Politics
Lobbying firms tied to Trump report wave of new clients
Lobbying firms with close ties to President Donald Trump have added new clients in droves since the election, with several disclosing close to two dozen so far, as companies, industry groups and other organizations look for an in with the new administration. Some of the biggest winners have been firms whose owners have helped Trump from outside of the government, such as fundraiser Brian Ballard, or whose current or former employees have more formal ties to the administration, according to a Blue Light News analysis of disclosures.
Those disclosures almost certainty undercount the actual boom in business for lobbying shops viewed as close to Trump. It’s not necessarily required to report outreach to presidential transition teams, for example. Lobbyists also have 45 days to disclose new clients once they’ve been retained, meaning that a fuller picture of who’s rushing to hire Trump-linked lobbyists — and how much they’re shelling out to do so — may not be available until first-quarter reports are due in April.
The election kicked off a familiar cycle in the lobbying industry, in which some K Street players see their fortunes rise as their links to the new government bring in business, while several firms that saw similar boosts four years ago have seen lobbying revenues dip.
While many of K Street’s biggest players reported surging lobbying revenues in 2024, those upticks were especially pronounced among firms with ties to the incoming president. So far, perhaps no firm has reaped more benefits from Trump’s election than Ballard’s Ballard Partners, which counts two key members of Trump’s second administration — chief of staff Susie Wiles and attorney general-designate Pam Bondi — as alums.
And after a lag in business during the Biden administration, Ballard Partners has disclosed a remarkable 41 new clients since the election, including Paramount Studios, Bayer, Chevron, Harvard University and the crypto firms Blockchain.com and Ripple Labs.
In the final three months of 2024, Ballard’s lobbying revenues were up by 31 percent compared to the previous quarter. Its Q4 revenues were up 38 percent year-over-year, and the firm’s annual lobbying revenues rose from $17.7 million in 2023 to $19.6 million in 2024 — an increase of 11 percent.
Another major beneficiary of Trump’s win so far has been Miller Strategies, whose founder Jeff Miller served as one of the finance chairs for Trump’s inauguration.
Miller Strategies has reported signing 21 new clients since the election, including the Edison Electric Institute, Uber, Ebay and Palantir — growing the firm’s client list by a third. The firm pulled in $4 million in the final quarter of 2024, a 37 percent bump from the previous quarter and a 36 percent increase from the same time a year ago.
Mercury Public Affairs, where Wiles most recently served as co-chair, has disclosed 16 new lobbying clients since the election — a half-dozen of which name Bryan Lanza, a Trump adviser and transition alum, as working on the account.
Mercury reported $11.8 million in lobbying revenue last year, a more than $4 million increase compared to 2023. The firm’s fourth-quarter revenue of $2.6 million was down a little over 7 percent from the previous quarter, but marked a 26 percent increase from the same period in 2023 — and that doesn’t include new foreign clients that Mercury has added since November, such as the South Korean government.
Continental Strategy has also seen a boom in new clients. Trump adviser Carlos Trujillo launched the firm just as Trump was leaving office in 2021 and has staffed up with a former chief of staff to Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the former deputy political director of Trump’s campaign, while also announcing a promotion for Wiles’ daughter Katie Wiles.
Since the election, Continental has signed 14 new clients, including Hims & Hers, the Geo Group and Google Cloud. The firm has yet to file all of the fourth-quarter lobbying disclosures that were due last week, but already has reported nearly $1.2 million in lobbying revenue for 2024 — a 35 percent jump from 2023 — while its quarterly revenue nearly doubled from $196,000 in Q3 to $373,000 in Q4.
CGCN Group, an all-Republican firm, has also seen an uptick in business. Its staff includes former Trump White House aides Tim Pataki, Ja’Ron Smith and Mike Catanzaro. The firm brought in $9.7 million in lobbying revenue in 2024 — up 28 percent from the previous year — and $2.6 million in the last quarter of 2024 — up 30 percent year-over-year.
As good as Trump’s election has been for firms on K Street with ties to the new administration, a handful of firms linked to former President Joe Biden have started bleeding business, according to Blue Light News’s analysis of disclosures.
Jeff Ricchetti, the brother of top Biden adviser Steve Ricchetti, saw lobbying revenues surge for his firm Ricchetti Inc. overall last year, as well as in Q4. With Biden on his way out of office, though, Ricchetti’s firm parted ways with six of its clients, while disclosing no new clients since the election.
At Putala Strategies, a firm run by Chris Putala, a former aide to Biden from his time on the Senate Judiciary Committee, annual and quarterly lobbying revenues also declined. Like Ricchetti, Putala’s firm has reported no new clients since the election and lost seven clients at the end of last year.
On the flip side, TheGROUP DC, which is home to Biden’s former vice presidential legislative affairs director and plenty of former aides to Democratic heavy hitters, reported a 10 percent increase in lobbying revenues last year.
The firm, which has also added a number of Republican lobbyists in recent years, reported steady lobbying revenues for Q4 compared to the previous quarter as well as the same period in 2023, and has registered four new clients since the election.
National Democrats are increasingly shifting their attention away from North Carolina’s Senate race as polls show former Gov. Roy Cooper ahead, eyeing once long-shot races as possible pickups. But a veteran Democratic strategist who helped deliver the party’s last presidential victory in the state is urging donors not to take a win for granted.
David Plouffe, who managed behind Barack Obama’s narrow 2008 victory in North Carolina, urged Democratic donors and supporters not to grow complacent in the final weeks of Roy Cooper’s Senate campaign, according to audio obtained by Blue Light News.
“I think that this race … has I think been the best run race in the country,” Plouffe said on the call. “But that doesn’t mean that we can rest easy.”
He warned about North Carolina’s relatively fixed partisan makeup as a purple state, making it difficult for a candidate to dramatically expand their base of support.
“There’s certain states that elections happen within a bound, and this one will be that way as well,” he said.
In public polling, Cooper leads Republican Michael Whatley, who has struggled to boost his name recognition against the much better-known former governor. And as Democrats grow increasingly bullish on their candidate’s chances of flipping the seat — one of four pickups they need to take control of the Senate — national groups have begun shifting their money and attention to other contests, including most recently to Kansas.
But Plouffe said North Carolina needs to remain a priority.
“We have to win the ones we have to win,” he said on the call to Cooper’s finance committee.
Just days before Plouffe’s remarks, Senate Democrats’ top super PAC pulled back some of its spending in North Carolina, following a much bigger retreat by Republicans’ top super PAC in the state.
Plouffe cautioned that North Carolina has historically been a tough state for Democrats at the federal level, especially in recent years. The party hasn’t won a Senate race there since 2008, when Obama became the last Democratic presidential candidate to carry the state, winning by fewer than 15,000 votes. He lost the state in 2012.
“Even though we carried the electoral votes back then, we only did so by I think 14,000 votes. So it was our narrowest victory,” Plouffe said. “And in 2012, we tried to win North Carolina again with the help of so many people on this phone, and we just couldn’t get it done. And that tells you how difficult the state is.”
Plouffe also cast the stakes of Cooper’s race as extending beyond November, arguing that a Cooper victory could provide a blueprint for the party’s eventual 2028 presidential nominee.
“Democrats need to compete and win in North Carolina in 28,” he said. “And it’s one thing to look how a governor can win a state. The best route, the best scout that you receive, is how someone in a federal race won in a tough state, and that can show you the way.”
Byron Donalds says he is not a ‘yes man’ to Trump
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The progressive political action committee Justice Democrats has appointed Rev. Hodari Williams as its new executive director. The change sets the organization up to hone a civil rights message ahead of the 2028 election cycle, Williams told Blue Light News.
His appointment, shared first with Blue Light News, comes at a time when self-proclaimed progressives (and socialists) are flooding the scene. The PAC has had its most successful election cycle ever, helping seven candidates — including Donavan McKinney in Michigan, Melat Kiros in Colorado and Darializa Avila Chevalier in New York — defeat incumbents in the primaries. While those candidates are heavily favored to win on Election Day, the fates of three other Justice Democrats candidates, including Tennessee’s state Rep. Justin Pearson, remain less certain going into November.
At one point, the group tried to get Williams to run for office. Though he declined, Williams said now is the right time to force change.
“America and its present-day politicians, from my experience, have a high blood pressure of promises and anemia of political courage,” Williams said in an interview, using a common Kenyan political expression. “Right now, JD is producing candidates who have the political courage to deal with the crises that are existing in marginalized and disenfranchised communities, and I want to be a part of that.”
Williams, 46, was born and raised in Lakewood, New Jersey. His parents were activists and community organizers who raised him on the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement. After graduating from Francis Marion University in Florence, South Carolina, with his bachelor’s degree, he joined the NAACP as a field organizer for voter rights and empowerment while pursuing his Master’s of Divinity at the Interdenominational Theological Center. In his time with the NAACP, Williams traveled across the Black Belt, where he said he witnessed poverty and inequity up close.
“Civil rights traditionally has been something that people have tried to separate from progressivism … but these movements are inseparable,” said Williams. “What I witnessed in the South as a worker in voter rights and voter empowerment and education, and as a regional representative for the NAACP, was that the conditions that created inequity still existed and needed to be confronted and challenged.”
His work took him to Kenya, where he served as a program coordinator with the Presbyterian Church USA. In Nairobi, he supported the Green Belt Movement’s work against deforestation and its mission to highlight environmental justice as a tool for economic empowerment and self-determination.
Now, as some Black and brown voters express concerns of being tokenized by traditional Democratic candidates, Williams plans to bring his experience working in racial justice circles to his new role.
“I have worked in communities that have borne the brunt of failed promises from the current Democratic leadership,” Williams said. “I have opened the doors of my congregations to politicians and have experienced the absence of those politicians after the elections.”
He continued: “Black communities have become destinations for environmental hazards and data centers. Unemployment has risen. Black federal employees have been targeted. The list goes on. I’ve pastored these people. I’ve prayed with them. I’ve listened to them as they’ve shed tears. Now I’ve decided I want to move from triage work to really transformational work.”
Some of that work will require challenging other Black leaders.
“Unfortunately, many of our Black politicians have become victims of corporate capture, and their voices have been taken by entities like AIPAC,” said Williams, referring to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. “They have not really been able to stand for the issues that are affecting the communities that that many of us are fighting for, and JD candidates are free from that, and they’re free to take bold and significant action to move forward legislation.”
But with the 2026 election cycle nearly over, the PAC is already brainstorming how to establish a strong progressive coalition for the 2028 presidential election. That will mean convincing the mainstream Democratic party that Justice Democrats have built a lasting coalition of the party’s base, said Williams.
“We hope that the Democratic Party would see that we’re developing a blueprint to show them how the base is being energized around the issues that are kitchen table issues that people want us to deal with,” said Williams.
“It’s not enough for us just to have a call to defeat a fascist president. We don’t want a fascist president. We want him out, but we also want a vision of what America could look like when affordability, healthcare, civil rights, housing, and livable wages — all of those things are at the top of the political agenda,” he added.
Williams succeeds current executive director and co-founder Alexandra Rojas, who will become president of Justice Democrats’ board and will support Williams as a senior adviser.
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