Roll Call: Pay Cut Let Lewis Aide Dodge Ban

More difficult revelations about Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-CA), the Appropriations Committee chairman.

In late 2002, Lewis delivered an $11,000 pay cut for one of his top aides — and a personal family friend. Normally, such a move would be a stinging, painful rebuke — but not in this case.

Instead, the pay cut allowed the aide, Letitia White, to narrowly dodge a law which would have barred her from lobbying Lewis for one year after leaving, Roll Call reports today. And lobbying Lewis is precisely what she did, just a few months later.

White is now under federal investigation, the New York Times reported in June.

Thanks to the pay cut, when White left Lewis’ employ in January 2003 she was earning just $80 under the legally-mandated annual limit which would have barred her from immediately cashing in on her ties to Lewis. The day after she left, she joined the lobbying firm of Copeland Lowery — whose partners, now split up, have become entangled in various spreading tentacles from the Cunningham corruption scandal. (TPMmuckraker first reported White’s luckily-low salary in June.)

On her first day of work at Copeland Lowery, White signed up two defense contracting clients, surely coincidental to the fact that her old boss was then responsible for overseeing all Defense-related spending. That year, she brought in $670,000 in lobbying fees from those clients and a handful of others — for winning at least $22 million in earmarks for those companies. Her old boss Lewis, of course, was responsible for approving most, if not all, of those earmarks.