Welcome to Pay Dirt—exclusive reporting and research from The Daily Beast’s Lachlan Markay on corruption, campaign finance, and influence-peddling in the nation’s capital. For Beast Inside members only.
Montana Gov. Steve Bullock is running a presidential campaign against cronyism and corruption. But the groundwork for that campaign was laid in part by a consultant who helps industry capitalize on Washington policymaking.
In the months before he declared his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination, Bullock’s federal political action committee, Big Sky Values, began paying a firm called Height Analytics. The PAC steered $32,000 to Height for policy consulting work beginning in August 2018. The last payment came on May 12, two days before Bullock announced he was entering the race.
The payments were specifically for the services of Jamie Wise, a Height senior vice president who leads the firm’s business consulting group. “We help businesses and market leaders establish and focus their presence in Washington, D.C.,” according to Wise’s LinkedIn Page. He is a veteran of Montana Democratic politics, previously serving as chief of staff to Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT), and a longtime Bullock acquaintance.
“We rely on [Wise] to help coordinate our policy efforts,” the Bullock campaign told PAY DIRT in a statement. “We have a few dozen folks who span a very wide array of experiences who offer policy advice and proposals to Gov. Bullock. Jamie coordinates those efforts as someone with significant ties to the West and experience pursuing progressive policies in a Republican state.”
Since his entry to the race for the White House, the Montana governor has leaned hard on his reputation as a campaign-finance reformer and anti-corruption crusader. “To Bullock, the most urgent issues on voters’ minds—income inequality, climate change, taxes, collective bargaining rights, and more—stem from the lasting influence of moneyed interests,” The Washington Post wrote in a profile this week.
That reputation makes it all the more interesting that Bullock has enlisted the services of a consultant enmeshed in a political-intelligence industry at the nexus of government and the financial-services industry. “The firm has grown to one of DC’s top regulatory-focused investment banks for institutional investors and companies by bridging the gap between Wall Street and DC decision-makers,” Height’s website boasts.
The firm did not respond to questions about the work Wise performed for Bullock, who, as a presidential candidate, has pledged to “break the power of Wall Street and the giant corporations.”
The Bullock campaign said its staffers “don’t interact with anyone at Height” beyond Wise, “and Jamie has signed an agreement with us that his work is specific to the campaign, not his employer.” He worked with Big Sky Values on a volunteer basis, the campaign said, “but we compensate him for his time now and the easiest way to accomplish that was through his current employer.”
Years before Wise joined Height, the firm made headlines after a report it sent to clients ended up spawning a federal insider-trading investigation. The Height alert advised that federal regulators would soon be taking action to benefit private Medicare insurers. Share prices for a number of large insurers spiked, and sure enough, the Department of Health and Human Services announced an increase in Medicare Advantage funding later that day—after the closing bell.
The Securities & Exchange Commission later opened an investigation into the chain of events, and even subpoenaed the House Ways and Means Committee and a senior staffer for the panel. Height was not subpoenaed, though the SEC questioned one of its analysts. The company was not accused of any wrongdoing.
But the controversy created a wave of scrutiny of the political-intelligence industry generally, which some lawmakers portrayed as emblematic of outsize corporate influence in Washington. Such influence is front and center in the Democratic presidential primary, in which numerous candidates frequently decry the sway that wealthy interests ostensibly hold over the policymaking process.
Though he trails other corruption-focused rivals such as Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Bullock has arguably focused more on the issue than any other candidate. At the same time, he has engaged in fundraising practices eschewed by some rivals.
Even as other candidates such as Warren and Sanders decline donations from federal lobbyists, Bullock has accepted their assistance in fundraising for his campaign. And despite his career-long crusade against political “dark money,” some of those same lobbyists represent clients that pour cash into non-disclosing political groups.
Get the data:
