International Business Times: As Florida Governor, Jeb Bush Provided Special Access to Lobbyists

[seafan]

Last edited Wed Jun 24, 2015, 04:01 PM - Edit history (1)

But, but.... that's not what Jeb said in his devious plans, err, "announcement" speech on June 15.


International Business Times has a crucial piece on the deep ties between Jeb Bush and DC lobbyists, who played a crucial role in the years he was governor of Florida.

What is particularly galling is his sanctimonious presidential announcement speech in which he painted a deceptive portrait of himself as an anti-lobbyist crusader. We the people detest liars who want to shoehorn themselves into the presidency.

Floridians watched him do these things in our state. Now, we must inform the rest of the country about it.

When Jeb Bush formally announced his campaign for the White House last week, his speech included a prominent denunciation of lobbyists and the fashion in which they enable well-connected insiders to pull the levers of power at the expense of the public. He vowed to avoid “the culture that has made lobbying the premier growth industry in the nation’s capital,” a mode he claimed to have fought relentlessly in Florida. “I was a governor who refused to accept that as the normal or right way of conducting the people’s business,” he said.

But those words contrast with Bush’s long-standing relationship with the Southern Strategy Group, whose lobbyists enjoyed extraordinary access to his gubernatorial administration, an International Business Times investigation has found.

According to IBTimes’ review of email correspondence between Jeb Bush, his top aides and Southern Strategy Group lobbyists, the firm frequently engineered meetings with the governor for its clients. A lobbyist at the firm helped write two of his major speeches. In some instances, Bush sought the direct input of Southern Strategy lobbyists as he crafted his legislative agenda, and he gave them private glimpses of public policy as they represented the corporate interests that had a financial stake in his decisions.

Flashback to 2002:

Jeb Bush had just completed his successful campaign for re-election and now confronted a second term as governor of Florida. Seeking to shape his immediate agenda, he solicited advice from one of his most trusted advisors: David Rancourt, his former deputy chief of staff, who had since become a corporate lobbyist at one of the most powerful firms in the state, the Southern Strategy Group.

“If you were governor, what would you be focusing on for the next two or three years,” Bush wrote Rancourt in an email dated Aug. 13, 2003. “What initiatives do you think we should pursue? How do you think we should do it?”

Two days after sending that note, Bush effectively delivered on one of Southern Strategy Group’s key aims: He signed legislation limiting the dollar value of damages that hospitals and insurance companies could be forced to pay to resolve instances of medical malpractice. The Florida Supreme Court would eventually overturn the bill, arguing that it effectively punished victims of mistreatment in hospitals. But at least for the moment, the governor’s signature handed a victory to Rancourt’s firm, which represented a major association of hospitals. It added to the cachet of the Southern Strategy Group, whose leadership was drawn heavily from the ranks of former Bush staff members and trusted associates.

.....

Many of the same people who were in his administration, then cycled into his vast lobbying machine, are in his campaign team today.

Sally Bradshaw, who is running Jeb's campaign is one of the most important examples, and she is detailed in this IBT piece.

I am sure some DUers remember her infamous appearance on Chris Matthews' Hardball on December 7, 2011. (Edited to add transcript of that show.)


IBTimes:

As Bush presses his run for the White House, he is being closely advised by Sally Bradshaw, his former chief of staff when he was Florida governor. Sally Bradshaw is the wife of Paul Bradshaw, who founded the Southern Strategy Group. One of the firm’s lobbyists is reportedly raising money for Bush’s 2016 run.

Paul Bradshaw previously served in the Florida government as a budget and policy aide, working alongside Jeb Bush in the administration of Republican Gov. Bob Martinez. He launched Southern Strategy Group with Rancourt in 1999, just a year after his wife helped engineer Bush’s elevation to the governor’s mansion in Tallahassee. The new firm quickly brought on former Florida House Speaker John Thrasher as a vice president.

Over the course of Bush's eight years as Florida governor, the Southern Strategy Group made $1,500 worth of donations to his campaigns. The firm and its top employees also sent more than $76,000 to the Florida Republican Party, according to data compiled by the National Institute on Money in State Politics. At the same time, the three principal government officials-turned-lobbyists who ran the company -- Rancourt, Bradshaw and Thrasher -- all became wealthy, as blue-chip corporations hired them to represent their interests in dealings with the Florida government.

Mother Jones has many more names in 'Jeb Bush Slams Washington's Pampered Elites...But Enlists Them for His Campaign'

Here are some of the special-interest influence peddlers and Washington operators whom Bush has enlisted for his campaign:

Vin Weber: The six-term Minnesota congressman turned consultant and lobbyist has been a Jeb Bush supporter for months but a prominent DC power player for years. Weber is a partner at Mercury, a lobbying firm, and his clients have included the government of Qatar, Hyundai, and eBay. He was once called "one of the most influential Republican lobbyists" by Washingtonian magazine. He came under scrutiny in 2013 when he was a registered lobbyist for the European Centre for a Modern Ukraine, which was formed by a Ukrainian politician accused of trying to roll back some democratic gains in the country at the time.

Lincoln Diaz-Balart: A former congressman from Florida, Diaz-Balart has his own lobbying group, Western Hemisphere Strategies, which has lobbied Congress on behalf of textile companies in Guatemala and El Salvador. He has also lobbied on behalf of MM Law, LLC, a firm that represents victims of international terrorism, according to Senate lobbying records.

James Baker: Baker epitomizes the Washington establishment. He was the White House chief of staff and treasury secretary for President Ronald Reagan and secretary of state for President George H.W. Bush. Baker was also a senior counselor and equity partner at the Carlyle Group, a global multibillion dollar investment group that relies on the political connection of its principals, and he is currently a senior partner at Baker Botts, a Houston law firm that has represented some of the biggest companies around, including OAO Gazprom, the Russian natural gas behemoth, and Halliburton.

Michael Hayden and Porter Goss: Both Hayden and Goss are former CIA directors. Hayden was also director of the National Security Agency from 1999 to 2005. He is now a principal at the Chertoff Group, a security consulting firm created by Michael Chertoff, a former secretary of homeland security. Goss, who served in the House of Representatives for 15 years, was director of the CIA from 2004 to 2006 and is now a senior adviser with Dickstein Shapiro, a major legal and lobbying firm in Washington. The Intercept reported that he is a registered lobbyist for the government of Turkey.

Michael Chertoff: After his time in government, Chertoff cashed in, working for two separate lobbying firms (Latham & Watkins and Covington & Burling) and three private companies (KeyPoint Government Solutions, BAE Systems, and TASC, Inc.) before starting his own consulting group, which has reportedly tried to win contracts for manufacturers of body scanners.

Paul Wolfowitz: The deputy defense secretary under President George W. Bush, Wolfowitz, a neocon Washington fixture, was an integral part of the invasion of Iraq. He went on to have a tumultuous run as president of the World Bank. (Other Iraq War alumni who are now assisting the Jeb Bush campaign include Stephen Hadley and Meghan O'Sullivan.)

Tom Ridge: The former governor of Pennsylvania, secretary of homeland security, and six-term congressman once told Stephen Colbert that he wasn't a lobbyist. But his post-government record includes an awful lot of consulting for major companies and the US Chamber of Commerce. Ridge Global, his firm, says it offers "strategic consulting services." One client was reportedly the government of Albania, which was trying to join NATO in 2008.

Michael Mukasey: Mukasey was US attorney general for the second President Bush and went on to become a partner at Debevoise & Plimpton, a major law firm that also engages in lobbying activity. Mukasey helped one of the firm's clients, the US Chamber of Commerce, push to weaken the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

John Negroponte: A former US ambassador to Iraq, Honduras, Mexico, and the Philippines, John Negroponte is an old foreign-policy hand who has worked at the State Department and the United Nations. These days, he is the vice chairman of McLarty Associates, a Washington-based global strategies firm that consults for Fortune 500 clients.

These guys are all members of the Washington elite that Jeb Bush the Populist has decried. Yet they are helping Bush. They must not feel too threatened by his call to disrupt the culture in the nation's capital.

Scott Olson/Getty Images



We the people don't like liars, Mr. Bush.

[lindysalsagal]

1. I certainly hope our side can dredge slime as well as their side, when Shrub 3.0 gets the party nomi

nomination. There has to be plenty of unsavory stuff at the bottom of his swamp.

Let's hope we have a few good bottom feeding investigators who can bring it all up to the surface for our collective amusement.