If you're having trouble viewing this email, you can view it in a browser.
PAY DIRT

Not Your Father’s Pay-to-Play Scheme: Plenty of ink has already been spilled on revelations surrounding Trump attorney Michael Cohen’s company, Essential Consultants LLC. A refresher: Cohen used the company to pay off porn star Stormy Daniels in late 2016 to stay quiet about her alleged affair with the president. In 2017, we now know, Cohen used the company for a whole new venture: access-peddling. At least four companies that we know of, including one tied to a Putin-friendly Russian oligarch, paid six-figure sums to the LLC in 2017.

On Wednesday, we learned that Swiss drug giant Novartis signed a $100,000-per-month deal with Cohen’s firm to conduct health-care policy consulting, and in particular to plumb the new administration for insights on what it planned to do with respect to Obamacare. But according to Novartis, it took one meeting with Cohen and decided it didn’t want his services after all. But the drug maker says it was contractually obliged to keep him on retainer through the duration of its year-long contract, so it paid Essential Consulting $1.2 million in all.

Novartis’s average monthly billing for outside lobbying firms in 2017 was just under $12,000. That means that for most of the year, it was paying Cohen’s company about nine times as much as it paid any outside lobbying firm to do… nothing. Or so the company claims.

The Quid and the Quo: Another Essential Consultants client, AT&T, was seeking a merger with Time Warner that required Trump administration sign-off. The company told CNBC: “Essential Consulting was one of several firms we engaged in early 2017 to provide insights into understanding the new administration. They did no legal or lobbying work for us, and the contract ended in December 2017.” AT&T paid Cohen’s company “up to $600,000” for its work, which the company says was “actual work done… It wasn’t to pay for access to the president.”

But “provide insights” and “advise on policy matters” is vintage shadow-lobbying language, and a source inside Novartis told trade publication Stat News that Cohen approached the company’s CEO offering to sell access to administration insiders. On its face, that is run-of-the-mill D.C. payola. What makes this case unique is the fact that these companies paid an entity used to buy the silence of the president’s alleged paramour. Now, the payments (the ones we know of, anyway) came in after the October 2016 payment to Daniels. But plenty of writing on the LLC has overlooked one crucial aspect to the whole Cohen saga: Stormy Daniels wasn’t the only beneficiary of Essential Consultants payoffs.

In late 2017, according to a Wall Street Journal report, Cohen used the company to steer $1.6 million to the alleged mistress of top Republican fundraiser Elliott Broidy, with whom she had reportedly conceived an illegitimate child (until that story broke, Broidy and Cohen were colleagues on the Republican National Committee’s finance leadership team). Cohen has previously said he had to take out a home-equity line of credit to gather the $130,000 paid to Daniels. If he (and his company) were so short on cash, how did they come up with the seven figures to pay off Broidy’s mistress as well?

Now it appears we know. Essential Consultants solicited huge payments from companies looking to grease the Trump administration's bureaucratic machinery at the same time that it financed a hush-money payment to a top Trump fundraiser’s mistress. Whether they knew it or not, AT&T and Novartis, and possibly others, were likely buying access to the Trump administration by funding, directly or indirectly, efforts to keep a major sex scandal under wraps. How’s that for a Season 2 twist.

The Lobbying Practice That Pence Built: When elected officials are elevated to positions of power, it’s fairly standard for at least some of the people in their orbit to cash in. The value of lobbying and consulting services is directly proportional to the political power of the people who a lobbyist or consultant can influence. But rarely is a lobbying firm’s work so singularly focused on a single elected official as that of Sextons Creek, the firm founded and run by Vice President Mike Pence’s former chief of staff.

Bill Smith served atop Pence’s staff in Congress and in the Indiana governorship. He left in 2014 to found Sextons Creek, which appears to have initially focused on political consulting. Pence’s re-election campaign paid the firm about $250,000 from 2014 through 2016, per Indiana campaign-finance records.

Pence officially withdrew from his gubernatorial re-election bid after joining Trump’s ticket in July 2016. Beginning in January 2017, a few weeks before Trump was inaugurated, Sextons Creek began cashing in on its ties to the new administration. On Jan. 2 alone, it signed five big-time clients: Verizon, AT&T, Microsoft, AFLAC, and General Dynamics (for the latter four, Sextons Creek was brought on in partnership with another firm, Fidelis Government Relations).

The firm now lobbies on behalf of 14 companies on issues ranging from energy policy to immigration to tax reform to international human rights. Despite that wide breadth of policy work, for all but one of its clients, Sextons Creek has lobbied just one office in the federal government: that of the vice president. In addition to its principal, the firm employs Pence’s former top health-policy aide, the former Pence-nominated chair of the Indiana GOP, and a host of former Indiana legislators and state government officials.

The firm’s entire lobbying practice revolves around its access to and ability to influence the vice president. For its lobbying work since Trump took office—which, again, has consisted almost entirely of advocacy aimed at the VP’s office—Sextons Creek has brought in about $1.2 million.

(Tip of the hat to Matt Corley for bringing some of Sexton Creek’s lobbying filings to my attention.)

This Week at The Trump Hotel

Spotted at “the world’s most controversial hotel”:

  • Rudy Giuliani, the loose-lipped new addition to the president’s legal team, was seen talking to Felix Sater, a Russian mob-linked businessman involved in a number of the Trump Organization’s Russian and Eastern European real-estate deals over the years.
  • Rick Grenell, the new U.S. ambassador to Germany, celebrated his confirmation with Trump campaign hands Katrina Pierson and Madison Gesiotto.

In emoluments news, the Brookings Institution’s Benjamin Wittes is suing the State Department in an effort to obtain records detailing foreign government payments to the Trump hotel in D.C.

FARA Blue Moon: A Pakistani national living in Maryland pleaded guilty this week to violations of the Foreign Agent Registration Act, marking just the fourth FARA conviction or guilty plea since 1966. As part of the plea deal, Nisar Ahmed Chaudhry admitted to advancing the interests of the Pakistani government in the U.S. by working with Washington, D.C. think tanks with sway over U.S. foreign policy—all without registering as an agent of a foreign government. “These activities were designed by Chaudhry to obtain and manage information on the status of the U.S. government’s policies regarding Pakistan, and to influence U.S. government officials and U.S. foreign policy toward Pakistan,” according to a DOJ statement.

Given the assistance he was surreptitiously offering the Pakistani government, Chaudhry’s connections to U.S. policymakers are pretty startling. He claims to have lectured at the Foreign Service Institute, an official training group for U.S. foreign-service officers. He touted his connections to former U.S. diplomats and lawmakers. And his work was promoted on, among other platforms, the Urdu arm of Voice of America, the state-owned U.S. broadcaster.

Read More On The Daily Beast: