Industry lawyers, lobbyists granted ethics waivers to work for Trump

Documents show Obama administration stopped sharing data

WASHINGTON — Lance Leggitt helped collect $400,000 in fees last year while working as a lobbyist to try to influence Medicare policy at the Department of Health and Human Services — an agency where he now serves as chief of staff.

Under an executive order signed by President Donald Trump in January, lobbyists were banned from that kind of government work.

But Leggitt is among a half a dozen officials across the federal government who have been granted special waivers to disregard ethics rules, according to a new set of documents released Wednesday.

“Mr. Leggitt brings a unique blend of substantive health care expertise to HHS,” his waiver said.

The disclosures offer additional evidence that lobbyists and industry executives who can now shape policies benefiting their former clients and companies have been allowed to work in the Trump administration, even with the president’s vow to “drain the swamp” of influence peddling.

The documents were made public in response to a demand by the Office of Government Ethics for details on how the Trump administration is enforcing the ethics policies.

One unexpected outcome was proof that the Obama administration, despite a much touted promise to make all of its ethics waivers public, stopped providing them to the Office of Government Ethics. The result is that three Obamaera waivers — two from the Justice Department and one from State Department — that should already be public are being released for the first time.

Karen Florini left a job at the Environmental Defense Fund to take a post as a special envoy for climate change at the State Department, and she was given special permission to interact with the environmental group, despite an ethics ban that would have otherwise prevented her from communicating with the group.

Walter Shaub, the head of the Office of Government Ethics, said the discovery of these Obama-era waivers showed that his requests for these documents — which covered a one-year period and not just the Trump administration, was not political.

In total, 17 of the 27 waivers he is making public were granted during the final months of the Obama administration.

“The fact that we discovered that two agencies failed to send us documents highlights the importance of OGE conducting oversight activities like this,” Shaub said.

But the revolving door cases in the Trump administration generally involve individuals who had been retained by forprofit clients, and then took up matters that could benefit these former clients.

Brian Callanan, who works at the Treasury Department as the deputy general counsel, has been given an authorization because he worked recently at a law firm that handled federal housing finance matters after serving as a Senate aide.

Callanan will still be able to handle legal matters related to housing finance, but he has agreed not to communicate with his old law firm.

Callanan has been assigned, while at Treasury, to look for federal financial regulations that could be revised or repealed.

Last week, a similar set of 14 waivers covering White House employees was made public, showing that former energy and financial services lobbyists have been granted permission to handle policy matters overlapping with their recent private-sector work.

“Filling the administration with lobbyists and industry officials isn’t going to drain anything but taxpayers’ patience,” said Scott H. Amey, general counsel at the Project on Government Oversight, which requested copies of any waivers or recusals from 54 federal agencies, echoing the requests submitted by the Office of Government Ethics.

Some of the waivers were granted to overcome seemingly minor conflicts: John Kelly, homeland security secretary, was granted a waiver to continue to handle policy matters related to Australia, where he was once paid by its government for a speech. Heather Nauert, a former Fox News anchor who now serves as State Department spokeswoman, was granted a waiver because she must communicate with Fox as part of her job.

The material posted Wednesday also includes a handful of waivers given at the end of the Obama administration, including one granted to Susan Rice, whose family was an investor in Canadian energy companies, banks and other assets, even while she was Obama’s national security adviser.

This waiver had been issued earlier in the Obama administration, but was revised last year based on changes in the investment portfolio.

It was not released publicly before because under law these types of documents — related to the criminal conflict of interest rules — are made public only in response to a formal document request.

Trump’s ethics executive order adopted language first written by the Obama administration.

The order prohibits new federal government officials who in the previous two years had worked as a lobbyist or an industry lawyer from handling matters they were involved with on behalf of their former clients. Waivers allow them to ignore this rule.

In the Trump administration, there also appear to be cases where former lobbyists have taken government jobs that oversee issues that relate to their former employers but have not been granted waivers, at least based on what has been released so far.