Donald Trump’s new chief campaign strategist, Paul Manafort, is bringing on some close associates for key spots on Trump's presidential campaign, including several whose lobbying histories seem to epitomize the special-interest influence against which the candidate rails.

Among the influence industry veterans who have been helping the campaign in recent weeks, according to sources close to the Trump campaign, are Laurance Gay, who worked with Manafort on an effort to obtain a federal grant that one congressman called a “very smelly, sleazy business,” and Doug Davenport, whose firm’s lobbying for an oppressive Southeast Asian regime became a liability for John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign.


The pair join another former Manafort lobbying partner named Rick Gates, who was identified as an agent of a Ukrainian oligarch in a 2011 racketeering lawsuit that also named Manafort. And Manafort this week met with Marc Palazzo, a former lobbyist for a Koch Industries subsidiary who used to work as a communications staffer for GTECH Corp., the controversial lottery operator, to which Gay, Davenport, Gates and Manafort all have ties.

It's not clear whether the people who recently started advising the campaign are working as staff, consultants or volunteers. But what unites almost all of them is a professional connection to Manafort, 67, a veteran GOP operative who was hired by Trump late last month to professionalize his campaign.

For the first 10 months of his candidacy, the billionaire real estate showman relied on a relatively inexperienced skeleton staff that helped elevate him from quirky political sideshow to a candidate on the verge of the GOP presidential nomination. But that core team, led by campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, was seen as unable to take Trump all the way, so the candidate handed the keys to Manafort, who has moved quickly to consolidate power on the campaign.

Manafort has made a decades-long career drifting between GOP presidential politics and lucrative lobbying and consulting work. The firm he helped found developed a niche representing a roster of controversial international clients that has been described as “the torturers’ lobby.” Clients included Filipino dictator Ferdinand Marcos, Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko, Angolan guerrilla Jonas Savimbi, a group accused of being a front for Pakistani intelligence, and — most recently — ousted Ukrainian Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych. In fact, the last time Manafort was intricately involved in a presidential campaign was Bob Dole’s unsuccessful 1996 bid, and he has been largely absent from GOP politics and Washington for years.

Manafort’s recent additions to the Trump campaign have prompted incredulous reactions among Lewandowski’s loyalists on the campaign, who have privately questioned whether Manafort understands modern presidential politics, said one operative who works with the Trump campaign.

“They said that they were going to bring in a new campaign team, but Manafort has been out of the game for so long,” said the operative. “He doesn’t have any current connections, so he’s just bringing in all his old lobbyist friends.”

It's an odd fit for a campaign based in large part on Trump's broadsides against Washington special interests and their lobbying corps, which Trump alleges have skewed the political process against the interests of regular people. Those lobbyists, he argues, are backing his opponents out of self-interest.

Two months after launching his campaign last year, Trump boasted on CBS’ "Face the Nation": "I don't want lobbyists. I don't want special interests,” adding that he "turned down $5 million last week from a very important lobbyist, because there are total strings attached to a thing like that. He's going to come to me in a year or two years and he's going to want something for a country that he represents or for a company that he represents.”

Manafort did not respond to questions about whether his own lobbying background or those of his new advisers would undermine Trump’s message, or whether his new team had the experience to run a presidential campaign in 2016.

Palazzo, who worked with Manafort on one of Ed DiPrete’s successful Rhode Island gubernatorial campaigns in the 1980s, rejected the idea that bringing on lobbyists without recent presidential campaign experience would hurt more than help.

“I’ve known Paul Manafort for many, many years. I have great respect for him, and am confident in his ability to help Mr. Trump win the nomination,” said Palazzo, 56. He met with Manafort at the campaign’s Manhattan headquarters this week to talk about the campaign but said he is “not going to assume an official role with the campaign.”

Gay, 63, Davenport, 44, and Gates, 43, did not respond to messages seeking comment about their roles with the campaign or their lobbying work.

It’s not immediately evident whether Gay, who is based in Connecticut, has worked on a presidential campaign in recent decades. But he has been on the ground in California and has met with Trump’s state director Tim Clark, according to the operative who works with the Trump campaign. The operative said that Gay has had discussions about the campaign’s plans to spend heavily in the run-up to California's primary on June 7 — the last day of voting — which in all likelihood will determine whether Trump reaches the 1,237-delegate threshold necessary to secure the GOP nomination before the convention.

Gates, who boasts in an online bio that he “has worked on several US presidential campaigns and has participated in many international political campaigns in Europe and Africa,” took over some of the duties of Lewandowski's deputy Michael Glassner, according to multiple campaign sources.

“He was coordinating nuts and bolts kind of stuff with the staff on the ground, trying to make sure we had the right people in place, and interviewing potential hires,” said a campaign insider. The insider said that some of those operational duties were inherited by Rick Wiley, who Manafort hired to be national political director. Wiley appears to be the only Manafort hire so far with recent high-level presidential campaign experience, though Wiley’s stewardship of Scott Walker’s underperforming presidential campaign was widely panned. The Wisconsin governor entered the race as an establishment favorite and was the beneficiary of $32 million in campaign and super PAC cash, but his campaign was seen as poorly managed, and he dropped out after plummeting in the polls.

Multiple campaign sources said that Davenport, who first worked with Manafort many years ago, is helping lead the campaign’s strategy for courting individual delegates, assembling what’s known as the delegate “book.” That will be a critical job, since those individual delegates could decide the GOP nomination at the party’s July convention if Trump fails to reach 1,237 delegates on or by June 7.

While Davenport has been involved in past conventions, his role was at least partly that of a lobbyist planning corporate events. His last high-level presidential campaign experience appears to have come in 2008, when he was a regional campaign manager for McCain. He stepped aside after it was revealed that the lobbying and public relations firm for which he worked, DCI Group, had previously been on retainer for the repressive military regime in Myanmar, then known as Burma.

Davenport is currently lobbying for DCI on behalf of hedge funds that hold Puerto Rico’s debt and don’t want Congress to approve a restructuring plan, according to lobbying disclosure records. The investors’ aggressive tactics — running attack ads in lawmakers’ home districts — have rankled some Congress members and other bondholders. He also lobbied for forcing Argentina to pay back U.S. investors in its own recent debt dispute. At least one of the hedge funds hounding Argentina is also involved in Puerto Rico.

And Davenport has lobbied since at least 2001 for GTECH, which dominated the state lottery equipment business but also came under legal scrutiny for its business practices. Its founder, Guy Snowden, resigned in 1998 after a London jury convicted him of attempted bribery, and GTECH last year was absorbed by slot machine maker IGT.

Gates and Gay also lobbied and worked for GTECH, which was represented by Manafort’s lobbying firm in the late 1990s — around the time Palazzo served as GTECH’s director of communications. He called Davenport and Gay “good friends and talented professionals.”

Gay led the company’s government relations and sales between 1994 and 1998. After leaving the company with a reported $4.5 million golden parachute, Gay registered to lobby in Connecticut for the casino-owning Mashantucket Pequot Indians and mall developer Westfield.

Gay and Gates also worked together at Gay’s Hartford, Connecticut-based firm Business Strategies and Insight LLC. In the early '00s, they registered to lobby Congress on behalf of Xavier Chemical Co., a Georgia firm that was locked in a dispute with the U.S. Army about a federal contract to operate a former ammunition plant.

More recently, Gates represented the American Stock Exchange and VILF Consultants, a Virgin Islands company lobbying on the territory’s infrastructure. Gates was named in a racketeering lawsuit brought in U.S. federal court by former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko against Manafort and his associates for their work for pro-Russian strongman Yanukovych. The complaint, first reported by the Washington Free Beacon, describes Gates as an agent of Ukrainian gas oligarch Dmytro Firtash, who Tymoshenko accuses of improperly shielding profits. (A judge dismissed the suit, ruling it fell outside U.S. jurisdiction.)

Gay also found himself in the hot seat over his work with Manafort after joining his firm in the 1980s from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, where he had been an official.

Manafort had been a partner in a venture to redevelop a housing project in New Jersey, and he paid his own lobbying firm to help win $31 million in HUD subsidies. Gay was the go-between between the firm, Black, Manafort, Stone & Kelly, and HUD. A congressional investigation found the facilities lacked laundry machines, gutters or downspouts, and the HUD official who Gay had lobbied was later convicted of conspiracy to defraud the government.

While Manafort and Gay were never charged, Manafort was called to testify about the matter in the late 1980s before the House Government Operations Subcommittee on Employment and Housing.

"The technical term for what we do — and law firms, associations and professional groups do — is lobby," Manafort told the committee at the time. "For the purposes of today, I will stipulate that, in a narrow sense, some people may term it influence-peddling."