Donald Trump may nominate for Treasury Secretary a Goldman Sachs banker whose biggest patron was George Soros. Alternatively, he could opt for the top bank lobbyist in D.C.
Trump’s pledge to “drain the swamp” appears headed for the same fate as President Obama’s promise eight years ago to end the reign of the special interests and “end the game-playing” in D.C.
In all corners of his transition team and his planned executive branch, President-elect Trump is placing lobbyists and Wall Street insiders. He’s not draining the swamp — he’s hiring the swamp creatures.
Steve Mnuchin was a Goldman Sachs banker who started his own investment firm seeded with money from George Soros. He then made huge profits by buying a failed bank off the government with help from a special tweak by regulators.
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Pawlenty quit Mitt Romney’s campaign six weeks out from the 2012 election to take over the Financial Services Roundtable, a K Street lobbying operation whose members include Bank of America, Citigroup, JP Morgan, Wells Fargo, and General Electric.
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Rudy Giuliani is the frontrunner to be Secretary of State, media reports say. Apparently, if there’s anything this past election taught us, it’s that the voters want a baby-boomer liberal New Yorker tied up with lobbyists, shady foreign actors, and bankers to push an aggressive globalist foreign policy from Foggy Bottom.
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Pete Hoekstra, the former congressman from Western Michigan, is a contender for a senior intelligence or Homeland Security job, according to various news reports. Hoekstra operates a lobbying and consulting firm, Hoekstra Global Strategies. Lobbying filings indicate Hoekstra lobbies Congress on tax credits for an energy company and federal contracts for a helicopter company.
Jeffrey Holmstead is a lobbyist at Bracewell LLP (they dropped Giuliani’s name at the beginning of the year) is on the short list for the Environmental Protection Agency, according to the Times. Holmstead has been a lobbyist for nearly a decade. Liberals blast him for representing “polluters,” but one of his clients, Duke Energy, was lobbying for mandatory climate caps late last decade while Holmstead represented them.
Corey Lewandowski and Newt Gingrich were in the early running for administration jobs, though early press reports suggest internal opposition. Lewandowski was an earmark lobbyist during the early days of the Tea Party. Gingrich was an unregistered lobbyist for government-backed mortgage-bubble-inflator Freddie Mac, for drug companies seeking Medicare subsidies, and for the ethanol industry.
Trump defends this K Street bonanza by saying it was unavoidable: “The whole place is one big lobbyist,” he explains. That excuse may be an accidental admission: His promises to reform Washington, to storm the castle, were promises he couldn’t keep.
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Drain the swamp? Trump is surrounding himself with swamp creatures. https://t.co/GouGpFukDs
— David Freddoso (@freddoso) November 16, 2016
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