Revolving Door Staffer Paid Big Money by Prior ClientsHere’s something that will raise your eyebrows. It looks like Jeffrey Shockey — the former staffer to Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-CA), then lobbyist, then staffer again — was worth a lot more to his lobbying clients after he’d left the firm. Payments to his old firm skyrocketed once he left, to work as a House Appropriations Commitee staffer.
Through his sweet “buy-out” package with the firm, Shockey got a cut of all that money.
How could this be? Here’s the rundown:
Last Friday, it came out that Shockey received a $1.96 million pay out from his lobbying firm when he returned to Lewis’ staff.
Now, Shockey’s lawyers have told reporters that the “buy-out” was to compensate Shockey for his interest in the firm, along with undistributed profits from the prior year. But the fishy thing about that is the interest is pegged to what Shockey would have brought in during 2005 (Shockey moved to Lewis’ office in January 2005).
Business, already fantastic, would have gotten even better: his gross revenue at Copeland Lowery was about $1.7 million in 2004, and he was projected to bring in $3 million in 2005 if he’d stuck around.
Now, the sleuths at Roll Call did some digging and discovered a suspicious pattern: Shockey’s predicted revenue didn’t jump just because he was expected to bring in more clients — it jumped because the clients he already had were projected to pay more, sometimes a lot more, for his services.
In other words, Shockey was worth a lot more to his clients on the Hill than on K Street.
From Roll Call:
Shockey benefited from a big increase in payments made by his former clients to Copeland Lowery after he left the firm in January 2005 and joined the Appropriations Committee staff. Earlier in his career, Shockey previously worked for Lewis from 1991 to 1999.
On a financial disclosure form filed by Shockey when he assumed the role of deputy chief of staff at Appropriations, he listed 49 lobbying clients, including dozens of California municipalities, as well as some defense contractors.
Research by Roll Call found that many of these clients boosted the fees paid to Copeland Lowery in 2005, in some cases doubling the amount paid in the previous years.
Typical of this pattern was Anteon Corp., a defense contractor located in Fairfax, Va. Shockey and Copeland Lowery registered to lobby for Anteon in Dec. 2002. Anteon never paid Copeland Lowery more than $10,000 for lobbying during the six-month reporting periods covering all of 2003 and the first half of 2004, according to lobbying disclosure reports filed with the Clerk of the House.
But in the second half of 2004, when Lewis was embroiled in a three-way battle to become chairman of the Appropriations panel, Anteon reported spending $40,000 on lobbying. With Shockey now working for the committee, Anteon paid Copeland Lowery $160,000 for all of 2005 â more than tripling the fees from the previous year.
San Bernadino County, a Copeland Lowery client that has been subpoenaed by the federal grand jury in the Lewis probe, paid the firm less than $10,000 in the first half of 2004. But the countyâs lobbying fees jumped to $60,000 in the second half of that year and rose to $100,000 during the first half of 2005. Copeland Lowery received another $60,000 for the second half of last year from the county.
The Cal State University San Bernadino Foundation paid Copeland Lowery $80,000 in 2004. That total increased to $120,000 in 2005. The foundation has been subpoenaed by the federal grand jury as well, its attorney said recently.
A spokesman for Copeland Lowery did not address the question of whether increased payments to the firm in 2005 from Shockeyâs former clients were in any way related to his position on the Appropriations panel.
