Transition co-Chairman John Podesta yesterday released rules banning registered lobbyists from raising money for the transition or working for the new administration in areas on which they represented clients.
The new rules also prohibit members of the transition team who become lobbyists from trying to influence the administration on any issues that they worked on. Podesta called them “the strictest, the most far-reaching ethics rules of any transition team in history.”
Bundlers Exempt
The rules, however, won’t prevent campaign fundraisers known as bundlers from serving.
Valerie Jarrett, a transition co-chairwoman, raised between $100,000 and $200,000 for Obama, according to his campaign Web site. Two advisory board members, Julius Genachowski, managing director of Rock Creek Ventures, a Washington firm that invests in online companies, and Donald Gips, a vice president of Broomfield, Colorado-based Level 3 Communications Inc., each raised at least $500,000 for Obama.
A third, Michael Froman, brought in between $200,000 and $500,000 for the campaign. Froman is a managing director at New York-based Citigroup Inc. The financial institution’s employees and their families contributed $581,216, Obama’s seventh-biggest source of campaign cash, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a Washington-based research group.
Campaign co-chairman William Daley, a vice chairman at New York-based JPMorgan Chase & Co., also sits on the advisory board. JPMorgan employees and their families were Obama’s sixth-biggest source of donations, giving $581,460.
Registered to Lobby
Another board member, Mark Gitenstein, was registered to lobby through June, House records show. Gitenstein is a partner in the lawyer-lobbying firm of Mayer Brown LLP, whose clients include Dearborn, Michigan-based Ford Motor Co., which is pushing for government help, and New York-based Merrill Lynch & Co., which sold itself to Bank of America Corp. in September.
Obama may be learning quickly that what sounds good on the campaign trail may not always be best for governing, said Costas Panagopoulos, director of Fordham University’s Center for Electoral Politics and Democracy in New York.
“They want to find the most qualified people; some will have been donors,” Panagopoulos said. “It was probably shortsighted to make promises that such individuals would not be included in his administration.”