Shockey Made Rain for Lobby Firm Even While on The HillMore on Jeffrey Shockey’s unbelievably fishy $1.96 million buyout deal.
In a piece out today, Roll Call‘s Paul Kane has crunched the numbers, and the result is clear: Shockey’s lobbying clients paid much more after he went to work on the inside. And the terms of Shockey’s buy-out deal meant that he profited directly from that bonanza.
When Shockey left Bill Lowery’s lobbying firm in January, 2005 to be a senior staffer on the Appropriations Committee with Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-CA), he had 49 clients. Roll Call’s Kane found that 33 of them upped their fees in 2005. What were they paying for? Lowery’s business was earmarks in appropriations bills, remember, and Lewis rose to become chairman of the House Appropriations Committee in early 2005.
Let’s review the terms of Shockey’s deal.
When he left the firm to work for Lewis, Shockey was a partner at what was then Copeland, Lowery, Jacquez, Denton and Shockey, a firm built on its relationship to Lewis. According to the ‘buyout’ deal, his interest would be dictated not by his past performance, but by what he would have brought in during 2005. The relevant time period, according to the agreement, was the first half of 2005.
So the more Shockey’s former clients paid in the first half of 2005, the more money for Shockey, who was working on the Hill. And according to Kane’s analysis, they paid a lot more. In the first half of 2004, for instance, Shockey’s clients paid $580,000 – in the first half of 2005, by comparison, Shockey’s former clients paid $1.46 million.
Almost across the board, Shockey’s former clients’ fees jumped way up. It seems to me this could mean one of two things. The first is that this was an easy way to make sure that Shockey was amply compensated for his move to the Appropriations Committee, where he was forced to subsist on a meager $160,000 salary (his lawyers, I ought to mention, claim that Shockey has nothing to do with his former clients’ business on the Hill). The second is that Lowery’s clients were made to pay for access that was now much more valuable, since their rep had risen to chairman of the committee, and their former partner was there as his staffer.
As Kane notes with admirable understatement:
While the departure of such a prominent rainmaker is usually bad news for lobbying firms, Shockeyâs return to Capitol Hill and the ascension of Lewis to full committee chairman in January 2005 has proven to be even better business for Copeland Lowery.
We’re going to continue to hear a lot about Shockey. He was not some small-time lobbyist – he was the big earner at Lowery’s firm. In 2004, Kane notes, Shockey was responsible for 33 percent of the firm’s revenue. And, of course, he was worth even more on the Hill – his former clients represented 39 percent of the firm’s $7.4 million in revenue in 2005.
