For such a pedestrian word, “lobbyist” summoned up a glorious carnival of sleaze. If scandal was upon Washington once more, a lobbyist was most definitely to blame. Not that any such blame would ever be credibly pinned in time for the public accounting the lobbyist had long deserved. Others would be dragged before congressional committees, forced into shows of contrition. The lobbyist was too quick, too smooth, the firm he worked for too powerful. Washington would never expel him because Washington needed him too much.
That was how lobbying had come to be seen by the early twenty-first century, and if that depiction was not entirely fair, it was also not entirely undeserved. It would be impossible to understand how Washington worked—and thus the reality of what truly powered the legislative and executive branches of government, cabinet departments included—without understanding lobbying, for no other reason than that lobbyists were the bees that pollinated the flowers.
What replenished K Street was the steady flow of talent from Capitol Hill. There were 425 former members of Congress as of 2018 who worked as registered lobbyists. The number of former congressional staffers plying the same trade was in the thousands: 69 alumni of Hillary Clinton’s time as the junior U.S. senator from New York are or were registered lobbyists, giving her first place in this category. There was nothing surprising about this migration. A junior legislative aide in Congress could expect to make about $40,000 per year. As a lobbyist, she could easily triple or quadruple her salary.
Lobbying the federal government was by 2018 a $3.3 billion annual enterprise, one that until 2016 had a lobbying group of its own, the Association of Government Relations Professionals. In 2018, the Center for Responsive Politics concluded that there were 11,444 registered lobbyists in Washington, as well as thousands more working as “shadow lobbyists,” doing the work of lobbying without adhering to the rules. There was the National Association of Ordnance and Explosive Waste Contractors, as well as the U.S. Association of Reptile Keepers, not to mention the Beer Institute. If there was a cause, there was a lobbyist.
America’s first lobbyist was William Hull, hired in 1792 to advocate for Virginians who had fought in the American Revolution. Some decades after that, gun-maker Samuel Colt found himself in need of a patent extension. To this end, he hired Washington lobbyists who “have at different times presented pistols to certain members,” as a later investigation found.
As for the dreaded term itself, a popular—though, unfortunately, probably apocryphal—story dates it to the administration of Ulysses S. Grant, the decorated Civil War general who would come to preside over one of the most corrupt presidential administrations in American history. Grant took an evening drink and cigar at the Willard Hotel, a couple of blocks from the White House. Those looking to win an audience with the president convened in the lobby of the Willard, a work of baroque splendor. (Historians have disputed that Grant’s postprandial habits had anything to do with the advent of “lobbying” as a term of art, as it appears to have shown up in the English language as early as 1777.)
In 1875, Congress began an investigation into the granting of an improper subsidy to the Pacific Mail Steamship Company. Among the culprits was Samuel Cutler Ward, known as “the King of the Lobby.” Ward defended his honor before the House Ways and Means Committee: “I do not say I am proud—but I am not ashamed—of the occupation.” Ward knew that lavishing lawmakers with food and drink was often all it took and “proceeded upon the comfortable axiom,” as a biographer would write, “that the shortest distance between a pending bill and a Congressman’s ‘aye’ lies through his stomach.”
No one lived this lesson as thoroughly as Jack A. Abramoff. By the time his career in Washington was over in 2005, and prison loomed, Abramoff had become the symbol of the Washington that Trump would run against. He was the swamp creature nonpareil, dragged from its lightless deep so that the whole nation could see what had become of American politics.
“I hope he goes to jail and we never see him again,” said a Republican U.S. senator from Montana who eventually returned campaign contributions from the man who had come to be known as Casino Jack. “I wish he’d never been born, to be right honest with you.”
By 2018, the façade of 801 Pennsylvania Avenue was shared by outlets of Wells Fargo, the coffee chain Paul, the salad chain Chopt, and several other unremarkable shops. Across the street was the concrete brutalist headquarters of the FBI, while on the next block, set back from the street, was the Trump International Hotel.
There was a time, nearly twenty years ago, when 801 Pennsylvania Avenue—located almost exactly between the White House and the U.S. Capitol—was the place to be. Between 2002 and 2005, this was the home of Signatures, one of the restaurants Abramoff owned in Washington, during a brief period when he owned all of Washington, or at least acted like he did.
There were places around Washington, like the charmingly fusty Tune Inn of Capitol Hill or the warm and rambling Old Ebbitt Grill across the street from the White House, that did not care to announce themselves as refuges for the powerful, which is probably why the powerful sought them out, savoring the chance to have a beer and burger without being bothered.
Signatures was for people who hungered to announce their arrival on the scene. A May 2002 review in The Hill, a paper for the city’s political class, gushed that “Signatures has the feel of a successful venture, including some silent investors with deep pockets, a prime location…a skilled chef and imaginative menu,” which included the then rare delicacy of Kobe beef from Japan. The review noted that the restaurant was owned by a group called Livsar Enterprises, among whose silent partners was “a prominent lobbyist” recently profiled by the New York Times. That lobbyist was Abramoff.
A product of Beverly Hills, Abramoff had gone to college at Brandeis University in Boston, where he headed the College Republicans chapter. He graduated in 1981 and went to Washington. He became the national chairman of the College Republicans upon his arrival in the district, then went to law school at Georgetown, graduating in 1986. He made a couple of movies, did some work for the apartheid South African government. In 1994, Jack Abramoff joined his first lobbying firm.
Abramoff’s genius was in his understanding Washington exactly as it was, not as it should be or had once been. He saw Washington without her makeup and loved her anyway. Judging by the politicians who sold their votes to him, Washington loved him right back. He worked by seducing staffers on the Hill and, eventually, their bosses, the members of Congress themselves, while convincing interests foreign and domestic that he was a figure of Rasputin-like influence within the Republican Party. His method was simple, but effective. Horace M. Cooper, who had been an aide to Representative Dick Armey, the influential Republican from Texas, was feted with tickets to see all the major Washington sports teams in action, as well as with seats to performances by Bruce Springsteen, the Dixie Chicks, and other acts. Who could say no to such largesse?
Plenty said yes. Republicans who turned out to have had dealings with Casino Jack, whether directly or not, included President George W. Bush, Texas attorney general John Cornyn (later the senior U.S. senator from that state), and Iowa senator Charles E. Grassley. There were Democrats, too, including U.S. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada and Tom Harkin of Iowa.
Abramoff’s clients were stunningly diverse. They most famously included six Native American tribes from which he reaped $66 million, even as he derided their members as “plain stupid” and “monkeys.” Other clients included the governments of Malaysia and the Northern Mariana Islands.
Downfall awaited Abramoff in 2005, after a whistleblower—another lobbyist—brought his trade secrets to light. The following year, a pained-looking Abramoff appeared on the cover of Time magazine as “the man who bought Washington.” He was supposed to be a symbol of the city at its most venal, but the truly frightening thing was not what Abramoff got wrong but, rather, what he got right.
Abramoff left prison in 2010. He wrote a book about corruption and became a spokesman against lobbying. This did not last. By 2016, he was back at it, trying without success to broker a meeting between Trump and the Congolese president, Denis Sassou-Nguesso. The effort failed. As the Trump administration approached the end of its first year, Abramoff appeared on Fox News, where Tucker Carlson asked him if Washington had changed since the halcyon days when Signatures was a hot table.
In response, Abramoff laughed. “Washington, basically, is the same swamp it used to be,” he said, “but they rearranged the alligators and the lily pads.” From anyone else, this would have come across as calculated cynicism. Coming from Abramoff, it had the harsh texture of truth.
Every president had done such rearranging. In 1992, about a month and a half before the presidential election, the Washington Post reported, “High-profile staff members from various Washington lobbying firms are actively campaigning for Democratic nominee Bill Clinton,” further noting that “Democratic lobbyists see the chance of expanding their influence and gaining new business if Bush is ousted.”
The Post spoke to one lobbyist who predicted a Clinton victory, and the windfall that would bring to firms like his, Hill and Knowlton. “I think Clinton is going to win,” that lobbyist said. “And we may well be the place to go if you want advice and counsel about how the new administration will affect your business, your cause or your country.” The lobbyist’s name was Frank Mankiewicz. He was once a top aide to Robert F. Kennedy. When Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles in 1968, it was Mankiewicz who announced the killing on television. There was nothing uniquely ignoble about his turning to lobbying, but it was a sign of where true power had come to reside in Washington.
Barack Obama’s eight years in office were marked by a remarkable lack of major corruption-related scandal, but that was not because his administration shunned lobbyists. To the contrary, it welcomed them like every other administration. There were lobbyists on his transition team, despite promises they would be kept out. Democratic power lawyer Lanny Davis, a top Clinton aide, dismissed this incongruity. “From George Washington to George W. Bush, there has been a role for the lobbyist that is perfectly appropriate and good for democracy,” he told the Washington Post. “The notion that there is something wrong per se with lobbying is ridiculous.”
Lobbyists had access to the Obama administration, if not always to the White House itself in the most literal terms. Diagonally across the street from the White House, on Pennsylvania Avenue and Seventeenth Street, there was an always crowded outlet of Peet’s Coffee, the Berkeley-based chain, by the time that Trump took office. During the Obama presidency, this was Caribou Coffee, and it played more or less the same function as the Willard’s lobby may have in Grant’s time.
Inviting lobbyists on campus would have required them to be recorded in Secret Service visitor logs, which could be subject to Freedom of Information Act public disclosure. But there were no disclosure laws pertaining to a coffee shop, even if privacy would be in short supply. Some other meetings with lobbyists were held at the White House Conference Center and at the Council on Environmental Quality, both located in the genteel row houses of Jackson Place, in sight of the White House. These could also be kept secret.
“We don’t believe there’s anything untoward about these meetings, and we don’t think that represents any special access for lobbyists,” one White House official told the New York Times in 2010 about the Caribou Coffee klatches. This was untrue. The Obama staffers were trying to keep their lobbyist meetings secret by, paradoxically, holding them in public. The Obama administration did release its visitors’ logs, though only after a lawsuit. Even then, the logs were incomplete.
Lobbyists were never more empowered than with the election of Donald Trump. He ran as their scourge; he would govern as their benefactor.
Trump may have banished Chris Christie from his transition, but when it came to actually making the four thousand political appointments for the executive branch that were the responsibility of the president, Trump inevitably turned to K Street, whose lobbying firms were clustered just north of the White House. That gave lobbyists enormous power in molding the Trump cabinet. Once the right people were in place, they could steer the federal government where they pleased.
What happened to draining the swamp and deconstructing the administrative state? There was no time, no will, at least not for the project as Bannon had envisioned it. He understood this as well as anyone. Washington was, as he put it, a “company town,” and Trump was now its mayor. Trying to tear everything down was not going to be a very smart program, even if that had been the program he promised. But there were other promises, other imperatives, namely on trade, healthcare, and national security. “Draining the swamp is very important, don’t get me wrong,” Bannon said. “But you need to get the economy going again.”
Opportunists rushed in. Savviest in gaining access to the new administration was the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank that opposed virtually every idea Bannon championed. The man who ran Heritage until the spring of 2017, Jim DeMint, made no pretenses about being an intellectual. A former U.S. senator from South Carolina, he was associated with the Tea Party and spent the first term of the Obama presidency in a state of perpetual resistance. When he took over Heritage in 2013, the think tank forswore its philosophic roots, taking on the reactionary dogmatism of its new leader.
Trump’s lack of commitment to conservatism, his disregard for that movement as anything other than a means of winning the presidency, was not a problem for DeMint, who moved toward Trump as others backed away. The gamble proved auspicious, and Heritage was rewarded with dozens of appointments within the Trump administration, even as other conservative groups struggled to gain a foothold in the West Wing. The foundation was also instrumental, along with the Federalist Society, in selecting Trump’s two successful Supreme Court nominees, Neil M. Gorsuch and Brett M. Kavanaugh.
“Here’s the brutal reality,” Bannon explained. “There was not a deep bench of talent that could step in to the government and run things. Now, we should have done a much better job of getting Trump people into the administration,” the former chief strategist added, showing a reflectiveness that did not come across in his spirited public appearances. “Absolutely, much better job. It’s one of the things that Trump didn’t fight.”
The presence of Heritage in the executive branch made the mainstream conservative movement—whose articles of faith Trump so floridly flaunted in his candidacy—the primary lobbying group within his administration. As of early 2019, Heritage had a remarkable 114 former employees or interns who were either serving or had served in the Trump administration. Heritage was not alone in influencing policy by influencing staffing. There were also, ProPublica discovered, 35 disciples of the free-market libertarians Charles G. and David H. Koch, not to mention 187 registered federal lobbyists.
What made the Trump administration unique was that its mundane reality contrasted so sharply with the grandiose vision of the presidential campaign. At the crux of that campaign was the idea that Trump himself was so rich that he would be above influence. “While I’m beating my opponents in the polls,” he’d tweeted in late July 2015, a month into his campaign, “I’m also beating lobbyists, special interests & donors that are supporting them with billions.”
Later, tweeting from the White House during the hours of “executive time” devoted to Fox News marathons, Trump frequently invoked the Deep State, an invention of that network and its Internet subalterns. He applied the term to a ruling elite made up of career federal lawyers and bureaucrats, rank-and-file Pentagon staffers, what little remained of the public intelligentsia, and the failing, fawning media that clung to this group like a barnacle. The Deep State was the stuff of second-rate spy fiction, only it was coming from inside the Oval Office.
In a sense, Trump was right. There was a shadowy cabal of expert operators manipulating the American government. Only he was wrong about who they were. It was the lobbyists he appointed, not the bureaucrats he inherited, who came closest to forming a Deep State. Its agents were like cancer cells, activated by the Heritage Foundation and the Koch network to eat away at the federal apparatus from the inside.
These cells had names.
Nominated as a top lawyer at the EPA, Erik Baptist had worked for the American Petroleum Institute, fighting the good fight for the oil and gas industry. Because the API was a lobbying group, Baptist’s appointment would seem to be in direct contravention of Executive Order 13770, the one White House officials touted as the toughest edict on ethics to ever emerge from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. That executive order would mean nothing if new hires were granted waivers, as Baptist was. His (partial) waiver was signed by EPA acting general counsel Kevin S. Minoli, who said it was “in the public interest” to have Baptist join the agency because of his “expertise,” neglecting to mention that his expertise was in dismantling environmental protections. Baptist eventually became a high-ranking administrator in the EPA’s Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention.
Trump used such waivers—sixteen granted by the spring of 2017—as a loophole through which he could evade his own decree. That explained how David L. Bernhardt became a federal employee. Bernhardt lobbied and worked for at least a dozen corporate concerns: the Rosemont Copper Company, Cobalt International Energy, Alcatel-Lucent Submarine Networks, Garrison Diversion Conservancy District. What did one make of a man like that? Naturally, one made him a top deputy in the Department of the Interior.
Kelly Marie Cleary went from a lucrative position at the white-shoe firm of Akin Gump, where she spent ten years working on behalf of clients in the medical industry, including insurance companies, to serving as the chief legal officer for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services at the Department of Health and Human Services. Maya Michelle Noronha had been a Republican operative who worked on voter suppression efforts for the Republican National Lawyers Association, which inexplicably qualified her to serve as a special adviser on civil rights at HHS.
Kevin O’Scannlain, an associate counsel to the president, had an astonishingly prolific lobbying profile: Discover, the credit card company; Cathay Pacific, the Asian airline; Rite Aid, the pharmacy chain; First Kuwaiti General Trading & Contracting; Emirates Investment and Development. One might have thought that a former lobbyist for Lehman Brothers, the failed investment bank identified with the worst excesses of the housing and financial crisis of 2008, would not be the person to help enact Trump’s populist agenda. And yet there O’Scannlain was, a White House special assistant.
In one of the Trump administration’s most brazen nominations, Andrew R. Wheeler was picked to be the deputy administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. Wheeler was a former coal lobbyist who did not appear to believe in climate change. It mattered little. With Democrats defeated and Republicans cowed, Wheeler was confirmed in the spring of 2018.
Did all these people succumb to their own worst impulses once installed in the federal government? Of course not. They simply did not belong there, in a White House that was to be above influence, above cronyism, above the buying-and-selling that had marked earlier administrations.
Only the task was too great. No one was up for it at the start. Later, no one bothered to revive it. “Draining the swamp is very difficult,” Bannon would come to concede. “People have to go in with a maniacal focus if they’re going to do it, and in this administration, there just has been no center of gravity to do that.”