as his constitutionally limited two terms had expired in 2016.
Kabila’s government delayed the presidential election until 2018, claiming to need more time to update the country’s voter registry. Protests erupted in response to the delay, and the United Nations reported that government security forces killed 49 protesters.
The group Journalists in Danger “reported 121 cases of attacks on media from November 2017 to October [2018] and attributed 77 percent of these attacks to government agents, including nearly half to state security forces.”
Meierling is not currently registered as a foreign agent.
CMD reached out to ALEC for comment twice for this piece and received no response.
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https://www.buzzfeed.com/borzoudaragahi/egypts-feared-spy-agency-has-hired-some-dc-lobbyists-to-clea
Egypt’s powerful spy service recently hired a pair of high-powered Beltway lobbying firms on retainers of $50,000–$100,000 per month to influence the Trump administration.
Egypt’s General Intelligence Service, known in the Arab world as the infamous mukhabarat, has hired communications powerhouse Weber Shandwick and DC lobbying firm Cassidy and Associates to spruce up its image inside Washington and promote what it describes as its “strategic partnership” with the US, according to documents filed with the Treasury Department.
The documents, dated late January, appear to have first been reported late last month by the newsletter Intelligence Online.
Foreign governments frequently hire lobbyists to improve how they are viewed among Washington policymakers, build up commercial ties or strengthen military partnerships. But it is rather rare for an intelligence service to undertake its own lobbying effort, especially one with a reputation as sullied as Egypt’s mukhabarat. It has been accused by human rights monitors of torture and unlawful detention of perceived political enemies of the government of President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi. Its very name in the Arab world conjures up images of naked men hanging from the ceilings of dungeons while screaming in agony from electric shocks.
According to the Treasury filings, the mukhabarat’s DC lobbyists are to help identify potential Washington insiders “supportive” of its agenda, massage the spy outfit’s public image using social media, provide crisis management help, and perhaps organize visits of Egyptian spymasters to Washington. Weber Shandwick, on retainer for $100,000 a month plus expenses, boasts on its website that it specializes in brand improvement. Cassidy, meanwhile, will be earning a quarterly fee of $150,000.
The Egyptian government has for years had a $2 million-a-year lobbying contract with the Glover Park Group. The mukhabarat’s venture may suggest competition between the country’s Foreign Ministry and intelligence services frustrated at the inability of career statesman to sell Egypt to foreign investors and governments.
“This is about the internal politics/rivalry between the intel service and the Foreign Ministry — the former bypassing the latter,” Mauritanian-American activist and scholar Nasser Wedaddy wrote on Twitter about the lobbying deals. “The intel service has been of late involving itself in attracting investors and reassuring those already something the Foreign Ministry failed at. This is about the intel service acting like a parallel foreign and economic affairs ministry.”
Egypt’s has suffered through years of hardship since a 2011 uprising ousted longtime ruler Hosni Mubarak. A 2013 coup led by the then-general Sisi toppled the country’s democratically elected Islamist president and led to thousands of deaths at the hands of the security forces. The murder last year of Italian scholar Giulio Regeni at the alleged hands of security officials, the downing of a Russian plane in 2015 by alleged jihadi militants, and other incidents have soured some foreign investors on Egypt and further darkened the reputation of its security forces.
The lobbying push could signal an effort by the mukhabarat to try to clean up its image. Ironically, Trump and Sisi have excellent relations. Sisi was the first foreign leader to call Trump after his November presidential victory and met with him in New York during the campaign. Egypt already receives $1.3 billion in US military aid per year, and Trump has signaled that he’s willing to overlook any concerns about Egyptian human rights violations or authoritarianism in favor of a shared battle against Islamist militants.
Others saw in the lobbying effort a worrying sign of fragmentation within Egypt’s security forces, a possible attempt by Egypt’s spies to use Washington to gain advantages over rival soldiers and cops.
“I’d be interested to see if the lobby focuses on the GIS reputation vs. Egypt’s,” Timothy Kaldas, a Cairo-based political scientist affiliated with the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy, told BuzzFeed News. “I find it interesting how so many institutions are working on their personal reputations. Food aid is distributed from the Interior Ministry or army or GIS rather than in the name of the Egyptian state. Access to the [Trump] administration could increase its power vis a vis other institutions in the state.”
Borzou Daragahi is a Middle East correspondent for BuzzFeed News and is based in Istanbul.
Contact Borzou Daragahi at borzou.daragahi@buzzfeed.com.
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ken silverstein harper's magazine npr on the media
cassidy approached
apco : write bs, get Ctt or hack to front for it
equatorial guinea 10 to #11
The following morning, Ricardo and I headed to the offices of Cassidy & Associates, perhaps the most prominent of all the Washington lobby shops.66.I had phone and email exchanges with two other firms: the Carmen Group, which attracted my interest because of its work for Kazakhstan, and The Livingston Group, which is headed by retired Congressman Bob Livingston of Louisiana and has represented Azerbaijan and Turkey. Livingston’s work for the latter country has included general public relations, advocating for Ankara’s right to purchase advanced American weaponry, and keeping Congress from declaring as genocide the Turkish massacre of Armenians during the early twentieth century.
Both firms expressed interest in working for The Maldon Group and offered to sign confidentiality agreements, but they also made efforts, albeit modest, toward due diligence by asking for additional information about my firm, and so I canceled my meetings with them. If The Maldon Group actually existed, though, I have little doubt that both firms would ultimately have been willing to handle the account. It was founded thirty-two years ago by Gerald Cassidy, a former staffer for George McGovern, and for much of its existence was known as a strongly Democratic firm. Cassidy pioneered the practice of lobbying for earmarks—the polite term for pork—but also represents Fortune 500 corporations as well as foreign countries and businesses. Its current clients include Teodoro Obiang, who has ruled the small African nation of Equatorial Guinea since 1979, when he executed his uncle. Between 1998 and 2006, Cassidy was paid more than $235 million in lobbying fees, more than any other firm in Washington.
Cassidy’s headquarters are just a block away from APCO’s but are far more elegant. The firm occupies the entire fourth floor of its building, so that one enters the offices upon exiting the elevator. A receptionist walked Ricardo and me into a large conference room with a beautiful wood table polished to a bright sheen. There were about twenty seats around the table, and eight settings had been laid out with a glass, each set atop a paper coaster embossed with the firm’s name. The table held an assortment of canned soft drinks, a pitcher of ice water with lemon slices, a cup of sharpened pencils, and a pile of yellow legal pads.
A phalanx of six Cassidy officials soon entered the conference room, all dressed in elegant business attire of varying shades of black, gray, and navy blue. There was Chuck Dolan, a former senior P.R. consultant for the Kerry-Edwards campaign; Gordon Speed, the firm’s pudgy, baby-faced director of business development; tall, thin Gerald Warburg, a former Hill staffer and company vice president; Christy Moran, who during the meeting told me she had previously worked for Saudi Arabia and helped boost its image with an “allies program” that sent visitors to the country; and David Bartlett, another P.R. specialist whose firm biography said he had helped corporate CEOs “face the nation’s toughest journalists.”
The sixth member of the Cassidy team, and its clear leader, was firm vice chairman Gregg Hartley, who with his crew cut and serious manner initially reminded me of a drill sergeant; but soon he loosened up and proved to possess a certain folksy appeal. Until 2003 he had been a top aide to then House Majority Whip Roy Blunt, and he maintains close ties to top Republicans in Congress. When Hartley quit his Hill job and decided to become a lobbyist, a “bidding war for his services ensued,” the Washington Post later reported. “Cassidy . . . won it with an offer of just under $1 million a year,” plus a “substantial percentage” of the lobbying fees Hartley generated. Hartley’s hiring marked a key moment in Cassidy & Associates’ transformation during the past decade into a lobbying enterprise that is increasingly identified with the Republican Party.
As was the case with APCO, Cassidy had immediately offered to meet with me. In an initial phone conversation with Speed, Hartley, and Dolan, the three had asked only a few softball questions about The Maldon Group (and, like APCO, offered to sign a confidentiality agreement) before they began their sales pitch. Hartley pointed out that Cassidy’s work for Equatorial Guinea was “a very similar sort of representation to what you’re talking about” with Turkmenistan. The Obiang regime had received a bit of bad publicity—he mentioned here a banking scandal involving the government—and Cassidy’s first job had been “to identify inaccurate or biased stories and try to correct them.”77.
I found this amusing, because he almost certainly was thinking of me: in 2003, while working at the Los Angeles Times, I had broken the story of the hundreds of millions of dollars of Equatorial Guinea’s oil revenues that were deposited at Riggs Bank in Washington, under Obiang’s effective control. A Senate investigation not only confirmed what I had reported but uncovered even more dirt, such as the fact that Obiang and family members had stashed millions of dollars in offshore accounts. Hartley also boasted about Cassidy’s political contacts, saying, “We strongly believe in a bipartisan [approach] and mirroring the power structure. . . . You have to find champions on both sides.”
Hartley returned to that theme during the meeting at Cassidy’s office. His firm, he said after passing Ricardo and me copies of a corporate brochure, 88.The brochure said that Cassidy offered “A Tradition of Ethics and Integrity that goes to the core of our beliefs” and made the claim, a brazenly cynical one even by the standards of Washington, that Gerald Cassidy had founded the firm “to ensure that Americans have access and the ability to exercise their First Amendment right to petition their government.” had “strong personal relationships” with policymakers, and not just to a committee chairman here and there, as was the case with some of its competitors. Cassidy had ties across the board—at the staff level, the committee level, the Republican and Democratic leadership, and the administration.
“We know you’re talking to other firms,” Hartley said pointedly. “You’re going to have a hard time matching . . . [the] types of successes” his firm had racked up. For example, thanks to Cassidy’s aggressive media strategy and trips it had organized to Equatorial Guinea for congressional staffers, things were now looking up for the government there. The proof: three years ago, Hartley said, Parade Magazine had ranked Obiang as “the world’s sixth worst dictator,” grimacing as he stated that last word. “He’s still not a great guy,” he went on, “but he’s not in the top ten anymore, and we can take some credit for helping them figure out how to work down that list. Is he going to win the U.N. humanitarian award next year? No, he’s not, but we’re making progress.”99.When I checked later, the progress seemed pretty modest. Obiang is indeed out of Parade’s top ten list for 2007; now he’s number eleven. In a brief summary, Parade noted that in 2003, “state radio announced that Obiang ‘is in permanent contact with The Almighty’ and that he ‘can decide to kill without anyone calling him to account and without going to Hell.’”
Now Warburg took over the meeting. He talked with some passion about two “remarkable lobbying campaigns” that the firm had been involved with, both of which had succeeded in getting the U.S. government to move “against its express will.” The first was eliminating a longtime trade embargo against Vietnam, which the firm had achieved over the opposition of the families of POWs and MIAs. The key to success was assembling an outside pressure group called the Multinational Business Development Coalition, which was made up of major American corporations seeking business in Vietnam. “The U.S. had no relations,” Warburg said. “We changed that policy, ended the embargo, and opened Vietnam up to U.S. economic exchange.”
The second campaign, Warburg said, involved winning permission in 1995 for President Lee Teng-hui of Taiwan to make a private visit to the United States “over the express opposition of the executive branch.” At the time, Taiwan’s embassy wasn’t even allowed to lobby in Washington without permission from the State Department. Evading that obstacle was simple: since the government couldn’t retain Cassidy, a Taiwanese think tank fronting for it did. President Bill Clinton had said he wouldn’t allow Lee to come to the United States, so Cassidy, Warburg recounted, began a campaign to lobby Congress. After both chambers passed resolutions in support of a visit by Lee, the White House caved. “The president of the United States reversed policy,” said Warburg. The campaign had been so brilliant, in fact, that graduate students had written theses on it.
Warburg also mentioned his past work for Merhav, an Israeli firm with major interests in Turkmenistan, for which Cassidy had obtained Export-Import Bank financing for a trans-Caspian pipeline. Unlike the case with other lobbying firms The Maldon Group might hire, “We really know Turkmenistan. It wouldn’t be on-the-job training for us.”
When Warburg had represented Merhav, he met a number of Turkmen officials. “Unfortunately, the previous government had a history of shuffling ministers,” he said. “I won’t pursue the metaphor.” To which Hartley added, “We won’t ask where all of them were shuffled!” There was general merriment, which seemed inappropriate, given that sixteen ministers were jailed or sent into internal exile last year, one of whom is believed to have died in prison.
Hartley announced that he and his colleagues had a few questions about The Maldon Group. I would be as helpful as I could, I replied, but discretion was our firm’s lifeblood; while it pained me “to look like I’m being evasive,” there wasn’t much I could say.
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Cassidy & Associates
Cassidy & Associates is a Washington D.C headquartered lobbying and public relations company that was formed in 1975.
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Cassidy EU Employees jump ship, organize first EU law & lobby firm
Cassidy's European work took a hit in April, 2007 when it was reported that six top lawyers had left the firm to set up a new company, Alber & Geiger. "Former Advocate General of the European Court of Justice Siegbert Alber and former CEO of Cassidy in Brussels Andreas Geiger set up Alber & Geiger, a specialist government lobbying law firm in the Belgian capital last month. Founding partner Geiger said: 'We're the first lobbying-focused law firm in Europe and we're following the lobbying law model from Washington [DC]. It wasn't possible for us to have this set-up under the umbrella of Interpublic, which owns Cassidy & Associates."[1]
Working for Philip Morris
A 1993 internal budget review document for the Philip Morris group of companies had Cassidy and Associates with a preliminary budget allocation of $78,000. Describing the consultants, the documents states, "Jack Brennan is a former Massachusetts state Senator who has excellent ties with members of the Massachusetts legislature. He is especially close to the Senate President Bolger, who maintains significant influence over the activities of the legislature. Mr Brennan is an experienced lobbyist who is familiar with KGF's solid waste issues, and has been retained to defeat MassPIRG's continued efforts to boycott KGF's products. Mr Brennan is also charged with representing KGF in the upcoming MassPIRG ballot initiative on expanded bottle bill legislation".[2] (KGF is the acronym for Philip Morris subsidiary, Kraft General Foods.)
Brennan is not listed on the company's website as a current employee. (Accessed November 23, 2003).
Polishing a blood-soaked dictator's image
According to a May, 2007 article in MotherJones, Cassidy and Associates has worked hard to improve the image of Equatorial Guinea's President Teodoro Obiang:
"Since 2004, according to Department of Justice reports, Equatorial Guinea has paid Cassidy and Associates at least $120,000 per month to overhaul the country's image. At times, Cassidy almost functions as a shadow foreign ministry for Equatorial Guinea. One longtime Africa observer says that at a recent D.C. event, he saw Cassidy staffers flanking the Equatoguinean ambassador passing her notes throughout her speech. "She was literally in the hands of her handlers," he says. Cassidy has also helped set up a social development fund to channel the country's oil money into welfare projects: "Obiang is intent on improving the country," says Juan Carlos Benitez, who is responsible for Cassidy's Equatorial Guinea account."[3]
Benitez's outlook is surprisingly optimistic, according to the article:
"Equatorial Guinea has one of the world's highest incomes per capita, but in one of the 10 most corrupt nations on earth, little of that money trickles down. Obiang rules the country with an iron fist: According to State Department reports, suspects have been tortured to death and prisoners raped by police. Still, Cassidy has delivered results for Obiang in D.C. 'A few years ago, at least U.S. officials wouldn't talk about the relationship with Equatorial Guinea, or they would admit all the problems and horrible human rights abuses,' says Frank Ruddy, the former U.S. ambassador to Equatorial Guinea. Now, he adds, 'you would have thought this is Mother Teresa's brother running Equatorial Guinea.'"[3]
From President Obiang
to Presidential hopeful Dodd
Until recently, the lead lobbyist for the account was Amos Hochstein.[4] He left Cassidy and Associates in January 2007 to join Senator Christopher Dodd's campaign for the U.S. Presidency.[5] In an April 2006 interview with the Washington Post, Hochstein was effusive about Obiang's regime:
"I don't know where The Post got those numbers [about malnutrition in Equatorial Guinea]. I've seen them on the opposition's Web site, but never anywhere else... [Obiang has] convinced me of his deep care for his people. And I've seen the changes. I know that he sent 120 Equato-Guinean nurses to Israel for training. I've seen the kids going to new schools in their blue pants and white shirts."[6]
The malnutrition figures that Hochstein challenged had been published in a Post editorial a few days beforehand. The editorial did not cite its sources.[7]
Contact information
700 Thirteenth Street, NW
Suite 400
Washington, DC 20005
Phone: (202) 347-0773
Fax: (202) 347-0785
Email: info AT cassidy.com
Web: http://www.cassidy.com
Resources
Related SourceWatch articles
References
- ↑ Julia Berris, Cassidy splits to form Brussels lobby firm, The Lawyer, 16 April 2007.
- ↑ Philip Morris, "Corporate Affairs: corporate cost review, Bates No 2046996735, July 1993 (estimated), page 5.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 Joshua Kurlantzick, "Putting Lipstick On A Dictator", Mother Jones, May 7, 2007.
- ↑ Ken Silverstein, "Obiang's Banking Again: State Department and Washington insiders help a dictator get what he wants", Harpers Magazine, August 9, 2006.
- ↑ "Amos Hochstein to Join Presidential Campaign", press release, Cassidy and Associates, January 16, 2007.
- ↑ Michael Grunwald, "A conversation with Amos Hochstein", Washington Post, April 23, 2006.
- ↑ "With Friends Like These... Condoleezza Rice's inglorious moment", Washington Post, April 18, 2006.
External articles
- Robert G. Kaiser, "The Power Player: How the Rise of One Lobbying Firm Helped Transform the Way Washington Works," Washington Post, March 4, 2007.
- "Informed Reader: Writer Sneaks a Look at Ways of Lobbyists," Wall Street Journal (sub req'd), June 14, 2007.
- Ken Silverstein, "Their Men In Washington," Harper's Magazine, July 2007.
- Ted McKenna, "Cassidy terminates deal with Pakistan," PR Week, November 14, 2007.
Categories: Equatorial Guinea | Lobbyists | Lobbying firms | Public relations firms | United States
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CASSIDY & ASSOCIATES
For the second straight year, Cassidy & Associates led all lobbying firms in reported income. Cassidy raked in over $20.8 million in 1999, becoming the first lobbying firm to clear $20 million in revenues. Cassidy’s revenues have grown by an average of 8.3 percent annually since 1997.
Not coincidentally, among the five highest-grossing lobbying firms Cassidy is the least reliant on its top clients. Only 12.2 percent of Cassidy’s income came from its top five clients in 1999. However, Cassidy is highly exposed to two economic sectors. Over 39 percent of its income is classified as coming from "other," which mostly consists of universities. Another 28 percent of Cassidy’s income comes from the health sector. Thus, a contraction of spending by either of these sectors would seriously harm Cassidy’s bottom line.
Top Clients
Client|Receipts|
| 1 | Boston University | $760,000 |
|---|---|---|
| 2 | United Space Alliance | $500,000 |
| 3 | Rush-Presbyterian-St Lukes Medical Ctr | $440,000 |
| 3 | Montefiore Medical Center | $440,000 |
| 5 | Ocean Spray Cranberries | $400,000 |
|5|General Dynamics|