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.
The nation’s biggest annual conservative political gathering is just around the corner, and once again, the conservative nonprofit that organizes it is using the event to promote special-interest agenda items in exchange for five- and six-figure checks.
Sponsorship packages for the Conservative Political Action Conference detail the extensive benefits that come with financial support for the annual D.C.-area confab. For just $12,000, the American Conservative Union, the group that puts on the annual conference, will blast an ad for your organization to its official email list. A $125,000 contribution will get you two marketing emails, six Twitter posts, six Facebook posts, and two logos on the main CPAC stage.
These are just some of the benefits that come with a financial contribution to the ACU conference. But if previous years are any indicator, they just scratch the surface. In the past, sponsors have also enjoyed a far more valuable benefit: the ability to shape the actual programming of the event at pre-CPAC planning sessions available only to financial supporters.
Last year, the Partnership for Fair and Open Skies, a coalition of U.S. airline companies, used its $125,000 “presenting” sponsorship package to land a spot on a CPAC panel for one of its member airlines’ lobbyists.
CPAC programming also tends to overlap with the interests of Matt Schlapp, ACU’s chairman, and the clients he represents through his lobbying firm, Cove Strategies. He lobbied for American Airlines, one of the Partnership’s three member companies, when it decided to sponsor CPAC in 2017. The Motion Picture Association of America was also a Schlapp client when it underwrote the conference three years earlier.
Schlapp has signed four new clients since last year’s conference, so we’ll be watching to see if any of them sponsor CPAC 2019, or if their issues are prominently featured at the event. Here are some issues to keep an eye on this year:
- Immigration: This issue was almost entirely absent from last year’s agenda, even as President Trump pursued it with vigor. But in April, Schlapp’s firm signed a lobbying deal with the Seasonal Employment Alliance, a trade group looking to boost immigrant visas for seasonal non-agricultural workers (the type that Trump’s company employs in droves).
- Trade: Cove signed two clients this year, Samsung Electronics and Cisco Systems, that have reported paying Schlapp’s firm to lobby on trade issues. Cisco is a huge supporter of a pending Trump-backed trade deal with Mexico and Canada, saying it “significantly expands” the North American Free Trade Agreement’s benefits to the company. Samsung, on the other hand, has taken a hit from the Trump administration’s trade war with China.
- 5G spectrum: Though a more obscure issue for the conservative grassroots, two of Schlapp’s new clients, Samsung and Virginia-based Ligado Networks, are paying Cove to lobby on issues related to 5G spectrum availability. The Trump administration is currently putting together a long-term national spectrum strategy. Given the highly technical and esoteric nature of the issue, any attention at CPAC would be noteworthy for Schlapp’s financial stake.
