At Least 11 Shitstain Interior Officials Have Left To Cash In W. Fossil Fuel & Hunting Lobbies
In October 2017, Ben Cassidy walked away from his lucrative lobbying gig at the National Rifle Association, where he raked in as much as $288,333 per year, for a post at the Department of the Interior. He’d spent nearly seven years trying to reshape the agency as part of the gun lobby, and despite seemingly clear ethics rules against it, he was soon working on national monuments, sport-hunted animal trophy imports and other issues he’d lobbied on.
In July, less than three months after his conduct became the subject of a formal department ethics probe, Cassidy quietly left his position as the Interior Department’s senior deputy director of intergovernmental and external affairs to join Safari Club International. The Washington, D.C.-based trophy hunting advocacy group has close ties to the Trump administration and is one of several organizations that successfully lobbied the Interior Department to roll back prohibitions on importing lions and elephants killed for sport in certain African countries.
assidy is a prime example of the revolving door at President Donald Trump’s Interior Department. A HuffPost review found that at least 11 former officials have landed jobs in industry or lobbying since leaving the federal agency. Three of them ― Cassidy, Vincent DeVito and Todd Wynn ― departed not long after getting wrapped up in a formal investigation by the agency’s Office of Inspector General. That probe targets six current and former officials who maintained close ties to former employers, and stems from a complaint the D.C.-based nonprofit Campaign Legal Center filed with the Interior Department’s internal watchdog that cites HuffPost’s reporting and alleges a “disturbing pattern of misconduct” across the agency.
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A top aide of former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, Downey Magallanes oversaw the administration’s controversial review of national monument designations, as HuffPost previously reported, which ultimately opened large swaths of formerly protected sites in Utah to mining, drilling and other development. Magallanes left the Interior Department in August 2018 for a senior government affairs job at oil giant BP, a company she met with at least five times during her tenure at the federal agency, The Washington Post reported. Magallanes is the daughter of Frederick Palmer, a former executive with coal giant Peabody Energy and an outspoken climate change denier. Palmer previously told HuffPost that Magallanes had recused herself from matters relating to Peabody, but Interior Department schedules show that she and other agency officials met with senior representatives of the company in June 2017, roughly a month after she and Zinke toured coal-rich Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. That same month, she advised a Peabody executive on the best contact at the Interior Department to help the coal company get a mine modification approved, internal emails show.
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https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-interior-department-revolving-door_n_5ddbf08ee4b00149f720e179
