Giuliani’s Rising Star Shines on Former Aides
Rudy Giuliani isn’t just the president’s lawyer. He’s also acting as a political and (very colorful) foreign policy adviser. That means the value of those who can influence the former New York City mayor just went up. And sure enough, about a month after Trump tapped Giuliani for his legal team, the government of Qatar inked a lobbying deal with a firm run by former senior Giuliani aides.
Qatar will pay Blueprint Advisors $100,000 for 12 months to lobby Congress and the administration on the Gulf nation’s behalf. The lead lobbyist on the account will be Anthony Carbonetti, who served as Giuliani’s chief of staff, advised his presidential campaign, and co-founded his consulting firm, Giuliani Partners. Blueprint’s founder, Chris Henck, was a senior adviser to Giuliani’s presidential campaign. Henck and Carbonetti each own 50 percent of Blueprint, according to incorporation records filed with the Department of Justice.
Giuliani’s companies have done prior business in Qatar, and his private security company in particular earned him some scrutiny during his presidential run over its ties to Qatari officials linked to al Qaeda.
I asked Giuliani about his former aides’ new client. He wouldn’t say whether they’ve been in touch since Blueprint signed the Qatari government, and suggested I reach out to them instead. “They know what’s appropriate to say,” Giuliani said.
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The Strange Case of the Original Trump Super PAC
About two weeks after super PAC Make America Great Again was formed in June 2015, it got its biggest cash infusion of the cycle: a cool million from Vegas casino magnate Phil Ruffin. But by October, scrutiny of the PAC proved too much to bear. Trump was running on a platform that explicitly eschewed big-money backers, and the campaign was having trouble explaining its many links to the super PAC’s donors (including Jared Kushner’s mother) and executives (the group was run by a Trump campaign vendor).
Finding itself under a microscope and publicly shunned by the Trump campaign, Make America Great Again ceased operations less than six months later, with more than $157,000 still in the bank, according to Federal Election Commission filings. But when the group filed its first FEC report of 2016, it reported a negative cash balance of about $3,500. The FEC has tried ever since to get the group to say what it did with the $160,000 difference.
In mid-2016, Make America Great Again tried to terminate its registration with the FEC. But the commission wouldn’t let it fold until it revealed what happened to all that cash. The PAC then amended its termination report to say that, actually, its cash on hand was about $154,000. Then it stopped filing FEC reports. The committee went dark until January 2017, when it filed pre- and post-general election reports disclosing a cash balance of less than $50,000. The reports said it had disbursed about $110,000 between March and October of 2016, but contained none of the required details on how that money was spent.
The FEC, and the public, had no idea where the cash went until Wednesday, when Make America Great Again quietly amended a 2016 quarterly FEC filing to note a very conspicuous transaction. The PAC now says that it refunded $50,000 to one of its donors, Florida real-estate developer Michael Dezertzov (who also goes by Michael Dezer). Dezertzov has partnered with Trump on a number of high-profile real-estate projects, and made bank selling Trump condos to, among others, wealthy Russian buyers.
The refund of Dezertzov’s contribution came on Aug. 18, 2016, according to Make America Great Again’s amended FEC filing. The next day, Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort resigned under scrutiny of his own business dealings with wealthy Russian businessmen.
We still don’t know what Make America Great Again did with the remaining $60,000 that disappeared from its balance sheets.
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Immigrant Labor Advocates Take Trumpian Lobbying Tack
Donald Trump’s businesses have for years soaked up the seasonal foreign labor offered to temporary immigrants under a visa program known as H-2B. But the Trump administration, despite modestly raising the cap of such visas this year, has simultaneously taken steps to dramatically limit the amount of such imported labor available to U.S. businesses.
Faced with an administration defined by few issues more than its hostility to immigration, the H-2B industry has tailor-made its advocacy to the Trump era.
The Seasonal Employment Alliance, a leading trade association representing H-2B employers, recently brought on a new lobbying firm. It hired Cove Strategies, the outfit run by American Conservative Union chief Matt Schlapp, a top outside adviser to the president and husband of White House strategic communications director Mercedes Schlapp. Cove’s lobbyist-registration form says it works to expand annual H-2B caps, and to permanently overhaul the program.
SEA inked the deal with Cove just a few months after it did what a number of companies, trade associations, and influence-peddlers looking to get in the good graces of the Trump administration have done: it patronized a Trump property. The SEA held its annual DC fly-in at the Trump Hotel in Washington, and hosted a fundraiser at the hotel featuring Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK). The trade association and its sister political action committee paid the hotel $15,000 for the event.
SEA appears to have made another move characteristic of political favor-seeking in the Trump era. It’s started tweeting at the president. Six days after it hired Schlapp’s firm, the group created a Twitter account. Of its 54 tweets since then, more than a quarter have mentioned @realDonaldTrump.
Resorts and golf clubs owned by Trump, or branded with his name, have applied for nearly 600 visas for non-agricultural seasonal foreign workers since 2013, the vast majority of them for jobs at Mar-a-Lago. To do so, Trump companies have tapped the 66,000 H-2B visas offered each year.
But demand for seasonal foreign labor—including from golf courses such as Trump’s—consistently outstrips the number of such visas offered by the Department of Homeland Security, and H-2B employers find themselves pushing federal regulators every year to take advantage of provisions allowing them to boost the number of available visas by an additional 15,000. Such was the case this year, when those employers anticipated significant need for seasonal laborers and last month lobbied vigorously for DHS to raise the H-2B cap.
But even as the Trump administration raised the cap for this year’s H-2B awardees, its other immigration measures had the effect of dramatically limiting the number of available temporary foreign workers. In past years, DHS did not count returning workers against its annual cap. It scrapped that measure this year, exacerbating U.S. employers’ seasonal labor shortage.
Industries supported by H-2B labor enjoy significant support in DC. But Trump’s nationalist base reviles the program. For a president prone to about-faces even on issues central to his appeal, the H-2B lobby’s personal touch appears a shrewd influence strategy.
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Former Senator Courts European Diplomats to Shed Russia Sanctions
Last month, we learned that former Trump campaign aide Bryan Lanza, now a lobbyist with the firm Mercury Public Affairs, is helping the energy and metals company EN+ shed U.S. sanctions by distancing itself from Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, the company’s largest investor. Deripaska, who previously worked with former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, remains under U.S. sanctions, hobbling EN+ and an aluminum company that it partially owns.
Lanza and his colleagues, including former Louisiana Republican Sen. David Vitter, have promoted a plan to reduce Deripaska’s holdings in EN+ and remove him and his allies from the company’s board in discussions with the administration aimed at easing the sanctions against the company. And according to new Foreign Agents Registration Act filings, Mercury is also attempting to enlist foreign diplomats in an effort to pressure the Treasury Department to ease up on EN+.
Vitter, now a Mercury co-chairman, has sent memos to the ambassadors to the U.S. from Ireland, Australia, Germany, Jamaica, and Sweden asking them to press the State Department and Treasury’s Office of Foreign Asset Control to support EN+’s plan to sideline Deripaska and get back on the good side of U.S. sanctions administrators.
Vitter’s memos spelled out the steps the company has taken to shed its ties to Deripaska, asked the ambassadors to put in a good word with U.S. authorities, and even included suggested form letter language for the diplomats’ communiques to State and OFAC. Each begins, “[Insert Name of Appropriate Official].”
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