BARRACK SPEAKS: Real estate investor and Trump fundraiser Tom Barrack won’t be advising his longtime friend’s third run for the White House, pointing in part to his acquittal last year on charges of illegally acting as a foreign agent while advising former President Donald Trump on Middle East issues during his first campaign and presidency. — “I have great respect for him as a friend always,” Barrack said of the former president in an interview with Bloomberg’s David Westin released Friday. But Barrack, who chaired Trump’s inaugural committee, said he was deterred by the ambiguity that landed him in the crosshairs of federal prosecutors who accused Barrack and a former aide of illicitly working to advance the interests of the United Arab Emirates. — “It’s a dangerous game. I’m a businessman, I have a point of view, I’m a Lebanese immigrant,” he said, echoing the gist of his defense in last year’s federal trial in Brooklyn. “I tried to contribute,” he continued, but ultimately, he argued, “it’s too confusing of a world for business people to get involved in politics.” — Barrack shot down the notion that his prosecution, which was one of several high-profile cases that ensnared Trump aides, was politically motivated. Barrack reiterated his thinking in backchanneling with Trump’s campaign and Emirati officials, arguing that Gulf states were interested in learning “never for any evil purpose” who the emerging GOP standard bearer was. — “I thought, this is a great opportunity to start chipping at the system, from somebody outside of the system,” Barrack said. “What got confused with me” was how intertwined sovereign wealth funds like those that poured millions of dollars into his businesses. — While he maintained that his dealings in the Middle East were strictly business matters, “the rulers of all these countries also are the ones making all the business decisions,” Barrack conceded. “So the sovereign wealth funds, ultimately, are governed and ruled by a monarchy, these are all monarchies.” Still, there was “never an ounce of impropriety,” he insisted. INSIDE SILICON VALLEY’S PUSH TO SHAPE TRADE DEAL: “Technology giants are drawing protests as they aggressively try to shape a new US trade deal with Australia, South Korea and other members of the Indo-Pacific region that account for 40% of global economic output,” Bloomberg’s Emily Birnbaum and Eric Martin report. — Activists pushing to limit companies’ role in influencing the deal are stepping those efforts up as a fourth round of negotiations in South Korea begins this week, following a robust presence by tech giants and allied groups during previous rounds of talks. — “When talks were held in Australia in November, Alphabet Inc.’s Google and IBM Corp. co-hosted an invitation-only reception for negotiators. In the Singapore round in May, which was supposed to be mostly closed to outside stakeholders, sessions began late one morning because of a breakfast hosted by the tech industry,” though a USTR spokesperson denied that account. “Elsewhere in the bustling conference center, a ‘war room’ was run by the US Chamber of Commerce.” — During the Singapore talks, “34 of the 40 stakeholders who gave presentations … represented corporations or their groups, most of which had ties to tech, according to people familiar with the matter who requested anonymity to discuss confidential talks.” U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai has vowed to deemphasize the role of companies in trade discussions, and a spokesperson for her office defended seeking “input from a broad range of stakeholders” on the deal. ANNALS OF DARK MONEY: Washington Free Beacon’s Andrew Kerr and Joseph Simonson got their hands on internal documents from the liberal consulting firm Arabella Advisors that shed new light on “just how centrally controlled a vast swath of activist organizations are by a central clearinghouse based in the nation’s capital—as well as the lengths to which Arabella’s leaders go to disguise that control and create the illusion of grassroots political activism.” FIRST IN PI — MINDSET ADDS RETIREMENT BUFF: Kendra Kosko Isaacson has departed the Hill, where she was a top retirement and tax policy aide to now-Senate Appropriations Chair Patty Murray (D-Wash.), to help stand up the retirement vertical at Mindset. Isaacson has worked for Murray, who was previously the top Democrat on the Senate HELP Committee, since 2015, most recently serving as the senator’s pensions policy director and senior tax counsel. — Before that, she served as an employee benefits specialist at the Labor Department and a number of firms downtown including the HR Policy Association’s Center On Executive Compensation, Slevin & Hart and Venable. PULLING PUNCHES: “The fraying relationship between big business and GOP politicians is about to get more strained,” POLITICO’s Zach Warmbrodt and Eleanor Mueller write in a curtain raiser, as Republicans on the House Financial Services Committee prepare to spend the next month zeroing in on corporate America’s embrace of climate and social initiatives. — In particular the panel’s Republicans “will target the process in which advocates pressure public companies to adopt environmental, social and governance (ESG) goals using the shareholder voting process. … While the committee’s bills have no chance of becoming law under President Joe Biden, the messaging — and industry’s response to it — will feed into a broader political conflict that could set the table for the next time Republicans control Washington.” — And although this month’s activity has been “framed around holding Wall Street to account, Financial Services Committee Republicans appear to be picking spots where they’ll minimize friction with the industry’s biggest players.” They’re “aiming at firms that play big roles in ESG investing, a strategy for managing businesses and retirement funds that elevates concerns about climate change and diversity,” and in the meantime lobbyists “want to avoid further inflaming tensions” on the right. THE OTHER BREWING QUAGMIRE FOR WALL STREET: The Federal Reserve’s top bank cop Michael Barr “laid out a series of recommendations Monday that would require large lenders to raise more capital to navigate economic turbulence,” Zach reports. The impending proposal from the Fed, which Barr justified in part by pointing to this spring’s bank failures, has already drawn pushback from bankers gearing up to fight the plan.
| 
No comments:
Post a Comment