Catastrophe - Dick Morris [92]
Actually, Ted Kennedy, Jr., never registered to lobby for BMS, but others in his firm did. It’s not clear why Ted Jr. didn’t register himself. Maybe he wanted to avoid public scrutiny of this eyebrow-raising transaction, in which the son of a senator was paid $20,000 for merely arranging a meeting for his father with the head of a corporation lobbying for special-interest legislation—a new low in lobbying annals, even by Washington’s extremely low standards. Even if he wasn’t registered, though, it’s reasonable to conclude that Kennedy Jr. was the one who did the key “work”—arranging the meeting between the BMS president and his father that was so crucial to BMS.
And Ted Kennedy, Jr., wonders why some people believe he trades on his famous name?
The BMS fee was a good one, considering the fact that it likely involved only a few minutes of time. After all, how long can it take to call your father and ask him to meet with one of your clients? For this, Marwood was paid $20,000 in 2001—a paltry amount to BMS but a full one-quarter of the Marwood Group’s lobbying fees for its first year. Not bad for just scheduling a meeting.
Surprisingly, though, in its 2001 lobbying disclosure form Marwood claimed it had made no contacts with the House of Representatives, the Senate, or any federal agency. No contacts with the federal government? So how did BMS manage to get that meeting with the elder Kennedy? And what was it paying Marwood to do? You don’t hire a registered Washington lobbying firm if it isn’t going to do any lobbying for you.
What’s also interesting about Marwood’s 2001 disclosure form is that it doesn’t admit to any involvement in the BMS patent issue. Under the section that requires a lobbying firm to describe the specific issues it lobbied on for BMS, Marwood wrote:
Provide advice re: grassroots program and work with provider team to help identify emerging biotechnologies and products.333
Say what?
“Grassroots program”? What were they going to do—organize spontaneous community opposition to lower prescription prices on Glucophage? And “identify emerging biotechnologies”? Are they kidding?
How about “use your family position to sell a meeting with your father and the president of BMS to try and help BMS hold on to its billion-dollar patent”? How about “help us hang on to our pharmaceutical patents”?
Every other lobbying firm that BMS hired in 2001 listed specific bills and/or issues it had been hired to lobby for or against. Most of them related to the extension of the Glucophage patent. And significantly, BMS itself did not list “emerging biotechnologies and products” in its meticulous twenty-nine-page year-end disclosure of the issues it had lobbied on in 2001.
Marwood listed two lobbyists on its BMS disclosure form—yet those lobbyists apparently never lobbied for BMS or contacted anyone on behalf of the drug company, if we’re to believe its statement that it never contacted Congress or any federal agency. So why were they listed as lobbyists? One of them was Ted Kennedy, Jr.’s, partner in forming the firm, John Moore, a former political operative in New York governor George Pataki’s administration. What did they do for BMS? If they weren’t contacting any federal officials, why did they file a lobbying disclosure form?
Yet there were no inquiries made about any of these dubious disclosures. Why? Sadly, that’s business as usual in Washington. Congress has never wanted to regulate lobbyists, and it ignores even the most patently ridiculous filings. At that time, although the filings were public, they weren’t available online, and few people would have bothered to make the trip to Washington to sift through them.
One has to ask why Marwood was initially hired by BMS. It certainly wasn’t because of the firm’s political