100 former US lawmakers have become foreign lobbyists

As Pete Hegseth was fighting an uphill battle to be confirmed as the secretary of defense, an experienced politico came running to whip votes: Norm Coleman, a former Republican senator from Minnesota.

After shepherding Hegseth around the Hill and lobbying his former colleagues, Coleman testified at Hegseth’s hearing, lauding the nominee and decrying the Biden administration’s failure to prevent Yemen’s Houthis from endangering shipping lanes. “Yes, Pete Hegseth is an out of the box nominee,” he said. “I say it's high time to get out of the box.”

What Coleman didn’t mention in his testimony was that he is a paid lobbyist for the Saudi government. Working with the firm Hogan Lovells, which received $3,000,000 from the Saudi Embassy the prior year, Coleman played a central role in rehabilitating the Kingdom’s image after the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi and the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen.

This is the revolving door at its most acute: a former senator, paid by a foreign government with heavy defense interests, testifying at a confirmation hearing for the man who would soon have his hand on the levers of the most powerful military in the world.

Coleman’s path from Congress to foreign agent is not unusual. Since 2000, exactly 100 members of Congress have worked for foreign governments after leaving public office, according to a new Quincy Institute analysis. And as the map below shows, the most common employers of these former lawmakers are authoritarian governments.

The top destinations include Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Kazakhstan, Libya, Qatar, Russia, and China. Eighty-five percent of the members of Congress who have registered as foreign agents have worked for governments rated “not free” or “partially free” by Freedom House. Of the top ten foreign patrons, only South Korea and Taiwan are rated as free.

Craig Holman, Government Affairs Lobbyist at Public Citizen, explained that authoritarian governments invest more in lobbying because they have a “greater tendency to be at odds with the interests of the United States.”

The chart below traces notable clients of the most prolific lawmakers-turned-lobbyists. Many of these former members of Congress sat on committees that oversee national security, including retired Reps. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.) and Ed Royce (R-Calif.), who both chaired the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

The top clients are heavily concentrated in the Middle East and East Asia. Many countries in these regions employ American lawmakers because they have unrivaled access to the U.S. government.These lobbyists have helped them seek favorable trade conditions, arms sales, and, in some extreme cases, military intervention.

Take Royce, for example, a prolific foreign lobbyist who has worked for the foreign interests of 10 different countries. As head of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Royce was open to Saudi lobbying efforts. In 2017, while arguing against ending support for the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen, Royce read talking points distributed by a firm working for the Saudi government — at times almost verbatim.

Just weeks after leaving Congress in 2019, he became a policy director at Brownstein, a top lobbying firm that earned $1.8 million from Saudi Arabia that year. There, he was restricted to advising and consulting, as congressional rules prevented him from directly lobbying his former colleagues for a year. Once that “cooling-off period” expired, he registered as a lobbyist and began working for Saudi Arabia and its close ally, Bahrain.

Ros-Lehtinen is a top lobbyist of another Gulf partner, the United Arab Emirates. In a filing to the Justice Department, Ros–Lehtinen admitted that when she entered Congress she was an outspoken “skeptic” of the UAE, explaining her about-face by declaring that she eventually “fully appreciated the importance of the UAE to U.S. interests in the region.” Ros-Lehtinen hosted a U.S.-UAE business reception in Miami in January, pitching her former constituents on the opportunity to meet UAE senior diplomats and trade officials.

Michael Beckel, Director of the Money in Politics Reform program at Issue One, a D.C.-based political reform group, explained to Responsible Statecraft that members of Congress are highly sought after by lobbying firms for their “first-hand knowledge of the legislative process, strategic insights, and relationships with key power players in government.”

Foreign governments understand this dynamic. “Foreign governments looking to ensure their perspectives are heard in Washington, D.C., know they'll likely get a high return on their investment when they hire former members of Congress to lobby and advocate on their behalf,” said Beckel.

Former Rep. and Gov. Rod Blagojevich of Illinois is another prominent lawmaker now plying his trade as a foreign agent. President Donald Trump pardoned Blagojevich in 2020 after he was convicted of corruption charges. Now, Blagojevich is lobbying for the government of Republika Srpska, a Serb-controlled part of Bosnia and Herzogvina. Blagojevich published articles in the Washington Times and Daily Caller on behalf of Republika Srpska. Neither publication acknowledged that the author was a paid lobbyist.

For some former members, this work extends to governments in exile. Just last month, former Sen. Robert Torricelli of New Jersey spoke before a conference celebrating the U.S.-Israeli war in Iran and laid out his vision for a government to succeed the Islamic Republic. He pointed to the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), an Iranian opposition group in Albania that used to be a designated foreign terrorist organization and its leader, Maryam Rajavi. “The provisional government established by NCRI and Mrs. Rajavi is the framework,” said Torricelli.

Torricelli, who served on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is the founder of Rosemont Associates, a small government affairs consulting firm that has received $2.7 million from the NCRI since 2013. While critics say the NCRI has little domestic legitimacy inside of Iran, the group punches well above their weight on Capitol Hill — assisted in part by the advocacy of Torricelli.

Given the track record of former members of Congress bending U.S. foreign policy to the whims of foreign powers, critics are looking to limit the practice. Holman says it is anti-democratic for lawmakers to take advantage of their public service for private gain. “Former government officials should be prohibited from serving as lobbyists, at least for a sufficient time period that whittles away their inside connections,” said Holman.

Some members of Congress are already looking to make that happen. In a remarkable case of odd bed-fellows, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii), Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) all agreed via a 2019 Twitter exchange to push for a lifetime ban of former members of Congress becoming lobbyists. While no such bill has passed, multiple measures have been introduced from both sides of the aisle, including Ocasio-Cortez’s’s Close the Revolving Door Act, Rep. Zachary Nunn’s (R-Iowa) Ban Members from Becoming Lobbyists Act, and bipartisan bills like The Fighting Foreign Influence Act, sponsored by Rep. Jared Golden (D-Maine) and Lance Gooden (R-Texas), amongst others.

There is no shortage of bipartisan support for stopping former lawmakers from becoming lobbyists and cashing in on their public service. It’s now up to Congress to push one of these bills through and help ensure that America’s policies serve the people, not wealthy authoritarian regimes.