Corey Lewandowski — a pugnacious hothead whose bad temper cost him a job managing the Trump campaign last summer — has remained largely out of the news since the end of his gig as one of CNN’s Trump fluffers.
Last we heard from him, Lewandowski, a noted lobbyist hater, was getting into the lobbying business. It was one of the earliest indications that “drain the swamp” was always more of a slogan than a promise. Now we have further proof of that courtesy of Politico, which revealed Friday that Lewandowski has been promising face time with Trump and Vice-President Mike Pence to potential lobbying clients around the world:
A document provided to an Eastern European politician by an international consulting firm that Lewandowski co-founded this year promises to arrange “meetings with well-established figures,” including Trump, Pence, “key members of the U.S. Administration,” and outside Trump allies.
The firm — which Lewandowski founded with Ben Carson’s former campaign manager, Barry Bennett — is called Washington East West Political Strategies. It was created to drum up Eastern European clients for Avenue Strategies, the lobbying firm that Lewandowski and Bennett also founded together. The duo has several of these firms around the world, Bennett told Politico, aimed at directing clients toward their D.C. firm.
Lewandowski’s promises to call Trump or cabinet members on behalf of his clients may not be improper, but it is unseemly — particularly for a White House that has already made a joke out of its stated intention to eliminate cronyism and influence-peddling. But there don’t appear to be indications that it will stop. Lewandowski enjoys easy access to Trump, both over the phone and in the West Wing, and he’s aggressive in trading on that.
Not that he’s been able to do much with that access: Avenue Strategies has reportedly signed up five clients for a total of $265,000. Two were mentioned in the Politico piece — the biomedical-data firm Flow Health and the government of Puerto Rico — and neither had been very happy with the work Lewandowski did on their behalf.
