As the Conservative Political Action Conference kicked into gear Thursday morning, its official social media pages began plugging an esoteric policy item: a new agreement limiting an Arab airline’s operations in the United States.
“President Trump has taken an important step to enforce our trade deal with Qatar and level the playing field for American workers and the UAE is next,” declared CPAC’s Facebook page. “Reagan’s Secretary of Transportation Jim Burnley will be here today to explain why this is so important.”
Burnley was scheduled that morning to kick off a panel discussion titled “Do not Pass Go! How Government Is Killing Capitalism,” during which he would hail an emerging agreement between the U.S. and Qatar preventing Qatar Airways from operating flights from U.S. airports to countries other than Qatar.
In the long, venerated history of CPAC, rarely has such a random topic been so prominently featured. But there was a reason that Burnley landed a panel to wax about an obscure airline policy. He is currently a registered lobbyist working on behalf of American Airlines, one of the three air carries that make up the Partnership for Fair and Open Skies, a trade group pushing heavily for the Qatar deal. And the Partnership, it turned out, had ponied up six figures to underwrite CPAC 2018.
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This is the second year in which the Partnership has supported CPAC financially. This year, it’s a “presenting sponsor,” meaning it paid $125,000 to support the event. According to materials provided to sponsors, that money gets the group two logos on the main CPAC stage, two ads in the conference’s glossy program, and two marketing emails and twelve social media posts from official CPAC accounts. It also comes with two tickets to the conference’s ritzy Ronald Reagan Dinner.
Those are the official perks, anyway. Unofficially, sponsorship provides a far more valuable benefit. It gives sponsors access to pre-conference planning meetings, where they can shape the actual programming of the event by recommending topics and guests for CPAC panels.
Billed as informal consultations about the general direction of the event, the meetings are actually efforts by the American Conservative Union—the organization behind CPAC—to reward financial support with influence over the content of the event, one longtime ACU insider told The Daily Beast. “That’s one of the bigger benefits of sponsorship. [ACU chairman Matt] Schlapp has very much made it known that if you sponsor, and the higher you sponsor, the higher the chances your speaker and your panel topic will happen at CPAC.”
That source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said Schlapp and ACU executive director Dan Schneider “have really amped up the level and the benefits to sponsorship in that you have much more aggressive input with respect to speakers and topics.”
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In addition to running CPAC, Schlapp also has lobbying clients who have interests before the annual conservative confab. Schlapp runs Cove Strategies, a firm that has, until this year, represented Delta Airlines, another of the Partnership’s three members (the third is United Airlines). Delta paid Cove Strategies $80,000 for its work.
Disclosure forms show that, after a little over a year lobbying on FAA funding bills and general aviation issues, Schlapp shifted his focus in the fourth quarter of 2017 to Open Skies agreements, the deals governing Qatari and UAE access to U.S. airports. He also shifted the target of his lobbying efforts from Congress to the White House, where he remains a trusted confidant of President Donald Trump.
That raises red flags, according to Brendan Fischer, the director of federal and FEC reform programs at the Campaign Legal Center, an ethics watchdog group. “If the lobbying groups who pay six figures to sponsor CPAC can determine what is discussed at CPAC, then the conference looks an awful lot like a pay-to-play operation,” Fischer said in an email. “It looks even more shady if the head of CPAC is leveraging the credibility of the conference to advance the interests of the clients who are paying him.”
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But tensions linger between the more protectionist strain of Trump’s Republican brand and conservatives who have promoted free trade for decades. The tension bore itself out on Thursday morning, during Burnley’s panel discussion, when CPAC’s billing of the event as a paean to free markets drew the ire of Tim Carney, a Washington Examiner columnist, American Enterprise Institute visiting fellow, and a longtime critic of “crony capitalism.”
“Burnley’s contention, cheered by ACU’s Schneider, is that our government is killing capitalism by allowing foreign companies to compete with Burnley’s client,” Carney wrote in a column on Thursday. “Maybe it represents change, and the triumph of Trumpian protectionism. More likely, it represents the status quo: conservatives, at the hand of revolving-door lobbyists, selling out free enterprise for the sake of corporatism.”
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NEW: Corporate lobbyists are paying big bucks for the ability to shape CPAC's agenda and speaker lineup https://t.co/VxVnYfM56g
— Lachlan Markay (@lachlan) February 23, 2018
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