Surprise: Trump’s Chief Of Staff Is A D.C. Swamp Creature

For the past decade, Donald Trump has positioned himself as a political outsider taking on “the establishment” or “the swamp” ― and for all that time, his actions have shown the opposite. His allies and picks for key government posts are generally aligned with corporate America, doing the bidding of the lobbyist class.
Case in point: Trump’s co-campaign manager and incoming chief of staff, Susie Wiles, is a seasoned lobbyist with nearly a decade of experience advocating for a formidable collection of corporate interests.
Public Citizen, a watchdog group, released a report Friday covering the past seven years of Wiles’ lobbying career, mostly at Ballard Partners, as well as at Mercury Public Affairs. The records begin a few months into Trump’s first term in 2017 and end this year. In 2018, Politico called Ballard “the most powerful lobbyist in Trump’s Washington,” in a profile that noted founder Brian Ballard’s status as a major Trump fundraiser ― and Wiles’ status as the Trump campaign’s Florida co-chair. When Trump won in 2016, “to say [clients] were freaking out is absolutely maybe even an understatement,” Wiles told Politico.
The Public Citizen report found that Wiles was registered to lobby the White House, Congress and several federal agencies on behalf of 42 individual clients, including two Canadian mining giants, a tobacco company and a waste management firm that for years fought to keep from having to remove radioactive waste from a landfill it owns outside St. Louis, Missouri.
One of Wiles’ more interesting former clients is Pebble Limited Partnership, the company behind the stalled and massively controversial Pebble Mine project in southwest Alaska. The Obama administration blocked the planned open-pit copper and gold mine, only for the Trump administration to revive it early in Trump’s first term. Wiles and others at Ballard lobbied both the White House and the Environmental Protection Agency on behalf of Pebble Limited Partnership throughout 2019, earning $180,000, according to Public Citizen’s report.
In the end, the Trump administration denied the company a key permit needed to move forward with the project, shortly after Trump’s son Donald Jr. spoke out against its development in the remote Alaskan wilderness. Pebble Limited Partnership is owned by the Canadian mining firm Northern Dynasty Minerals.
That isn’t the only lobbying gig that seemingly put Wiles at odds with the first Trump administration. In 2018, Trump’s EPA, then led by acting Administrator Andrew Wheeler, approved a final plan to remove radioactive waste from West Lake Landfill, a toxic Superfund site in a suburb of St. Louis. Thousands of tons of nuclear waste from the Manhattan Project were dumped at the site in the 1970s.
Months after the Trump EPA announced its cleanup plan, Wiles and her colleagues at Ballard went to work lobbying for the owner of the landfill, Republic Services ― which, as Reuters reported, had long fought to cap the radioactive waste in place instead of pursuing a more expensive removal cleanup.
Lobbying reports show that Republic Services paid Ballard $140,000 in 2019 to lobby Congress and federal agencies, including specifically on the issue of “disposition of a Superfund designated landfill.”
In 2019, Wiles and others at Ballard registered as lobbyists for the Canadian mining firm Waterton Global Resource Management, Inc., lobbying both the White House and federal agencies concerning “mining minerals on federal lands.” Around the same time, the firm was pursuing environmental approvals for what it described as “one of a few conventional open-pit heap leach gold mines in the U.S. that is fully permitted and shovel-ready.” Lobbying reports show Waterton paid Ballard $200,000 in 2019 for its services.
Wiles’ lobbying disclosures, according to Public Citizen, show a client list “both extensive and littered with controversial clients who stand to benefit from having their former lobbyist running the White House. This report’s findings raise serious questions about potential conflicts of interest that need to be answered before Inauguration Day.”
The lobbying reports do not disclose the extent or specifics of Wiles’ work for each client.
Unsurprisingly, Trump’s appointment of Wiles to the chief-of-staff post ― the “gatekeeper” for the president’s time, attention and priorities ― clashes with his campaign-trail rhetoric against lobbyists.
“You have to stop listening to lobbyists,” Trump told podcaster Theo Von during the campaign, adding that as president, he “was not a big person for lobbyists.”
“You could say that if you’re an elected official or if you work in government, you can never be a lobbyist,” Trump said.
Trump made similar noises during the 2016 presidential campaign, calling for lobbying restrictions for former administration officials. And as president, he did institute some restrictions, copying past Democratic presidents. But ― following in Bill Clinton’s footsteps ― he also revoked those restrictions on the literal last day of his presidency in 2021, freeing up alumni of the Trump White House to cash in. Joe Biden instituted his own lobbying restrictions the same day.
Even now, Trump is breaking with historical norms meant to fight corruption.
Unlike past presidents, for example, the Trump transition team has failed to provide a legally required ethics pledge, which was due on Oct. 1, and which constitutes a written commitment to avoid conflicts of interest once in office. The delay could affect the transition process, hampering the Trump team’s access to federal agencies.
“Trump has a number of holdings that raise significant conflict of interest concerns: including his new cryptocurrency business, majority stake in the social media network Truth Social, real estate properties, books, and licensing deals,” the Campaign Legal Center wrote Friday of the delayed ethics pledge. “If the president-elect were to sign an agreement vowing to avoid conflicts of interest, it would suggest that he should divest from many — if not all — of these holdings. In addition, it is possible that the president-elect does not want the public to know who has been contributing to his transition or place a limit on individual contributions.”
Noting that the president-elect cannot receive more than $5,000 per individual transition donor, and that these donations must be disclosed to the public, the Campaign Legal Center argued: “It is possible that Trump — who has no shortage of wealthy allies with special interests — would rather accept unlimited contributions, which would create significant conflicts of interest, than receive the necessary transition services from the federal government to keep the country safe.”
The Trump transition team did not respond to HuffPost’s requests for comment.
When it comes to his current transition team’s efforts on energy and the environment, Trump has turned to two ex-Cabinet officials who were the face of Trump-era swampiness. As The New York Times reported last week, David Bernhardt, who led Trump’s Interior Department, and Wheeler, the former EPA administrator, are spearheading that work. A longtime former lobbyist for oil, gas, mining and agriculture interests, Bernhardt had so many potential conflicts of interest while at the helm of Interior that he had to carry around a card listing his former clients. Critics dubbed Bernhardt the “ultimate D.C. swamp creature.” Wheeler, meanwhile, is a former coal lobbyist.
Trump has long been representative of the “revolving door” between corporate America and political power. A HuffPost review in late 2019 found that at least 11 officials in his Interior Department went on to land jobs at fossil fuel companies, lobbying firms or other private companies.
But Trump isn’t alone in embracing lobbyists for key positions.
For example, Steve Ricchetti ― currently a counselor to Biden and, prior to that, a close aide to Biden for a decade and a staffer in the Clinton White House ― is a former lobbyist with an ample Rolodex.
And his brother’s lobbying firm, Ricchetti Inc., saw a spike in business when Biden was elected ― including from large clients like Amazon.
When Trump won a second term last week, the Times reported on the celebrations among lobbyists with access to his circles.
“In an ironic twist for a politician who first ran on a pledge to ‘drain the swamp’ of Washington special interests, Mr. Trump’s election is expected to be very lucrative for lobbyists who have struck that balance” of demonstrating their value to Trump without alienating cautious clients, the paper wrote.
The paper named one lobbyist among those who stood to benefit the most: Brian Ballard, Wiles’ old boss.