new lobbyists Ballard
M. Scott Mahaseky/POLITICO,
When Brian Ballard signed the lease last year for an office on the second floor of the Homer Building, a downtown Washington edifice that’s home to a number of lobbying firms, he promised himself he would stay in the space for five years. He lasted one. In February, his firm, Ballard Partners, moved into a bigger office on the fourth floor to accommodate the new lobbyists Ballard has hired since the election of one of his former clients, President Donald Trump.
Not all of Ballard’s foreign clients are as sympathetic. Ballard signed a contract with the Turkish government worth $125,000 a month on May 11, days before Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s security guards beat up peaceful protesters outside Turkey’s embassy, according to a Justice Department filing. Another filing shows Ballard met several times with administration officials on Turkey’s behalf, including Sean Cairncross, a senior adviser to the White House chief of staff, and Matt Mowers, a State Department official who worked on Trump’s campaign.
At the firm’s first staff meeting in the new offices, Ballard and five of his Washington lobbyists sat in new leather chairs around a small conference table, with Ballard at the head. Robert Wexler, a former Democratic congressman from Florida whom Ballard hired last year, phoned in from Paris with an update on the firm’s work for the Turkish government. Jamie Rubin, a former assistant secretary of state in the Clinton administration, called from Brussels and updated Ballard on a meeting he’d had with Moise Katumbi, an exiled opposition leader from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, who’s a client.
“You’ll be happy to hear that we signed the Maldives today,” Syl Lukis, another Ballard lobbyist, told Rubin.
“Let’s fire away quickly on Kosovo and Turkey,” Ballard said. (The government of Kosovo is another Ballard client.)
Other Ballard lobbyists gave updates on their meetings with Trump administration officials and other work on behalf of the dozens of clients they represent in Washington, including Amazon, Dish Network, Uber, Pernod Ricard (the makers of Jameson whiskey and Absolut vodka) and Trulieve (a Florida-based medical marijuana company). Rebecca Benn, a former congressional staffer Ballard hired last year, updated Ballard and another lobbyist, Susie Wiles, on a meeting she’d set up for a client. “They were very, very happy — thank you, Susie — for the meeting at the White House last week,” Benn said. “It went very, very well.”
Ballard is a veteran Florida lobbyist who’s been in Washington for barely a year — the blink of an eye in an industry in which many of the top practitioners have spent decades inside the Beltway. But Ballard is closer to the president than perhaps any other lobbyist in town. He’s parlayed that relationship into a booming business helping clients get their way with the Trump administration — and his clients and even some of his rivals say his firm has a better grasp of what’s going on in the West Wing than almost anyone else on K Street. Ballard was one of the top fundraisers in the country for Trump’s campaign and continues to raise millions for his reelection campaign. Wiles, one of his top lieutenants, ran Trump’s campaign in Florida and delivered the nation’s biggest swing state to the president.
Ballard’s relationship with Trump has helped him solve a lucrative puzzle that has frustrated more established players. For all of the president’s “drain the swamp” rhetoric, the new administration has given corporate America and its lobbyists the opportunity to revive dreams of tax cuts, regulatory rollbacks and rule changes that were mothballed during the Obama administration. But Trump also presents a challenge for the influence business — a White House in which key positions at least initially were as likely to be staffed by Trump loyalists as by old Washington hands with ties to K Street. Ballard has helped to bridge the gap. He’s a Trump-friendly out-of-towner who can connect with the establishment — he is a close ally of Senator Marco Rubio as well as Charlie Crist, the former centrist Republican governor of Florida who is now a Democratic congressman — and make corporate clients comfortable.
Ballard isn’t the only person in Trump’s orbit who decided to try his or her luck in Washington. Campaign veterans from Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s fired-but-never-forgotten campaign manager, on down have flocked to “the swamp” to lobby the administration — or, in Lewandowski’s case, to offer clients a glimpse into Trump’s thought process without actually registering to lobby. But Ballard appears to have landed the biggest fish. He has signed more than 60 clients since setting up shop in Washington after Trump’s inauguration, including blue-chip companies like American Airlines and Sprint. Those clients paid Ballard nearly $10 million last year for help navigating Trump’s first year in office. (Those numbers don’t include the $3.1 million the firm says it brought in representing foreign clients such as Turkey and the Dominican Republic.)
“He’s the only guy that’s done it,” said Robert Stryk, a lobbyist who runs in the same circles as some former Trump campaign hands and moved to Washington himself after the election. (Stryk’s company, SPG, bills itself as a “private diplomacy” firm rather than a traditional lobbying shop.)
Lobbyists at some of Washington’s established firms are quick to praise Ballard, but they also wonder how long his success can last, given the unique nature of the Trump administration. There are risks to building a shop around one principal’s relationships. The now-defunct firms of Ed Gillespie, who was one of Washington’s most powerful lobbyists during George W. Bush’s administration, or Tony Podesta, who thrived under Barack Obama, might be regarded as cautionary tales. “Brian is building a strong Washington office, but the question is what happens when the circus leaves town,” one Republican lobbyist with close ties of his own to the administration told me.
Unlike Lewandowski, who hasn’t been able to resist boasting about his relationship with Trump as he hustles for clients, Ballard has taken pains to avoid the appearance of cashing in on his relationship with the president. He refuses to speak on the record about how often he talks with the president. But his clients say he’s been able to figure out how the Trump administration works in a way no one else has. For now, at least, it’s working for him.
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Trump called Ballard in the days before he announced he would run for president. The two men have known each other for nearly 30 years. Ballard met Trump after picking up a copy of “The Art of the Deal” in the 1980s. He read the book and was so struck by it that he wrote Trump a letter telling him how much he’d enjoyed it. “I loved the idea of 15-minute meetings,” Ballard told me years later. “That’s one of the things in the book that still stands out to me.” He later told the Orlando Sentinel that he didn’t believe in meetings that lasted any longer. Trump wrote “this beautiful letter” back, Ballard says, and they kept in touch.
Ballard ended up working on and off as Trump’s Florida lobbyist, helping the Trump Organization negotiate state and local government when issues came up with Trump’s Doral golf club. A decade before Trump announced his presidential run, Ballard helped orchestrate a fundraiser in 2005 at Trump Tower in Manhattan for Crist’s campaign for Florida governor. “A friend told me about his record,” Trump told the St. Petersburg Times at the time, referring to Crist. “I checked him out. I met him, I liked him, and I said I could help.”
Ballard, like most of Florida’s Republican establishment, backed Jeb Bush in the primary, but when Trump called he offered to do what he could for his client. In September, as it became clear that Trump’s lead in the polls wasn’t going away, Ballard dispatched Wiles to New York to meet with Trump. Wiles was named the Trump campaign’s Florida co-chairwoman a few weeks later.
It took months for Ballard himself to come around to Trump. He jumped ship first to Rubio’s campaign and signed on with Trump only once it was clear he would be the Republican nominee. But once he was in, Ballard proved a valuable asset. Florida is home to lots of of wealthy Republican donors, and Ballard knew most of them after raising money for John McCain and Mitt Romney’s presidential campaigns. Trump named Ballard his Florida finance chairman, and Ballard raised millions for his campaign. He spoke with Trump often and traveled on the campaign plane with him. The effort also put him in close touch with Reince Priebus, the Republican National Committee chairman who would be tapped as White House chief of staff, and Steven Mnuchin, the campaign’s finance chairman, who’s now treasury secretary. Trump spent more time in Florida in the general election than in any other state. And “whenever we did an event in Florida I was there,” Ballard said.
Ballard watched the election returns come in with Lukis at an apartment he keeps in Manhattan. They didn’t know whether Trump would win — although Wiles later said she was confident he would pull it off — but they hoped he’d at least carry Florida. When it became clear Trump would become president, they high-fived and walked over to the victory party. The calls from clients started the next day. “To say they were freaking out is absolutely maybe even an understatement,” Wiles said.
Some Trump campaign hands almost immediately began trying to figure out whether they would be working in the new administration or lobbying it. Ballard, who was raising money for the inaugural committee, moved more slowly, waiting to open his Washington office until after the inauguration. (His firm began representing a half dozen federal clients before Trump took office, according to disclosure filings, but Ballard says he didn’t do any lobbying until later). Within three months of the inauguration, though, Ballard had signed two dozen clients, not just Amazon and American Airlines, but also Prudential and the GEO Group, a private prison operator.
Read More:https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/04/02/most-powerful-lobbyist-in-trump-washington-217759?cid=apn