Welcome to Pay Dirt—exclusive reporting and research from The Daily Beast’s Lachlan Markay on corruption, campaign finance, and influence-peddling in the nation’s capital. For Beast Inside members only.
The White House has waived ethics rules for two of its top lawyers, including President Donald Trump’s newly appointed White House counsel, allowing them to work with former clients as they steer the administration’s legal strategy.
Both White House counsel Pat Cipollone and his deputy Patrick Philbin were excused in late January from provisions of a federal law that seeks to bar federal appointees from decision-making that could affect the financial interests of their former employers.
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Cipollone will be permitted to “participate in communications and meetings involving [a] former client,” according to a copy of the waiver posted on the White House’s website last month.
Cipollone, a former partner at the firms Kirkland & Ellis and Stein, Mitchell, Cipollone, Beato & Missner, recently replaced former White House counsel Don McGahn and his acting successor, Emmet Flood.
It was not immediately clear which former client Cipollone will be at liberty to communicate with in his new West Wing post. The White House didn’t respond to questions about the waiver, nor did it provide a copy of Cipollone’s financial-disclosure form in the eight days after PAY DIRT requested it.
The White House also didn’t provide financial-disclosure forms for Philbin, a former Kirkland & Ellis partner.
Philbin has been exempted from federal ethics rules to enable him to meet and communicate with Kirkland clients “in matters affecting public-policy issues which are important to the priorities of the administration,” as long as Philbin didn’t “personally and substantially” work with those clients while at his former firm.
Kirkland, which also employs Trump Attorney General nominee William Barr, provides a partial list of clients on its website. They include a host of companies with perpetual business before the federal government, including investment banks, health insurers, energy companies, pharmaceutical firms, and technology giants.
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