BALLARD LOBBYIST BONDI TAPPED FOR AG: Hours after former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) withdrew Trump's nominee for attorney general, the president-elect turned to K Street for a second time this week to take his place, selecting former Florida Attorney General and Ballard Partners partner Pam Bondi as his next choice to lead the Justice Department. — Bondi joined the firm, which is run by top Trump fundraiser Brian Ballard, in 2019 after wrapping up her second term as Florida’s top cop. She took a brief leave from the firm that year to join Trump’s defense team for his first impeachment before returning once again in 2020. — Bondi registered to lobby for almost three dozen clients since joining the firm, including General Motors, Uber, Amazon, private prison company GEO Group, Carnival cruise lines, the Children’s Hospital Association and Major League Baseball, according to disclosures. As of Friday, she was still registered to lobby for a trio of law enforcement groups: Major County Sheriffs of America, Inc., Florida Sheriffs Risk Management Fund and Florida Sheriffs Association. — Bondi was also registered at one point to lobby for the Qatari government, which enlisted Ballard Partners in 2018 amid a humanitarian blockade by the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia that Trump supported. RIP ‘DRILL BABY DRILL’: “Donald Trump wants oil companies to ‘drill, baby, drill’ on the first day of his presidency, but his fossil-fuel benefactors have a different agenda,” Wall Street Journal’s Benoît Morenne and Collin Eaton report. “Many of the tycoons who backed the Republican’s victorious campaign say what they need help with is shoring up demand for their products — not pumping more fossil fuels, which they have little incentive to do.” — “They are pushing for policies that would lock in fossil-fuel use, such as easier permitting for pipelines and terminals to shuttle fossil fuels to new markets. They also favor eliminating Biden administration policies meant to put more electric vehicles on the road.” — “Under President Biden, shale companies produced record amounts of oil and natural gas as crude prices rebounded from the pandemic’s depths and then soared after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But the industry is also confronting the early stages of a long-term shift away from fossil fuels, as well as concerns that gasoline consumption has peaked in the U.S.” — “Many of Trump’s oil and natural-gas supporters favor easing regulations that govern drilling. The changes would include scrapping rules targeting methane emissions, getting new permits to frack on federal land and eliminating climate disclosure rules. But some donors grimace when they hear Trump promise that under his watch, crude-oil producers would open the floodgates.” ANNALS OF CAMPAIGN FINANCE: Before dropping out of Congress last week, Gaetz’s campaign committee had “reported spending millions of dollars on Stripe Inc.’s payment-processing services in recent years, though it now says that those funds ultimately went somewhere else — and campaign-finance watchers say that’s a problem,” Bloomberg’s David Ingold and Ted Mann write. — “During the 2024 election cycle, Gaetz’s principal campaign committee, Friends of Matt Gaetz, said in Federal Election Commission filings that it had paid a total of $1.2 million in ‘e-merchant fees’ to Stripe, a San Francisco-based financial-services company. The sum is equivalent to about 19% of all contributions the campaign took in during the period, the filings show.” — “Such outlays far exceed election-season norms. A Bloomberg News analysis of FEC filings by candidates for federal office this year found that campaign committees typically reported spending between 1% and 4% of their contributions on payment processing. Most campaigns report payment-processing expenses separately from other vendor costs.”
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