Another registered lobbyist who defended the president is Pam Bondi, a former Florida attorney general.



Immediately prior to joining the impeachment defense team as a special government employee, she worked as a lobbyist for Ballard Partners, which is run by Brian Ballard, a top fundraiser for Trump’s presidential campaigns and whom Politico magazine dubbed “The Most Powerful Lobbyist in Trump’s Washington.” As a special government employee, Bondi is bound to some degree by ethics laws and rules, which, if followed, mitigate ethics risks (special government employees are provided more leeway to engage in activities that would typically be off-limits to normal federal employees).

As a lobbyist who began representing clients in January 2019, Bondi represented a wide array of entities in advocacy before the White House. Some highlights from her recent lobbying disclosure forms:

Last year, she lobbied the White House, as well as the State Department and Congress, on behalf of the Kuwait-based KGL Investment Company, whose former top executive was found guilty of embezzling Kuwaiti government funds. In the same corporate family is KGL Logistics, a major U.S. military logistics contractor in the Middle East that, as POGO reported, appears to have sought to evade U.S. sanctions against Iran several years ago.

Also last year, she lobbied the White House and Department of Homeland Security on behalf of the Florida-based private prison company GEO Group, whose detention contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement have surged during the Trump administration. The company has sought the administration’s help in defending against lawsuits accusing it of forced labor at its immigration detention centers.

Another of her clients was automaker General Motors, which, as Bloomberg Law detailed, hired Ballard Partners as part of its effort to navigate and influence the administration’s trade wars and to avoid being the focus of the president’s ire on Twitter.

Bondi also lobbied the White House last year for the gambling technology company IGT Global Solutions, which is seeking to influence how the administration interprets and enforces the Wire Act, a law that governs online betting. In early 2019, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel reversed its previous position on the law to correspond with an expansive interpretation favored by Sheldon Adelson, a casino operator who is one of Trump’s biggest donors and an opponent of online gambling, which competes with his business. A federal court subsequently struck down the Office of Legal Counsel’s new interpretation of the law.

Bondi and another Ballard lobbyist also advised Qatar’s embassy in the U.S. “in matters related to combating human trafficking” as the Middle Eastern country seeks to burnish its international image in advance of the 2022 World Cup.

Bondi did not respond to POGO’s request for comment. The White House has said she is required to recuse herself from any matters that she lobbied on. Ballard continues to represent the clients mentioned above.