Tommy Thompson

Wisconsin Republican Senate candidate Tommy Thompson loves the Keystone pipeline. He always promotes it at campaign stops and debates. But what he doesn’t tell you is the D.C. lobbying firm he worked at was quietly paid to lobby for it.

In January of this year, Thompson resigned his position at Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP (known in shorthand as “Akin Gump”). While there, his chief duty was to provide public policy advising to health care corporations. Essentially, he was an unregistered lobbyist corresponding with many of the same corporations that he regulated as Bush’s Health and Human Services Secretary.

But Akin Gump is a huge law and lobbying firm. It has many clients in every sector. One of the firm’s clients that signed on one month before Thompson resigned his position was Houston, Texas’s Qanta Services.

Qanta services was selected one month prior (in November) to be Canadian energy company TransCanada’s partner in building the controversial Keystone XL pipeline.

Qanta’s contract specifically lists the Keystone XL Pipeline as the issue that it hired Akin Gump to lobby on. Here’s a screenshot from the disclosure document (click it to get a larger version):

As we noted earlier, Akin Gump is a huge lobbying firm. It has literally hundreds of clients and many of them that are not asking for registered lobbying do not have to disclose their connection to the firm at all.

We have no idea what other corporate interests Thompson’s former firm may be asking him to advocate for. We just know that he spent all of his time between his service in the Bush administration and now working for various corporate interests, helping them lobby the government to get special deals and favors.

We don’t have to let Thompson get elected to the Senate to shill for these corporations.

Click here to sign up to make calls for Thompson’s opponent, bold progressive Tammy Baldwin.