{"id":8134,"date":"2006-08-07T09:40:55","date_gmt":"2006-08-07T13:40:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/8134.html"},"modified":"2006-08-07T09:40:55","modified_gmt":"2006-08-07T13:40:55","slug":"transactional-lobbying","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/transactional-lobbying\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Transactional lobbying’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Brent Wilkes, “Co-conspirator #1” in the Duke Cunningham scandal, has been pretty quiet lately, but he opened up to the New York Times, which ran a must-read story<\/a> yesterday.<\/p>\n

Mr. Wilkes had set up separate meetings with the lawmakers hoping to win a government contract, and he planned to punctuate each pitch with a campaign donation. But his hometown congressman, Representative Bill Lowery of San Diego, a Republican, told him that presenting the checks during the sessions was not how things were done, Mr. Wilkes recalled.<\/p>\n

Instead, Mr. Wilkes said, Mr. Lowery taught him the right way to do it: hand over the envelope in the hallway outside the suite, at least a few feet away.<\/p>\n

That was the beginning of a career built on what Mr. Wilkes calls “transactional lobbying,” which made him a rich man but also landed him in the middle of a criminal investigation.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It’s hard not to enjoy the euphemisms of a Republican-dominated Washington. Up until recently, if a lobbyist paid a lawmaker to help win a government contract, it was called “bribery.” In 2006, it’s “transactional lobbying.”<\/p>\n

Wilkes described a twisted system in which the appropriations process has become little more than a shakedown.
\n<\/p>\n

He said that lobbyists close to the committee members unceasingly demanded campaign contributions from entrepreneurs like him. Mr. Wilkes and his associates have given more than $706,000 to federal campaigns since 1997, according to public records, and he said he had brought in more as a fund-raiser. Since 2000, Mr. Wilkes’s principal company has received about $100 million in federal contracts.<\/p>\n

Mr. Wilkes described the system bluntly: “Lowery would always say, ‘It is a two-part deal,’ ” he recalled. ” ‘Jerry will make the request. Jerry will carry the vote. Jerry will have plenty of time for this. If you don’t want to make the contributions, chair the fund-raising event, you will get left behind.’ “<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Dems may have largely given up<\/a> on the “culture of corruption” as a campaign theme, but that doesn’t change the fact that under Republican “leadership,” the appropriations process was a pay-to-play enterprise.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Brent Wilkes, “Co-conspirator #1” in the Duke Cunningham scandal, has been pretty quiet lately, but he opened up to the New York Times, which ran a must-read story yesterday. Mr. Wilkes had set up separate meetings with the lawmakers hoping to win a government contract, and he planned to punctuate each pitch with a campaign […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8134","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8134","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8134"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8134\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8134"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8134"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8134"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}