The following article by Lachlan Markay was posted on the Daily Beast website November 2, 2017:
The president’s team insists that progress has been made. Good government groups say the exact opposite has occurred.
To hear the White House tell it, Donald Trump is ushering in a new era of good government. Aides point to the downfall this week of a leading Democratic lobbyist and the lower spending on lobbying in general as evidence that influence peddling and backroom dealing are increasingly relics.
But if you scratch beneath the surface just a little bit, these White House claims fall apart.
The truth, argues Brendan Fischer, the directors of federal reform programs at the watchdog group Campaign Legal Center, is that “despite Trump’s drain the swamp rhetoric the swamp has only grown deeper.”
The dispute came to the fore this week when President Donald Trump appeared to suggest that the fallout over a scandal ensnaring his former campaign chairman was actually a sign of apparent success in his swamp-draining efforts.
Paul Manafort, the former chairman, was accused by the Justice Department his week of illegally lobbying on behalf of foreign governments and laundering the money through offshore shell corporations. The indictment handed down against him and his deputy, former Trump campaign official Rick Gates, implicated the Podesta Group, a powerhouse Washington lobbying firm.
Within a day of the indictment, Tony Podesta, the firm’s principal, had resigned. The firm then announced that it would rebrand, as a means of distancing itself from its founder, who started the Podesta Group with his brother, Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, in the late 1980s.
In a day of very bad developments for the Trump administration, the Podesta news gave the president an opportunity to crow. “He and his brother,” John and Tony Podesta, “could Drain The Swamp, which would be yet another campaign promise fulfilled,” Trump tweeted.