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Florida Republican Jeff Miller left Congress in January 2017, and by that summer he was a registered agent of the Qatari government. Now an ethics watchdog group wants law-enforcement officials to look into whether Miller’s new job violated federal law.
The Campaign Legal Center sent a letter to the Justice Department on Thursday asking for an investigation into Miller’s compliance with a law that bars former members of Congress from representing foreign governments for a year after they retire. Miller insists he took pains to stay on the right side of that law, but CLC says his explanation doesn’t square with foreign-agent filings on file with DOJ.
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The law at issue prohibits former members of Congress from “representing” a foreign state before any employee of the federal government “with the intent to influence a decision of such official in carrying out his or her official duties” for a year after leaving office. It also bars former members from “aiding” or “advising” any party in furtherance of such representation.
Miller registered to work for Qatar in July 2017 through his new employer, McDermott Will & Emery, and told DOJ that he would be “lobbying the Executive Branch” on Qatar’s behalf. Two months later, he registered to represent a state-owned Vietnamese telecommunications company, and told DOJ that he planned to conduct “outreach and communications with U.S. Executive Branch officials regarding Vietnamese interests.”
In the course of an investigation on members of Congress-turned-foreign agents last month, The Daily Beast asked Miller how he squared those descriptions of his work with the federal law mandating a year-long “cooling-off” period.
“I made no Legislative or Executive Branch contacts on behalf of Qatar during my one-year ‘cooling off’ period,” Miller said at the time. “After my one-year restriction expired, in 2018, I did make such contacts.”
Miller did not respond to follow-up inquiries this week seeking additional information on the nature of his representation during his first five months as a foreign agent.
Those details matter, CLC says, because the law at issue doesn’t just prohibit direct contacts on a foreign government's behalf; it also bars a far broader spectrum of work under the “aids or advises” language. Why would Miller have bothered registering as an agent of Qatar, CLC reasons, if he weren’t “aiding” MWE’s representation of the country?
“Even if Rep. Miller never made lobbying contacts on Qatar’s behalf, any ‘behind the scenes’ services in support of the foreign government’s lobbying or influence efforts would nonetheless violate the Act,” CLC wrote in its letter to DOJ. “The most reasonable inference is that he did provide such services: Qatar engaged McDermott to influence government officials, and… McDermott made dozens of lobbying contacts with Legislative and Executive Branch officials on Qatar’s behalf in the second half of 2017.”
The cooling-off period was designed to provide at least some measure of separation between a lawmaker’s official duties and the lucrative post-congressional employment opportunities that frequently present themselves to federal legislators and often present problematic questions of conflicts-of-interest and cronyism.
“It is bad enough when former politicians leverage their public service for foreign lobbying clients,” said Brendan Fischer, CLC’s director of federal reforms, in a statement to PAY DIRT. “But it is even worse when a politician ignores the law’s minimal protections against influence-peddling and begins working on a foreign government’s behalf shortly after leaving office.”
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