Trump's Transition Team Is Dirty, and It's Dark
Trump’s Transition Team Is Dirty, and It’s Dark
Trump has packed his transition team with corporate executives and lobbyists, and he doesn’t want you to know what they’re doing.
By George Zornick
December 5, 2016
Robert MacKichan has built a living lobbying on behalf of large special interests that want to make real-estate deals with the federal government. As a partner at Holland & Knight and leader of the firm’s General Services Administration Leasing and Federal Real Estate Team, he works on behalf of clients who want to lease building to the federal government, or who are having a dispute over their federal contract, all of which is run through the GSA. It makes sense, since MacKichan used to be the GSA’s general counsel.
MacKichan represents the quintessential insider who used his public service to later benefit large special interests. And now he has swung back through the revolving door again, serving as a member of Donald Trump’s transition landing team at—where else?—the GSA.
He isn’t alone. Seventy percent of Trump’s landing team members have some corporate affiliation, according to an analysis by Public Citizen. There is a former lobbyist for Pepsi and agro-giant DuPont on the landing team for the Department of Agriculture. The Department of Justice (DoJ) landing teams are stocked with white-collar lawyers who work primarily to defend corporate clients from DoJ actions. A former vice president for defense contractor Boeing is on the Department of Defense landing team, along with several other people who work in defense contracting or other private military companies.
Trump has an ostensible ban on lobbyists on his transition team, but it applies only to people who have had relevant lobbying activities in the past 12 months. Even that thin prohibition—which doesn’t stop company executives or lobbyists masked as “consultants” from joining—is being brazenly flouted. Several lobbyists are simply de-registering as lobbyists in order to join the transition team.
Take Shawn Krause, who as recently as September was registered as a lobbyist for Quicken Loans, which underwrites a majority of the mortgages backed by the Federal Housing Administration, which is part of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. In any reading of Trump’s own rules, she shouldn’t be allowed to work on the transition team in that area.
Instead, she’s leading the transition at HUD. Her only motion towards lowering this conflict was de-registering as a lobbyist, which still doesn’t satisfy the prohibition against working on a transition area you have lobbied over in the last 12 months.
Trump is flouting not only his self-imposed rules against conflicts of interests but also one of the cruxes of his presidential campaign. “There is a fundamental conflict in the transition team between the promises that the president-elect made on the campaign trail, and the excitement that he generated among ordinary voters who felt very strongly that Washington was no longer answering to them, but was instead answering to big special interests,” Senator Sheldon Whitehouse told reporters Friday. “This array of big special-interest operatives and lobbyists who are now engaged in this transition in these exact places where their conflict of interest is most acute.”
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https://www.thenation.com/article/trumps-transition-team-is-dirty-and-its-dark/
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He promised to drain it. But that was another of his lies. Get used to lies; the Republicans are in command.
