Jeffrey Shockey is the deputy staff director of the House Appropriations Committee. That’s 
the committee that decides how the money gets spent. Literally. It’s hugely powerful. And the Committee Chairman is Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-CA) who’s at the center of the ever-expanding Cunningham investigation.
Now, Shockey went to work for Lewis in 1994. Then in 1999 he left to work for the lobbying firm of Copeland Lowery. TPM and TPMmuckraker.com regulars will remember that Lowery’s an ex-congressman-turned-lobbyist who’s the link between Duke Cunningham, Brent Wilkes, Jerry Lewis, et al. And at Copeland Lowery, Shockey, as you’d probably expect, was mainly in charge of lobbying clients who needed access to Lewis.
That was between 1999 and 2004 while Lewis was a member of the Appropriations committee and then Chairman of the Appropriations Defense Subcommittee.
But in January 2005, Lewis ascended to the Chairmanship of the full Committee. And it was then that Shockey was overcome with a yearning to return to public service and signed on as deputy staff director for Lewis at the Appropriations Committee.
Now, already it was known that when Shockey left Copeland Lowery he got a lump-sum payment of $600,000.
But it came out yesterday that that was just the first payment out of a total of $1.96 million Copeland Lowery paid Shockey over the course of 2005 when he was helping to run the committee that is earmark central.
This was going to come out next week when the House disclosure filings go public. But Shockey’s own lawyers spilled the beans in a conference call with reporters yesterday. Better to get the news out late on Friday than mid-week.
Now, when we heard about this yesterday, Paul Kiel asked just what sort of severance package pays out 2 million dollars when the severee quits rather than gets downsized or canned. The Copeland Lowery folks say it was actually a buy-out of the practice Shockey had built up as a lobbyist. The firm agreed to pay him a big chunk of the money his clients would have brought in if he’d stayed with the firm.
Now, you don’t have to be too stringent to see that there’s a problem here. Shockey’s working at Copeland Lowery as an earmark-finder. Then he goes to work as the deputy staff director of the earmark committee, basically an earmark-giver. And he’s still being paid by Copeland Lowery, which is of course in the earmark business.
But it’s actually worse than that. You have to go to the article in the Times to find out that “under an agreement with Mr. Shockey, the firm waited to see how much money the clients he signed paid the firm in 2005 to determine the full payment.”
In other words, Shockey didn’t just have a continuing financial interest in Copeland Lowery to the extent he needed them to make enough money to honor their buy-out agreement. His income was still directly tied to how much his ‘former’ clients paid the firm in 2005 — while he was working as a congressional staffer.
Sorta makes you wonder who took over his client list at the firm, doesn’t it?
Well, it gets better.
Who took over Shockey’s client list when he returned to government service? Well, when Shockey left Copeland Lowery, Copeland Lowery turned around and hired Shockey’s wife Alexandra, who also used to work for Lewis. And in an email to Copley News Service’s Jerry Kammer back in December, Alexandra “acknowledged that her client roster includes some of her husband’s old clients.”
The ever-expanding Cunningham investigation appears to be focusing now on Rep. Lewis. And Jeff Shockey seems to be a particular focus of attention, along with fellow former Lewis staffer and Copeland Lowery lobbyist, Letitia White.
