Barack Obama promised to take on Washington’s revolving door culture. Washington won. How K Street beat Obama

Barack Obama promised to take on Washington’s revolving door culture.

Washington won.


A POLITICO review shows that the Obama administration has hired about 70 previously registered corporate, trade association and for-hire lobbyists. And many of these former lobbyists work at the highest levels of government.

Take Broderick Johnson, who is a top aide to Obama as a liaison between federal agencies and the White House. He’s the husband of NPR anchor Michele Norris and is known to be close to Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder. Until 2011, Johnson was a well-known Democratic lobbyist for companies including Microsoft, Pearson, Globalstar, Comcast and FedEx. Then he disappeared from the lobbying rolls.

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Yet according to the financial disclosure form he filed when entering government, he remained a consultant for those same five companies right up until he started to work at the White House. He also served as a political adviser on Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign — all while consulting for a client roster of corporate interests.

There’s nothing illegal about the consulting work. An attorney who did compliance work for Johnson said that he complied with all relevant laws when transitioning away from registered lobbying. But Johnson’s trip from registered lobbyist to consultant to Obama campaign adviser to White House staffer violates the spirit of Obama’s pledge to keep special interests out of his White House.

The revolving door also means that having put in their time, at least two dozen Obama administration veterans can be found all over town in advocacy, strategy or consulting gigs.

When he ran for president, Obama vowed lobbyists would not find a place in his White House. “I am in this race to tell the corporate lobbyists that their days of setting the agenda in Washington are over,” Obama said in a 2007 Iowa speech. As president, Obama signed an order the White House said “closes the revolving door that allows government officials to move to and from private sector jobs in ways that give that sector undue influence over government.”

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The White House backed off a key part of its own lobbying ban on Tuesday — permitting registered lobbyists to serve on industry boards and panels for the first time since the rule went into place in 2010.

The administration insists that it has done more than any other administration to stem the tide of staffers cashing in on their government experience for private gain — including requiring staffers to sign an ethics pledge and making it more difficult for former lobbyists to enter the administration.

“President Obama has done more in the past six years to close the revolving door of special interest influence than any president before him, namely by prohibiting executive branch appointees from accepting gifts from lobbyists, prohibiting former lobbyists from working on issues on which they lobbied, and by preventing appointees from lobbying the White House after working here,” White House spokesman Eric Schultz said. “Our goal has been to reduce the influence of special interests in Washington — which we’ve done more than any administration in history.”

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But the reality is that Obama, like his predecessors, has found it difficult to run the government without turning to lobbyists.

Melody Barnes was a registered lobbyist at the Raben Group before she headed up the Domestic Policy Council for Obama. She’s back in the private sector, doing consulting at her own firm, Melody Barnes Solutions, and for the Albright Stonebridge Group.

James Kohlenberger headed up an industry coalition called Voice on the Net before joining the Office of Science and Technology Policy. He’s now at his own firm called JK Strategies. He’s not registered to lobby — he bills the firm as “public policy consulting practice.” Sean Kennedy was an in-house lobbyist for AT&T before he went to work for the White House Office of Legislative Affairs. He’s back on K Street, working for the airline industry’s primary trade group Airlines for America, or A4A.

Marc Berejka — a former registered lobbyist for Microsoft — dropped off the lobbying rolls to take a job in technology policy at the Commerce Department. After two years in government, he’s back as a registered lobbyist at the outdoor company REI, working as director of government and community affairs. Bradley Gillen was a registered lobbyist with DISH Network before he took a job as a legal adviser at the Federal Communications Commission. In July, he joined the wireless industry’s primary lobbying trade group CTIA.

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All either declined to comment or would not respond to a request for comment.

For longtime K Street observers, the comings and goings of lobbyists into the administration and right back out is hardly a surprise.

“It’s expected that in any administration that this is going to happen,” said David Urban, a veteran Republican lobbyist with American Continental Group, about longtime staffers heading for the exits and into private industry. “I think it’s disingenuous on their part to say that it wasn’t going to happen or to try to distance themselves from it.”

In the case of Johnson, since he hadn’t been a registered lobbyist since 2011, he did not run afoul of Obama’s rule against hiring people direct from K Street.

“The pledge does not bar anyone with prior lobbying experience from serving in this administration,” Schultz, the White House spokesman, said. “Broderick has substantial experience working in the Clinton administration, on the Hill and in the private sector in a variety of capacities as well as on the president’s campaign. We welcome that mix of experience.” The White House declined repeated requests to interview Johnson.

Johnson is a longtime K Street presence. Prior to his time at Bryan Cave, he worked at Wiley Rein, the Oliver Group and in-house at BellSouth Corp. and AT&T. In his time on K Street, he’s represented big American corporations like Anheuser-Busch, Fannie Mae, FedEx, Ford, JPMorgan Chase, Microsoft, Shell Oil, Time Warner, Comcast and Verizon, according to federal lobbying records. He’s also done stints in government in the Clinton White House and in Congress.

After leaving Bryan Cave, he worked at a new consulting firm with Art Collins called the Collins Johnson Group — all while consulting for the Obama administration. Neither man was registered as a lobbyist during that time, and as “consultants” they don’t publicly disclose any of their clients.

But Johnson’s financial disclosure form filed when he entered government shows that five of his lobbying clients — Microsoft, Pearson, Globalstar, Comcast and FedEx — kept paying him. Wal-Mart lobbyist Ivan Zapien — who first hired Johnson when he was at Bryan Cave as a non-lobbyist consultant— told POLITICO that Johnson was used by the company for strategic advice, not lobbying. Wal-Mart later also hired Collins Johnson group for similar work, according to his disclosure form.

“As you know, there’s a wide variety of government-relations activities that don’t count as lobbying activities under the LDA. You can provide political consulting, you can provide what’s called political intelligence,” said Michael Toner, a partner with Wiley Rein and an election law expert. Toner worked with Collins Johnson Group on lobbying compliance issues and said that all of the firm’s activities were carefully reviewed to make sure they complied with the letter of the law.

Obama’s lobbying rules have been under fire from downtowners from the beginning. The critics say administrations have traditionally mined K Street shops to help fill key policy and management roles and that demonizing registered lobbyists simply lowered the pool of qualified individuals for those jobs.

“Lobbyists are easy political targets for presidential candidates and for freshly minted presidents,” said Jeff Birnbaum, a longtime lobbying reporter at The Washington Post and K Street watcher who now heads up public relations at the firm BGR Group.

“But when a president and his staff get down to doing hard work of governing, they quickly realize that they need serious experts on a wide range of complicated topics to get the job done,” Birnbaum said. “Lobbyists are often the experts presidents need so it was a mistake for the Obama administration to exclude and vilify them.”

But there are fewer registered lobbyists than in years past, with a corresponding boom in the number of people labeled as consultants or policy advisers. The White House rules, along with a decline in congressional action including the virtual end of earmarks, are cited as a factor that have helped encourage longtime Washington hands to try and avoid the stigma of the scarlet “L” by simply not registering as a lobbyist.

Former campaign manager and White House staffer Jim Messina, for example, is working on projects for trade groups and other corporate clients and not registered to lobby. Other former top White House or campaign staffers like Robert Gibbs, Bill Burton, Stephanie Cutter, Tommy Vietor, Jon Favreau, Jim Papa and others are available for hire on issue campaigns in the public affairs world. None disclose their activities or their clients to the public, like registered lobbyists must.

“One thing about life after the White House is that you’re afforded an ability to work on causes that you really care about and for organizations that you find very interesting,” said Burton, now at the firm Global Strategies Group with Papa. “At Global, we’ve been able to do work with Oxfam and the League of Conservation Voters.”

“We do big strategic campaigns using some of the cutting-edge tools we development on the 2012 campaign in terms of targeting messages to particular voters, consumers or potential supporters,” added Cutter, who is now at the firm Precision Strategies with fellow Obama campaign veterans Teddy Goff and Jen O’Malley Dillon. “And we do it for big corporations, issues advocacy campaigns, political campaigns and many others.”

Top National Security Council staffer Mara Rudman worked as a registered lobbyist the Cohen Group and her own firm, Quorum Strategies, prior to her stint in the Obama administration. She’s back at Quorum, but she’s gone from the lobbying disclosure database.

“Quorum had a couple clients who required limited lobbying efforts during the mid-2000s,” said Rudman, who added that lobbying was never the firm’s primary focus. “When I restarted Quorum last year, I elected not to take on any clients that needed such work.”

Denise Wilson was manager of government relations for Motorola, but not registered as a lobbyist, before she joined the White House Office of Legislative Affairs in 2009. She’s now at a firm called Strategic Government Services. She’s not registered to lobby, but the firm offers itself up as a “unique resource for clients seeking regulatory and public affairs advice and representation.” She would not respond to a request for comment.

Alan Hoffman was a registered lobbyist at the firm Timmons & Co. before he did a stint as Vice President Joe Biden’s deputy chief of staff. He’s now a senior vice president for global public policy and government affairs at PepsiCo (although he’s not registered to lobby on the Hill).

Supporters of the administration’s lobbying ban say that it has done wonders to end some of the worst abuses in previous administrations.

“K Street lobbyists want to attack the ethics waiver and argue that it isn’t doing anything, but it has had a very, very significant impact,” said Craig Holman, a lobbyist with the watchdog group Public Citizen.

Holman says de-registration concerns have some merit but that the problem is exaggerated by critics who would return to the status quo of a constant churn of lobbyists going between government and private industry — and sometimes back.

“It’s had some role in de-registration of some lobbyists, but not an overwhelming impact that should be alarming to anyone,” said Holman. “The solution to that problem is not to suddenly remove all the ethics obligations for lobbyists. It’s to enforce the registration requirements.”

But other former White House or campaign staffers say they paid their dues in government and have done their time serving. One former Obama staffer now working downtown noted that he had spent much, much more of his career in public service and government than in the private sector.

“I’m not completely evil,” he joked.