Trump friends, former staff cash in on COVID-19 crisis

A former deputy assistant secretary for legislation in the Department of Health and Human Services under Trump, Courtney Lawrence, is now a lobbyist for health insurance giant Cigna. The spouse of former White House counsel Don McGahn, Shannon McGahn, worked for Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin in 2017-18. Now she’s the top lobbyist for the National Association of Realtors, where she lobbies her former coworkers at Treasury in addition to Congress and other agencies.Another former Treasury senior staffer, Jordan Stoick, is vice president of government relations at the National Association of Manufacturers. He also lobbies his former coworkers at Treasury. McDonald’s has Geoffrey Burr lobbying for it through the firm Brownstein Hyatt. He worked for Treasury Secretary Elaine Chao, who is married to Mitch McConnell. Who Burr lobbies. One of his colleagues at that lobbying shop is Emily Felder, who used to work for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. She’s been lobbying both the White House and Congress on coronavirus issues.

The disclosure for all these people show them lobbying both the administration and Congress, and some of them lobby their own former agencies. The executive order Trump signed in his first weeks in office—the one about the swamp—ostensibly prohibited former officials from lobbying their old agencies for at least five years after leaving the government job, and supposedly prohibits former political appointees from lobbying for the duration of Trump’s term in office. For some reason, enforcing those executive orders hasn’t been a priority for Trump. Go figure.

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