inglee ISM strategies
<div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-appointees-pledged-not-to-lobby-after-they-leave-now-lobbying" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;">https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-appointees-pledged-not-to-lobby-after-they-leave-now-lobbying</a></font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" /><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">no lnx dox many</font></font></font></font></font></font></font></div><div><b>
</b></div><div><b>Trump’s Appointees Pledged Not to Lobby After They Leave. Now They’re Lobbying.</b></div><div>
</div><div>Despite agreeing to five-year bans, at least six former administration officials are registered lobbyists and others are doing similar work without registering.</div><div>by Derek Kravitz and Alex Mierjeski May 3, 3:07 p.m. EDT</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>Lobbyists who joined the Trump administration and now want to return to their old trade have a problem: President Trump said they can’t.</div><div>
</div><div>Days after taking office, President Donald Trump signed an executive order requiring every political appointee to sign a pledge as a condition of taking office. The appointees agreed not to lobby the agencies they had worked in for five years after they left government service. Nor would they lobby anyone in the White House or political appointees across federal agencies for the duration of the Trump administration.</div><div>
</div><div>But never doubt the ingenuity of the Washington swamp class. At least eight former Trump officials have found ways around the so-called ethics pledge.</div><div>
</div><div>Using staffing lists compiled for ProPublica’s Trump Town, the first exhaustive database of current political appointees, we found at least 184 people who have left the Trump administration. Of those, at least six former officials are now registered lobbyists and several others work at firms in roles that resemble lobbying in all but name.</div><div>
</div><div>Search Our Database</div><div>
</div><div>Trump Town</div><div>
</div><div>]]</div><div>Tracking White House staffers, Cabinet members and political appointees across the government</div><div>Their techniques vary from the bureaucratic to the audacious: Some former officials are tiptoeing around the rules by not registering as lobbyists or by exploiting loopholes. Others obtained special waivers allowing them to go back to lobbying. And at least one never signed the pledge at all.</div><div>
</div><div>Needless to say, roundtrip traffic between lobbying and government has long been endemic in Washington. The Obama administration, despite campaign promises to the contrary, hired dozens of previously registered lobbyists and many officials returned to K Street firms afterward. “The revolving door is a persistent feature of Washington if you work in an administration and you develop some expertise over an area of policymaking,” said Lee Drutman, a senior fellow who studies lobbying at New America, a left-leaning Washington think tank. “There’s a high demand for someone with your knowledge and connections.”</div><div>
</div><div>Candidate Trump famously vowed to put an end to such D.C. practices by “draining the swamp.” Indeed, in some respects, the Trump administration’s ethics pledge is tougher than those in place under Obama and former President Bill Clinton. Trump’s version expanded the prohibition from lobbying to what his executive order called “lobbying activities” after people leave government. This was intended to stop former officials not only from communicating directly with government officials but also from helping other lobbyists do that.</div><div>
</div><div>The goal, as Trump put it at a Wisconsin campaign rally in October 2016, was to “expand the definition of ‘lobbyist’ so we close all the loopholes that former government officials use by labeling themselves consultants, advisers, all of these different things, and they get away with murder.”</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>Violating the pledge exposes former officials to possible extended bans on lobbying, civil proceedings or fines, or being barred from lobbying entirely. </div><div>
</div><div>Paradoxically, experts warn that tougher enforcement could be spurring the growth of “shadow” lobbyists. That’s the term for those whose tasks look much like lobbying but which they label, say, “strategic consulting.” It also applies to those who don’t meet the legal threshold requiring them to formally register as lobbyists. According to the Lobbying Disclosure Act, a lobbyist must register if he or she spends “20 percent or more of his or her time in services for [a] client over any three-month period.”</div><div>
</div><div>THE TRUMP ETHICS PLEDGE (p. 1)</div><div>Selected portion of a source document hosted by DocumentCloud</div><div>The Trump Ethics Pledge stipulates that former appointees can't lobby their old agencies or political appointees across federal agencies for the rest of the Trump administration.</div><div>View the entire document with DocumentCloud</div><div>But calculating that 20 percent can get mushy. “A former senior official who is now a non-lobbyist lobbyist can send a text and have it returned immediately. How do you count that against the 20 percent threshold? What is the disclosure? How do you decide how to bill for that?” said Sam Geduldig, a partner at CGCN Group, a Republican lobbying firm in Washington.</div><div>
</div><div>Even pinning down what constitutes lobbying — compared to, for example, advising — can be tricky. “Of course there is an incentive” for would-be lobbyists not to register, said Paul Miller, a former president of the industry trade group, American League of Lobbyists. “It’s not by coincidence that the new [lobbyists] aren’t registered and the ones who were registered are de-registering because they think they no longer meet the threshold.”</div><div>
</div><div>The result is that the Trump pledge is less impregnable than it might seem. Here’s how some of the president’s former appointees dodged the restrictions:</div><div><b>
</b></div><div><b>Route 1: The “Non-Lobbyist Lobbyist”</b></div><div>Shadow lobbying typically takes two forms, experts say. The first: Those who spend 20 percent or less of their time on lobbying and, because of the legal threshold instituted during the Obama administration, don’t have to register as lobbyists.</div><div>
</div><div><b>Take the example of former White House environmental policy adviser George David Banks</b>. Before spending a year that ended early in 2018 at the White House, Banks was an executive vice president at the American Council for Capital Formation, where he lobbied on environmental, tax and regulatory issues. And before that, Banks represented a number of utilities and energy trade groups, advocating for nuclear energy and lobbying on clean power legislation.</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>George David Banks</div><div>
</div><div>Banks resigned from his White House position this February; Politico quoted him saying he was denied a permanent security clearance over admitted marijuana use in 2013. The next month, Banks resumed his previous post at the American Council for Capital Formation, but has not re-registered as a lobbyist. In an interview with E&E News shortly after his resignation, Banks was quoted joking that “going back to be a full-time swamp creature is certainly an attractive option.”</div><div>
</div><div>Banks’ previous registration was a mistake, countered Mike Burita, a spokesman for the council. He told ProPublica that Banks’ earlier activity didn’t meet the legal threshold to register as a lobbyist because he spent “little to no time” on the Hill. Banks did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment.</div><div><b>
</b></div><div><b>Then there’s the second shadow route: working for strategic consulting or communications firms.</b></div><div>
</div><div>William Inglee joined the Trump administration as a senior adviser to then Secretary of State Rex Tillerson in February 2017 after leaving his own strategic consulting firm, ISM Strategies LLC, in Mount Vernon, Virginia. Inglee left the State Department four months later and returned to his company, whose website touts his “extensive career in Congress, the Executive Branch, and the private sector” and cites the State Department role.</div><div>
</div><div>But Inglee has also been careful to avoid the lobbyist term, describing his company as a “non-lobbying consulting firm” while still emphasizing its “high-value counsel, expert assessments, and other strategic support” for its clients.</div><div>
</div><div>WILLIAM INGLEE'S DESCRIPTION OF HIS WORK (p. 3)</div><div>Selected portion of a source document hosted by DocumentCloud</div><div>William Inglee has been careful to avoid the lobbyist term, describing his company as a “non-lobbying consulting firm,” and his duties as "non-lobbying strategic consulting."</div><div>View the entire document with DocumentCloud</div><div>Inglee did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment.</div><div>===</div></div>