Obama transition tangled in ties to lobbying

Even Mr. Lu, the transition’s executive director charged with policing potential conflicts of interests, may have his own appearance problems. His wife, Kathryn Thomson, is a lawyer who represents corporate clients dealing with federal environmental regulations, while his older brother, Curtis Lu, is a top lawyer for Fannie Mae. (Such family connections may not be disqualifying conflicts depending on the nature of the transition job, ethics lawyers said.)

Mr. Lu has his work cut out for him in deciding which apparent conflicts may be of real concern, said Robert Walker, a Washington lawyer and former staff director of the Senate Ethics Committee. “I don’t think it is the brightest of bright lines, and there is going to be a lot of time spent thinking about just where that line is,” Mr. Walker said.

The people involved in the transition teams assigned to each federal department and agency have begun meeting with their current staff to collect information on budgets, pending issues and personnel matters. For now, the advisers assigned to each agency report back to the central 12-person working group, which coordinates the efforts.

The vast majority involved are second-tier officials of the Clinton administration, eager to help another Democrat take control of the White House. With the exception of a few academics, almost all of them spent the intervening years in the private sector, usually capitalizing on the connections and expertise they developed in the Clinton years.

For example, Sandy Berger, the Clinton national security adviser, founded Stonebridge International, a consulting and lobbying firm focused on helping clients resolve government issues here and overseas.

Mr. Berger took with him Mr. Warren, the former executive director of the president’s economic council who became chief operating officer of Stonebridge and has now become a major contributor to the transition in the pivotal areas of the Treasury Department and economic policy. Although not a registered lobbyist, Mr. Warren helped manage Stonebridge while it lobbied the government for clients including the U.S.-India Business Council within the last year as well as Dynergy International, Airbus and Conoco in earlier years. (More of Stonebridge’s business involves using government expertise and connections to help corporate clients abroad.)

Some transition officials now work at firms that do business with the agencies they are examining. John O. Brennan, a former Central Intelligence Agency official working on its transition, is president and chief executive of the Analysis Corporation, an intelligence contractor.

On the NASA review board, Lori Garver is now president of a strategic consulting company, Capital Space LLC, and previously worked for the aerospace company DFI International.

Among the transition officials charged with reviewing the Securities and Exchange Commission — likely to come under significant scrutiny amid the financial meltdown — is Mozelle Thompson, who runs a legal and policy consulting business for publicly traded companies including Facebook.com. One name on the transition list comes unencumbered by potential conflicts but instead by bad luck. Jami Miscik, leading a review of American intelligence agencies, was the head of intelligence analysis at the Central Intelligence Agency during its biggest embarrassment: the botched assessments about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Then she moved on to become a senior official managing risks in emerging markets for the investment bank Lehman Brothers, until its collapse this fall.

Kitty Bennett, Mark T. Mazzetti and Barclay Walsh contributed reporting for this article.

This story, "In Transition, Tangle of Ties to Lobbying," originally appeared in the New York Times.

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