Earmarkers Grumble about MuckrakerYesterday, we reported on the Copeland Lowery lobbying firms’ remarkable success in winning earmarks for California State University, San Bernadino (CSU-SB).
One of the more entertaining emails we came across in reviewing the school’s correspondence with their lobbyists was an exchange between a school official and Jeff Shockey, the firm’s star lobbyist who’s now under federal investigation as part of the probe into the firm’s relationship with Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-CA).
Last fall, Copley News Service’s Jerry Kammer — who won a Pulitzer Prize for helping expose the Duke Cunningham scandal — was sniffing around Shockey, his firm and its clients.
“This guy is really focusing in on my relationship with the university — I can’t quite figure it out,” Shockey wrote to his university contact about Kammer.
“He does not understand eamarks,” the school official moodily replied, “nor like them.”
Three weeks later, Kammer broke the Lewis scandal with a raft of stories on Lewis and his lobbyist buddy Bill Lowery. Today, Lewis, Lowery and Shockey count themselves among the subjects of the spreading federal investigation into congressional corruption — which began with, and has been buoyed by, Kammer’s reporting.
Who doesn’t understand the earmark process?
