Shawn Thew - Pool/Getty Images politics Zinke teaming up with Lewandowski at D.C. lobbying firm The move comes a few weeks after Zinke resigned amid scandal from the Interior Department.

Ryan Zinke, who resigned as interior secretary last year amid scandal, is teaming up with Corey Lewandowski, President Donald Trump’s former campaign manager, to work as senior advisers at Washington lobbying firm Turnberry Solutions.

Jason Osborne, a partner at Turnberry, said Lewandowski won’t do any work that would require him to register as a lobbyist, but said that Zinke was likely to do so.


“Zinke will if it’s the right clients and it’s something he’s passionate about,” Osborne said.

Zinke is the first former member of Trump’s Cabinet to join a lobbying firm — a new milestone for a president who took office promising to “drain the swamp.” Lewandowski, meanwhile, is one of a multitude of former Trump campaign staffers and fundraisers who have offered to advise corporate America on how to deal with the administration. Some of them have registered as lobbyists, while others, including Lewandowski, have declined to do so.

Zinke’s quick turn to the lobbying world and his move alongside Lewandowski also shows the appetite among the president’s allies to cash in on their high-profile positions, even when they’ve been dogged by controversy.

Trump announced via Twitter in December that Zinke, a former Montana congressman, would step down by the end of the year as he faced several investigations into whether he had misused his office. Lewandowski was ousted from Trump’s campaign amid concerns about his brash style and inexperience, but he has remained close to the president and has also worked with Vice President Mike Pence’s leadership PAC.

Lewandowski and Osborne previously worked together at Avenue Strategies, the lobbying firm that Lewandowski started with Barry Bennett, after the 2016 election.

Lewandowski quit Avenue in 2017 after stories raised questions about him cashing in on his access to the president. Mike Rubino, another Avenue lobbyist who had worked on the Trump campaign with Osborne, left Avenue soon afterward and started Turnberry. A third Trump campaign veteran, Ryan O’Dwyer, later joined them.

Lewandowski claimed at the time he had “nothing to do with Turnberry Solutions,” but allowed Turnberry lobbyists to work out of the Capitol Hill rowhouse where he stayed when he was in Washington.

One of Turnberry’s clients, T-Mobile, later said that Lewandowski was advising the company on its proposed merger with Sprint. And Joel Sheltrown, the vice president of government affairs for another Turnberry client at the time, Elio Motors, told POLITICO that Lewandowski had been on a conference call his firm had with Turnberry.

“Corey Lewandowski is now affiliated with that firm and they have offered perspective to T-Mobile on a variety of topics, including the pending transaction,” T-Mobile said in a statement last year about Turnberry.

Osborne said the new arrangement would allow Lewandowski to work more closely with Turnberry. “Previously it was friends talking to each other, friends worked together in the same building,” he said in an interview. “Now we’re actually working for the same company.” Lewandowski said in a statement that he looked “forward to working with Secretary Zinke to provide strategic advice and counsel to clients.”

Zinke, meanwhile, plans to work on energy and defense matters. He’ll split his time among Montana, California and Washington.

The former Interior secretary is limited in his ability to lobby the administration by Trump’s ethics pledge and doesn’t plan to do so, according to Osborne. But he’s allowed to lobby Congress, in which he represented Montana for one term before resigning to join Trump's Cabinet.

Zinke said in a statement that he was “excited to join Turnberry Solutions and I look forward to helping companies navigate the Washington, DC bureaucracy.”

Zinke declined to comment further. Lewandowski did not respond to a request for further comment.

Turnberry’s other clients include the government of the Northern Mariana Islands, which is a U.S. commonwealth. Osborne is also registered to lobby for the government of Azerbaijan and Polska Grupa Zbrojeniowa, the Polish state defense conglomerate, through another lobbying firm, the BGR Group.

Rubino, who started Turnberry with Osborne, left the firm last year to join the Department of Health and Human Services’ intergovernmental and external affairs office as a senior adviser. But he quit last month, claiming he couldn’t work with the office’s director, Jack Kalavritinos, because he was “an avowed member of the swamp” and a “never-Trumper.”

A spokesperson for the department described Rubino’s accusations as “unfortunate comments from a former employee who served very briefly at the Department.”

Daniel Lippman contributed to this report.