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The swamp is rising

Published by digby on May 4, 2017

The swamp is rising

by digby

I know it’s very hard to believe but it turns out that Trump wasn’t serious about draining it:

Donald Trump promised last year to “drain the swamp” of Washington, starting with barring people who worked on his presidential transition from lobbying for six months afterward.

But three months after Trump moved into the White House, at least nine people who worked on his transition have registered as lobbyists, highlighting holes in the president’s pledge to keep people from cashing in on government service.

Many are registered to lobby the same agencies or on the same issues they worked on during the transition, a POLITICO review of lobbying disclosures found. A former “sherpa” who helped to guide Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos through the Senate confirmation process is now registered to lobby her department. The former head of the transition’s tax policy team has returned to his old company to lobby Congress on tax reform. One ex-member of the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative team is now registered as part of a team lobbying on behalf of a major steelmaker.

Because of the way the transition’s six-month lobbying ban was worded, the former staffers may not be violating it. Regardless, their trips from lobbying to government service and back run counter to Trump’s campaign promise to close Washington’s revolving door.

They also raise questions about how rigorously the White House will enforce a separate five-year lobbying ban that applies to those serving in the administration. At least two officials who briefly served in the Trump administration and then left — Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser, and Robert Wasinger, who worked in the State Department and is now a lobbyist — have said they did not sign a five-year ban.

“This is more evidence of the ethical vacuum in the Trump White House,” said Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen, a nonprofit government ethics watchdog. “These revolving-door-esque actions mock everything candidate Trump said about draining the swamp and ending corporate corruption and inside dealing in Washington, D.C.”

Transition officials had presented the lobbying ban as an essential part of Trump’s pledge to drain the swamp. “The key thing for this administration is going to be that people going out of government won’t be able to use that service to enrich themselves,” Sean Spicer, now the White House press secretary, said when he announced the ban in November. But it hasn’t prevented former transition staffers from going to K Street within weeks of leaving.

I’m sure that means nothing. Carry on.

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