NEW: TRUMP fundraiser @Elliott_Broidy offered or arranged meetings with @POTUS for leaders of Congo, Angola & Romania — while pursuing lucrative defense contracts with those countries. https://t.co/KDsD9i4zH5
— Kenneth P. Vogel (@kenvogel) March 26, 2018
Cash Rules EveryONE Around Him… dolla-dolla, y’all, get th’ money:
For Elliott Broidy, Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign represented an unparalleled political and business opportunity.
An investor and defense contractor, Mr. Broidy became a top fund-raiser for Mr. Trump’s campaign when most elite Republican donors were keeping their distance, and Mr. Trump in turn overlooked the lingering whiff of scandal from Mr. Broidy’s 2009 guilty plea in a pension fund bribery case.
After Mr. Trump’s election, Mr. Broidy quickly capitalized, marketing his Trump connections to politicians and governments around the world, including some with unsavory records, according to interviews and documents obtained by The New York Times. Mr. Broidy suggested to clients and prospective customers of his Virginia-based defense contracting company, Circinus, that he could broker meetings with Mr. Trump, his administration and congressional allies.
Mr. Broidy’s ability to leverage his political connections to boost his business illuminates how Mr. Trump’s unorthodox approach to governing has spawned a new breed of access peddling in the swamp he vowed to drain.
Mr. Broidy offered tickets to V.I.P. inauguration events, including a candlelight dinner attended by Mr. Trump, to a Congolese strongman accused of funding a lavish lifestyle with public resources. He helped arrange a meeting with Republican senators and offered a trip to Mar-a-Lago, the president’s private Florida resort, for an Angolan politician. And he arranged an invitation to a party at Mr. Trump’s Washington hotel for a Romanian parliamentarian facing corruption charges, who posted a photograph with the president on Facebook…
As with so many other political conventions, Mr. Trump has upended the traditional system of access to the president, among the most prized chits in Washington. That is partly because of lax vetting that has allowed largely unfettered access to Mr. Trump and his White House by loyalists, friends and hangers-on with their own policy agendas or business interests.
But it is also because few of Washington’s established lobbyists have close connections to the president. In their place, a new class of insider has emerged, able to lobby the president directly on behalf of clients or business partners, an uncommon opportunity in prior administrations, when lobbyists focused on winning support from lawmakers or regulators…
So, expect a lot of words to be spewed tomorrow about how “our” poor, naive businessman-president allowed himself to be taken advantage of by sweet-talking Beltway lobbyists. Because this will presumably sell better to Trump’s in-every-sense-Base than the alternate understanding that Donny Dollhands has never not been for sale to the highest bidder, no minimum reserve.