With help from Daniel Lippman HELLER JOINING VENABLE: Law and lobbying firm Venable has hired Dean Heller, the former Nevada GOP senator and congressmember, as a senior policy adviser as Heller’s party begins its takeover of Washington. Heller served three terms in the House and one term in the Senate before losing reelection in 2018 to Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.). — Heller was a member of both chambers’ respective tax-writing committees — House Ways and Means and Senate Finance — during his time in Congress, as well as the Senate Banking, Commerce and Veterans’ Affairs committees. — While he won’t be immediately registering to lobby at Venable, Heller does eventually expect to do so, according to the firm. His hiring amounts to a reunion with several former colleagues, including fellow former Rep. Mike Capuano (D-Mass.) and former aide Josh Finestone. FIRST IN PI — AIC HIRES WHITE HOUSE AIDE: Meanwhile the American Investment Council, which represents the private equity and private credit industries, has added a top White House congressional liaison and a former aide to top Democrats on the Ways and Means Committee as the industry seeks to avoid becoming a pay for in this year’s tax debate. — Lee Slater, who’s served for the past four years in the White House’s legislative affairs office — most recently as its deputy director — is joining AIC as senior vice president of government affairs with a focus on engagement with congressional Democrats. — Before joining the White House, where he also served as a special assistant to President Joe Biden, Slater spent four years as outreach and member services director for Ways and Means ranking member Richard Neal (D-Mass.) and served as chief of staff to fellow Ways and Means member John Larson (D-Conn.). — His hiring comes as a tax provision loathed by members of both parties but prized by the private equity and hedge fund industries is bound to be floated as a revenue-raiser to help cover the cost of renewing expiring tax cuts. The so-called carried interest loophole managed to survive the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act and escaped the 2017 GOP tax bill largely intact after targeted lobbying campaigns touting private equity’s impact on lawmakers’ communities — a playbook AIC appears poised to replicate. — “Any time the Congress is talking about tax reform I think it’s smart for all industries to be focused in, because you never know what could make it out in the 11th hour agreement,” Slater said in an interview, adding that serving as one of Biden’s key emissaries to the Hill while Democrats maintained the thinnest of majorities demonstrated that “engaging everybody on the Hill is the most important path forward.” Happy Tuesday and welcome to PI. What’s going on out there? What are the hot inauguration events coming up? Let me know: coprysko@politico.com. And be sure to follow me on X: @caitlinoprysko. MAD ELEVATES VANCE ADVISER: Ohio-based public affairs and consulting shop MAD Global Strategy has named Jai Chabria a partner, elevating a key adviser to Vice President-elect JD Vance weeks before he’s sworn in. — Chabria, a longtime Ohio political operative, served as chief strategist and a general consultant for Vance’s 2022 Senate campaign and has remained a Vance adviser. Chabria joined the firm in 2022 from Mercury Public Affairs, where he was managing director of the firm’s Columbus office. FIRST IN PI — GOP DONOR ALLIANCE’S LEADERSHIP SHAKEUP: Parker Poling is stepping down as executive director of the American Opportunity Alliance, the Republican donor consortium that’s led by Paul Singer and Chuck Schwab, Daniel reports. Poling is moving on to be a senior adviser to AOA. — Poling, a former executive director of the NRCC and ex-chief of staff for former Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.), this month started as president of Adirondack Strategies, according to her LinkedIn profile. Poling and a representative of AOA declined to comment. — Lauren Bryan has been named as the new executive director of AOA, which also includes the Ricketts and Stephens families. She most recently was a senior adviser to new Senate Majority Leader John Thune and was director of development at Congressional Leadership Fund, House Republicans’ super PAC. — Ward Baker, the longtime Republican strategist, is also taking a larger role in the group’s political efforts, although he’s not leaving his firm, a person familiar with the matter told PI. He’s been a regular at AOA’s meetings in recent years. — Two national Republican operatives who worked on multiple congressional races this past cycle said that they have heard Poling being vocal about being a “never Trumper” in the last few years and that did not sit well with some donors in the group. She would sometimes say about candidates “they’re too pro-Trump” or target candidates who leaned too close to Trump, said the two operatives. Both Poling and a representative at AOA declined to comment. — Other people who have worked with AOA disputed that she has been anti-Trump. Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who was the House Republican leader when Poling headed up the NRCC, praised her and told PI he had “never heard her say one word about being anti-Trump” and that she had worked closely with former Trump political director Brian Jack when she was at the NRCC. — A political adviser to a longtime AOA member recalled her bringing in top Trump aide Susie Wiles to present to members in early 2024 and noted that she threw a cocktail party for the group at the Milwaukee convention even though a number of big-time Republican donors didn’t even attend the convention. The adviser also said that she brought Vance to present to a meeting of the group last year and convened a call with the heads of the three top pro-Trump super PACs in the fall. META’S MEA CULPA: Meta continued its overtures to the incoming administration with the rollout this morning of the social media giant’s plans to eliminate third-party fact-checking on its platforms. — The announcement came after years of denying the right’s accusations that Meta-owned Facebook and Instagram had been censoring conservative viewpoints. Republican Joel Kaplan, the company’s new global policy chief, essentially copped to those allegations in a sit-down this morning with Trump’s favorite morning news show, “Fox & Friends.” — Kaplan dodged questions about whether the new changes amounted to an admission of wrongdoing but said that while the introduction of independent fact-checkers was “well-intentioned at the outset,” the process became tainted by “too much political bias” and that content moderation rules aimed at curbing misinformation had become “too restrictive over time.” — He also took several swipes at the Biden administration, framing Trump and allies like X owner Elon Musk as “big defenders of free expression.” “Over the last four years,” Kaplan said, “we saw a lot of societal and political pressure — all in the direction of more content moderation, more censorship.” — “One of the things we’ve experienced is that when you have a U.S. president[ial] administration that’s pushing for censorship it just makes it open season for other governments around the world that don’t even have the protections of the First Amendment to really put pressure on U.S. companies,” he added. — The new policy approach from Meta, which Kaplan denied was a temporary one meant to curry favor with the new administration, nevertheless comes as Trump will soon take the reins on key Meta priorities like antitrust, AI and social media regulations and taxes, and follows Trump’s post-election Mar-a-Lago summit with Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s $1 million donation to Trump’s inauguration and Meta’s recent shakeup of its global policy team. — Two people pleased by today’s move? Trump himself, as well as incoming FCC Chair Brendan Carr. House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), meanwhile, told reporters he plans to meet with Zuckerberg in the coming weeks. Another member of Trump’s party wasn’t impressed, however, signaling that the platform still has an uphill climb in Washington. “This is a ploy to avoid being regulated,” Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), a co-author of the Kids Online Safety Act Meta successfully killed last Congress, wrote on X. “We will not be fooled.” THE TRUMP EFFECT ON WALL STREET: As Trump and a Republican Congress prepare to take aim at climate rules, “major financial firms are facing a reckoning around efforts to keep them engaged in the fight against global warming,” our Jordan Wolman reports. — “The Glasgow Alliance for Net Zero, a coalition including the biggest firms on Wall Street, said last week that it is relaxing requirements for participants as it faces a series of high-profile defections from an affiliated group whose members have faced GOP criticism and legal threats.” — “Those departures from the Net-Zero Banking Alliance and the GFANZ reorganization are the latest reflections of the complications that financial giants face in trying to juggle business and social demands from governments and stakeholders in a political environment with pendulum swings between aggressive climate action and equally intense pushback against those policies.” AND ON PHARMA: “Pfizer’s chief executive Albert Bourla decamped with his top management team to Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort for an off-site meeting,” the Financial Times’ Oliver Barnes and Alex Rogers write, “in the latest attempt by corporate America to ingratiate itself with the US president-elect.” — “Pfizer’s executive team is using Mar-a-Lago for a planning meeting over several days, the people said. While there is no scheduled meeting between Bourla and Trump, the pair are likely to interact and the choice of venue is another example of outreach from the pharmaceutical industry to Trump, a person familiar with the meeting said.
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