The BLT: The Blog of Legal Times

Obama Administration to Lobbyists: We Aren't Changing Our Minds

Lobbyists have been petitioning the Obama White House to rescind or loosen a policy that bans lobbyists from executive agencies' advisory boards. The message yesterday from Norm Eisen, special counsel to the president for ethics and government reform and the man seen as the driver behind the administration's restrictions on lobbyists: No dice.

In a post on the White House blog, Eisen wrote that he met with lobbyists and others who chair such advisory groups, and the administration won't change the policy.

Eisen wrote that lobbyists have the right to petition the government, but the public is best served "if we limited their ability to do so from special positions of privileged access within the government." For more, click here.

Eisen also posted a list of meeting attendees, a letter from lobbyists voicing objections to the policy, and his letter in response.

Brownstein Hyatt Adds Former Congressman to Lobbying Practice

Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck has added former Rep. Larry LaRocco (D-Idaho) to its Washington office as a policy director. LaRocco, who started at the firm on Nov. 2, lobbies on financial and natural resources issues.

Before joining Brownstein Hyatt, LaRocco ran his own lobbying shop, LaRocco & Associates Inc. He said in an interview he joined Brownstein to take advantage of the firm’s larger lobbying practice. “With 25 lobbyists and about 240 lawyers in Washington, there is a great deal of institutional knowledge and the culture of the firm is such that it’s no problem to seek out someone who is more familiar with an issue or its legislative history,” LaRocco said.

LaRocco lobbies on behalf of Discover Financial Services, USA Funds, U.S. Geothermal Inc., and Rodney Anderson, a Texas-based mortgage lender. He said those clients will be joining him at his new firm.

While in Congress from 1991 to 1995, LaRocco represented Idaho’s first district and served as deputy majority whip. He sat on the Financial Services and Natural Resources Committees. In 1994, LaRocco lost his attempt for a third term to Republican Helen Chenoweth. In 2006, LaRocco made an unsuccessful bid to become Idaho’s lieutenant governor.

In 2008, LaRocco was the Democratic nominee for former Sen. Larry Craig’s seat after Craig announced that he would not seek reelection following the infamous “wide stance” incident. LaRocco ultimately lost to Lieutenant Governor Jim Risch. “I enjoyed my time in Congress, but that time in my life is over and I’m looking forward to the next part of my career,” he said.

LaRocco founded LaRocco & Associates with his son in 2000 and took the firm’s clients with him when it merged with Fleishman-Hillard Government Relations in 2003. At Fleishman, LaRocco served as vice chairman and president. LaRocco’s son Matthew left Fleishman in 2006 to join Arnold & Porter’s Washington office.

Larry LaRocco reestablished LaRocco & Associates in January and said he has remained busy, but the opportunity to join a larger firm, particularly one with a strong presence in the western states, was one did not want to pass up. When LaRocco signed on to Brownstein, he was the only lobbyist at his firm. “Brownstein is a growing government relations shop, and I love the fact that it has roots out west,” he said.

State Department Official Worked on Behalf of Pakistan Immediately Before Taking Job

Newly filed lobbying disclosure documents show that Robin Raphel, the State Department's nonmilitary aid coordinator for Pakistan, attended meetings to help Pakistan craft lobbying strategy less than a week before her government appointment was publicly announced.

Raphel worked for lobbying firm Cassidy & Associates until July 31; her State Department job was announced Aug. 5. Cassidy has represented Pakistan since May. Cassidy’s latest disclosure filings, submitted to the Justice Department Oct. 30, show Raphel attended more than 40 meetings on Pakistan’s behalf in the two months before she left at places including the State Department, and Capitol Hill, though it doesn't specify who she met with.

The State Department and the White House have not responded to questions about Raphel's appointment, including queries this week about whether the State Department knew she was working on Pakistan's behalf immediately before taking her new job.

The Cassidy report also shows Raphel's termination date as Sept. 1, 2009, which would mean her job at the State Department overlapped with her job at Cassidy by about a month. On Thursday, Cassidy spokesman Tom Alexander said the termination date on the report was incorrect, and Cassidy would file an amended report with the Justice Department showing Raphel's last day was July 31.

Alexander stresses that Raphel “was not engaging in political or advocacy activities on behalf of our client and was instead assisting in a very limited and brief strategy development and information gathering phase.” In other words, she wasn't lobbying - just helping Cassidy craft a lobbying strategy on Pakistan's behalf.

Raphel led work on a $1.2 million-a-year lobbying contract for Pakistan that Cassidy briefly held in 2007, so her new job already appeared to violate a ban on federal appointees participating in matters involving former clients or employers. Read an earlier National Law Journal story about the matter here. The Obama administration has been extremely vocal about its conflict of interest policies, and repeatedly promised to limit the influence lobbyists have in Washington.

In August, a State Department spokesman said Raphel will be a temporary worker who can only work 130 days out of 365, and because of that, was subject to different conflict of interest requirements, though he did not provide specific information about what those requirements were.

Patton Boggs Working to Keep Army in Heidelberg

A Patton Boggs team led by name partner and leading lobbyist Thomas Boggs will lobby to keep a U.S. Army presence in Heidelberg, Germany, according to disclosure documents filed with the Justice Department last week.

In an Aug. 28 letter to the mayor of Heidelberg, Dr. Eckart Würzner, Boggs wrote that as part of an ongoing military assessment known as the Quadrennial Defense Review, the military is reconsidering plans to bring two German-based Army Brigades back to the U.S. Cancelling the relocation would leave 42,000 soldiers in Germany and Europe, Boggs wrote.

Boggs wrote that "We believe we can be of assistance to the City of Heidelberg and the State of Baden-Württemberg in helping to maintain the Army's presence in the City" by lobbying Congress on the military construction budget and congressional authorization for military construction projects.

Boggs wrote that partners Michael Nardotti, a retired major general, and partner John Deschauer would help lobby, and stressed Nardotti's "extensive contacts with Army leadership."

The law firm's fee is $12,500 a month. Patton Boggs did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the contract.

DLA Piper Getting No Love on the Streets

A pickup truck driving around Washington today displayed a large billboard in its bed accusing DLA Piper of lobbying for an Ethiopian dictator.

The American Lawyer reported last year on the firm's 2008 efforts on behalf of Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi and his government to keep Congress from imposing sanctions on the country for human rights violations. In April, the firm released a statement to Above the Law saying that it was no longer representing Zenawi’s government in those matters, but is still helping them with pro bono work relating to a school in Addis Ababa.

Apparently, there are still hard feelings--though we're not sure who has them.

(Photo by Daniel Newhauser)

Former PMA Lobbyists Have Started New Firms

The implosion of lobbying firm PMA Group continues to make news.

Today, The Washington Post reported that leaked documents from congressional ethics investigators show that seven members of a House subcommittee that controls defense spending are under investigation because of their ties to now-defunct PMA.

Of course, just because the lobbying firm is no more doesn't mean that PMA's former lobbyists or their clients have gone away. Back in March, Legal Times reported that several former PMA Group lobbyists had started new firms.

One such new firm, Flagship Government Relations, begun by former PMA Vice Chairwoman Kaylene Green, reported receiving $585,000 in lobbying fees during the third quarter, lobbying disclosure reports show. Another new firm mentioned in that story, Federal Business Group, Inc., registered its first client at the end of March, and since then, has filed a total of 18 new client registrations, lobbying disclosure reports show.

Tax Haven Legislation Likely Won't Include Blacklist

Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) and Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) have filed new legislation to crack down on offshore tax evasion, and unlike an earlier bill, their version won't include a so-called blacklist of countries that are considered tax havens.

Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-TX) had filed the Stop Tax Haven Abuse Act, which would have created a list of foreign tax havens and given the U.S. Treasury Department new tools to impose sanctions on them. That bill set off a lobbying push by countries that didn't want to be included in the legislation. The National Law Journal wrote about the issue in June.

The countries on the list include Malta, which has hired Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal to help gain ratification of a tax treaty that calls for more transparency and reporting of financial transactions. Also on the list: British islands Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man, which hired partner Linda Carlisle of White & Case, and the Cayman Islands. Cayman Finance, formerly the Cayman Islands Financial Services Association, has retained Quinn Gillespie & Associates. The countries have spent more than $800,000 collectively on lobbying.

The countries have been blunt about their preference for an earlier draft of the Baucus legislation. "Malta has no concerns about the Rangel-Baucus proposal," Ron Platt, a senior managing director at Sonnenschein who lobbies for Malta on the tax treaty, wrote in an e-mail Tuesday. In a statement released through Quinn Gillespie Wednesday, Cayman Finance Chairman Anthony Travers said he "commends Chairman Baucus and Chairman Rangel for developing legislation that concretely addresses the important issues of US tax avoidance while rejecting damaging 'list' approaches included in competing legislation."

Cayman Finance has paid Quinn Gillespie $290,000 since hiring them in April, lobbying disclosure reports show.

That proposal seems to be the one with momentum and support from the administration. "This legislation fits well into the Administration’s dual-track strategy of improving our domestic tax laws while increasing global cooperation on tax information exchange to help narrow the tax gap and create the fairer tax system we need," Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said in a statement. "We have had great success recently in working with countries around the world to increase tax information exchange as part of the global effort to end offshore tax evasion." Geithner, who had previously praised the Levin-Doggett bill, went on to acknowledge their work "in support of a strong international tax enforcement agenda.” President Obama, too, issued a statement saying the Rangel-Baucus bill would meet his goal of cracking down on offshore tax evasion.

As for Levin, he issued a statement describing the Rangel-Baucus bill as "strong," but added that "When their committees move to markup, I hope to work with my colleagues to strengthen the Baucus-Rangel bill by adding some of the measures from the offshore tax bill I’ve introduced."

Obama's Ethics Counsel Faces Tough Crowd at ABA Conference

President Barack Obama's special counsel for ethics and government regulation Thursday afternoon gave an American Bar Association crowd an insider's perspective into the administration's thought path as it first embarked on, and now continues to pursue, lobbying reform in Washington. But his remarks did not go unchallenged. 

Many thought Obama's promise of reform was just empty campaign rhetoric, said Norman Eisen, but the president in fact has “a deeply held personal view that political systems are susceptible to special interests” and he “speaks of it often.” “The president will hold every government servant to the highest standard of fidelity to the public interest,” Eisen told a crowd of about 40 at the ABA Administrative Law Conference luncheon. “We think it is no accident that we have had one of the most scandal-free starts of any administration in modern history.”

Though Eisen refrained from outlining future steps, he said Obama’s initial lobbying reform, particularly an executive order scribed by Eisen and signed on Jan. 21 by the president, served to “send a message to everybody that we were serious about the change.” The order restricted registered lobbyists from government employment in areas they lobbied, among other things. Eisen said there have been only three waivers in some 2000 posts filled.

Following that order, the administration mandated disclosure of lobbying or competitive grants for stimulus dollars to keep the process transparent and opened up the White House visitor logs to the public. “We did full transparency,” he said. “We’ll let the public decide who among them is a lobbyist or not.”

The current and unfinished leg of Obama’s regulatory pursuit—purging lobbyists from administration boards and commissions—is being undertaken to bring fresh voices into policy-making discussions, Eisen continued, saying: “We do not feel there is a monopoly on wisdom and talent within the beltway.”

Still, critics like Thomas Susman, the ABA’s government affairs office director, who joked when introducing Eisen to the crowd that he was responsible for “vilifying and emasculating” lobbyists, questioned Eisen as to why, if indeed these regulations are intended for the public interest, no distinction is made between corporate lobbyists and those who lobby for public interest causes. Eisen responded by saying that the administration did consider parsing types of lobbying, but in the end, “felt that as a matter of principle, we needed to be consistent in that regulation to have credibility.”

Sharing the stage Eisen and Susman, William Luneburg Jr., chair of the the ABA’s administrative law and regulatory practice section, which sponsored the event, told Eisen that the definition of, “lobbyist,” should be more consistent because some who don’t register as lobbyists still fit the role and slip through the cracks into government positions. Eisen responded, saying: “We thought it would be too burdensome to establish another regulatory regime” and “we felt that as a matter of workability, that was just too tough.”

An audience member also harangued Eisen for not consulting with lobbyists before undertaking reform. Eisen said that in fact the administration did, though only with those whose contribution would have had a valuable impact.

Sughrue Mion Partner to Head IP Law Group

Alan Kasper, a senior partner and patent lawyer at Washington-based Sughrue Mion, has been named president of the American Intellectual Property Law Association, the firm announced Monday.

Kasper has spent more than 30 years as a member of the Arlington, VA- headquartered association, which was formed to improve intellectual property laws and has more than 17,000 members. Since 1968, he has practiced patent law, working as an examiner at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and chief patent counsel for Communications Satellite Corporation before joining Sughrue two decades ago.

Kasper will serve a one-year term, then another year as past president. Much of that time will be spent coordinating dozens of committees that deal with wide-ranging topics like international relations, FDA law and domestic legislation. The group also files several amicus briefs yearly at the Supreme Court and federal circuit courts. Though he’s retaining his firm partnership, he said the job will take up at least half, if not three-quarters, of his working time. “It’s obviously an important position and the firm has made accommodations for me,” he said. “Fortunately for technology, I can work remotely.”

Kasper has worked abroad extensively with Sughrue, once heading the Tokyo office, and as president, he said he hopes to expand the association’s international presence.

He said he also wants to work with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to streamline patent laws and make them more user-friendly plus help pass a patent reform bill that ends Congressional diversion of public funds from the patent office. “That of course leaves the patent office with less money,” he said. “A lot of the problems we face today are because of that underfunding.” He said he’s hoping to see a bill scheduled for floor time this year.

Legal Times Honors Top D.C. Lawyers

Washington’s top legal brass assembled at the Ritz Carlton last night for the second annual Legal Times Awards Gala.

Four categories of awards were handed out to lawyers who practice in Washington:

Champions, lawyers who have upheld the profession's core values of public duty and client service, building pro bono practices, taking on community causes, holding public service positions and fighting to expand liberties and protect civil rights.

Visionaries, or attorneys who, in tough times, found ways to build up their law firms, pushed for wise solutions in complex legal clashes and insisted on democratic and constitutional answers in government disputes.

Pioneers, lawyers who passed away during the last year, but whose contributions to the Washington legal community through public service and work for private law firms will stand the test of time.

Rising Stars, 40 lawyers under the age of 40 who have created distinguished practices, advanced legal scholarship and significantly contributed to the bar and the Washington community through public service. 

For a full list of winners see the National Law Journal’s stories about Rising Stars and Champions, Visionaries and Pioneers.

What follows are some photos from last night’s event. All photos were taken by Photo Editor Diego M. Radzinschi.

Jose Cunningham (left) and Eldon "Took" Crowell of Crowell & Moring

Judge Emmet Sullivan of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, who was named a Champion, and his wife Nan

U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland Judge Andre Davis (left) and Ahmed Davis of Fish & Richardson, who was named a Rising Star

Timothy Hester of Covington & Burling, who was named a Visionary

(L-R) Patton Boggs partners Edward Newberry and Kevin O'Neill, a Rising Star; his wife Patty O'Neill of the College of William and Mary; and Keri Li and Jessica Pung, both of Patton Boggs

Champion Ana Reyes (left) of Williams & Connolly, with Lillian Cheng 

Rising Star Maame Ewusi-Mensah (left) of the U.S. Department of Justice with Adwoa Frimpong

Heather Podesta, a Rising Star, of Heather Podesta + Partners

Guests applaud award recipients

Rising Star Catherine Stetson of Hogan & Hartson chats with Visionary Irvin Nathan of the U.S. House of Representatives

(L-R) Visionary Irvin Nathan of the U.S. House of Representatives, Rising Star Mark Freeman of the U.S. Department of Justice, John Whealon of Georgetown University Law Center, and Visionary John Duffy of George Washington University Law School 

Richard Beckler (center) visits with Howrey managing partner and Visionary Robert Ruyak (right) and his son Rob

 Visionary Christopher Curran of White & Case (left)

Rising Star Neal Katyal (left) of the U.S. Department of Justice and Visionary David Frederick of Kellogg, Huber, Hansen, Todd, Evans & Figel

National Law Journal publisher Stephen Lincoln (center) presents a Visionary award to D.C.Councilmembers Phil Mendelson (left) and David Catania

Stephen Lincoln, publisher of the National Law Journal

Guests enjoy dessert