Obama Officials Are Living Large in Trump's America
President Barack Obama with then-Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. (Pablo
Martinez Monsivais / AP)
Since departing the White House in January 2017, Barack Obama has kept a
conspicuously low profile, surfacing briefly to condemn the Trump
administration's violation of the Iran nuclear deal and offer a few,
inadequate words about its child separation policy. During that time, he has
grown fabulously wealthy, inking a $65 million book contract and a Netflix
television deal and delivering speeches to Wall Street firms for several
hundred thousand dollars a pop.
But the former president is hardly the only member of his administration to
cash in on his time in office. As HuffPost's Zach Carter and Paul Blumenthal
report, numerous Obama officials are "riding out" President Trump's term by
enriching themselves through consulting and lobbying deals, many at
"scandal-fraught" organizations.
One such official is former Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson. When
he's not denouncing child detention camps as "immoral and un-American" while
simultaneously dismissing calls to abolish ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs
Enforcement) as "about as serious as the claim that Mexico is 'gonna pay for
the wall,' " Johnson serves on the board of directors at Lockheed Martin-the
country's biggest weapons manufacturer and a corporation that has incurred
$767 million in fines for assorted misconduct since its formation in 1995.
While Johnson's precise level of involvement at the defense contractor is
uncertain, HuffPost reveals that as a Lockheed Martin director he earned as
much as $290,000 last year.
Melody Barnes, previously Obama's Domestic Policy Council director, has
rebuked the Trump administration for showing "virtually no respect for
constitutional principles, or often, basic human decency." But she too works
for a defense contractor, Booz Hamilton, investigated for criminal
wrongdoing, in this case by the Department of Justice for alleged accounting
irregularities. HuffPost reports that the company has received as much as
$63 million in contracts from ICE, the government agency that has made
headlines for allegedly denying essential care to pregnant women in its
custody and for employing agents who have told asylum seekers, "Don't you
know that we hate you people?," among countless other offenses.
Then there's Timothy Geithner, Obama's treasury secretary and current
president of the private equity firm Warburg Pincus. That firm is the owner
of a money lender called Mariner Finance, which according to a damning new
Washington Post report preys on the country's most vulnerable. As one former
branch manager put it, "it's basically a way of monetizing poor people."
Geithner, who has blamed predatory lenders for their role in the 2008
financial crisis, declined to comment on the article, but Mariner Finance
LLC documents indicate the company has $561 million in total assets.
There are many more examples: Former Attorney General Eric Holder, former
Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer, former White House press secretary
Jay Carney, and Obama's original Securities and Exchange Commission chair,
Mary Schapiro, have all found lucrative second lives in the private sector.
"Elite Washington is comfortable with what it calls 'the revolving door'―the
movement of government officials into lobbying, contracting or consulting
jobs where they can exploit government connections for profit," conclude
HuffPost's Carter and Blumenthal. "But much of what passes for normal in
Washington is considered grotesque in the rest of the country. If the Trump
administration weren't bumbling between different crimes against humanity,
it's hard to imagine anyone getting nostalgic for the era when these folks
ran the free world."
Jacob Sugarman
