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A prominent Trumpworld lobbyist and former campaign adviser is running a new pro-Trump political group out of the offices of his lobbying firm, PAY DIRT has learned.
Ed Brookover, a partner at the firm Avenue Strategies, formed We Are Great Again last summer, and has been organizing telemarketing and letter-writing campaigns designed to boost President Donald Trump’s legislative agenda and position him for re-election next year.
What exactly the group has been up to is a bit of a mystery, as it hasn’t yet filed legally required financial-disclosure reports with the Federal Election Commission, despite a pair of reminders from the FEC last year. Brookover said that was an oversight, and that the group is currently rectifying its standing with the FEC.
Brookover told PAY DIRT that WAGA has raised just over $250,000 from nearly 4,000 donors since its creation in July.
Like Avenue co-founders Barry Bennett and Corey Lewandowski (who left the firm in 2017), Brookover is a former aide to Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Since then, he’s helped build a lobbying practice at Avenue that relies, in large part, on its access to, insight into, and ability to affect the workings of the Trump administration.
It’s fairly standard for former aides to prominent politicians to cash in on their ties to those politicians. But it’s far less common for them do so while they form and run political groups expressly devoted to advancing the political prospects of the policymakers on whose favor they trade.
WAGA isn’t just run by an Avenue executive. Officially, at least, it’s based in the firm’s downtown D.C. office, which is listed as the PAC’s address in FEC documentation. Those documents also list its treasurer as Ryan Newsome, Avenue’s chief operations officer.
Brookover said the PAC has no official affiliation with Avenue despite that staff overlap, and that he created it simply to help re-elect the president he supports. Though the group is currently focused primarily on issue advocacy—it has run pressure campaigns and raised funds through calls to crack down on illegal immigration and support the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, for instance—Brookover said that he expects it to focus more on explicit politicking as the 2020 race heats up.
Due to its lack of FEC filings, the sources of funds supporting those efforts are at present unknowable.
Avenue, for its part, is bringing in revenue from a number of domestic and foreign lobbying clients. It represents Citgo, the American arm of Venezuela’s state-owned oil company; an Oregon hazelnut grower; and the governments of Qatar and the Democratic Republic of Congo. It’s unclear if WAGA itself is an Avenue client.
WAGA was officially formed on July 16, 2018, and almost immediately began soliciting donations through its website. Over the weekend, WAGA expanded that fundraising campaign to Facebook. Since Saturday, the group has purchased more than 150 ads on the platform that directs users to a donation page on its website. That page offers numerous perks to its donors, including “access to invite-only monthly Tele-Townhall Conference calls with notable Republican strategists” and “publication of quarterly Op-Ed to all social media and partner media outlets.”
Brookover said those conference calls have not yet begun. Asked which Republican strategists might take part, he said “You’re speaking to one of them.”
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