A top Washington lobby firm is changing its contract with a former Iraqi prime minister following consultation with the Justice Department.
Barbour Griffith & Rogers has amended its filing with the department’s Foreign Agent Registration Unit to reflect that the firm is representing the Iraqi National Accord, not just Ayad Allawi, according to an executive with the firm. Allawi is a co-founder of the political party.
“Throughout this process, we have worked closely and cooperatively with Justice officials to ensure that at all times we were meeting the requirements of the [Foreign Agent Registration Act] statute,” a vice president at Barbour Griffith, Walker Roberts, said.
A CNN interview with Allawi, during which the Iraqi said he was not paying for the contract, fueled speculation as to the source of the funding. Observers have seen the contract as a step by Allawi to regain power, particularly given his criticism of Iraq’s current prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki.
Allawi has had a patron before. Dr. Mashal Nawab, a British citizen described in Justice Department records as a “close friend and admirer” of Allawi’s, helped fund the former prime minister’s lobbying contracts in the past.
In addition to Barbour Griffith, several others — lobbyists, lawyers, public relations consultants — have represented Iraqi interests since the U.S. invasion.
According to Justice Department records, the number of U.S.-based firms actively working with Iraqi politicians and government agencies in Washington went from two in 2002 to 11 in 2004. Consequently, revenue jumped more than $300,000 in 2002, to more than $2 million in 2004.
“It was likely because at that point, in the immediate aftermath of the liberation of Iraq, U.S. and Iraqi interests were aligned; they were parallel,” a managing director at KRL International LLC, Riva Levinson, wrote in an e-mail.
Barbour Griffith has represented Kurdish interests for years, utilizing Ambassador Robert Blackwill, a former Bush administration presidential envoy to Iraq, and Andrew Parasiliti, once a foreign policy adviser to Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.)
Yet some D.C. firms, seeing a new market open up at the war’s beginning in 2003, have found difficulty in representing Iraqi groups.
J.C. Watts Companies, known for its work representing African governments, saw opportunities in Iraq, according to its chief executive, Elroy Sailor. But cost, safety issues and the conflict’s divisive politics proved to be too much of a deterrent to conduct business there.
“Half of the people are going to like what you are doing,” Sailor said. “Half of the other people are not going to like what you are doing, and that impacts your brand.”
Various factions within Iraq have brought their message to American policymakers, but the Kurds have established the most solid presence on K Street. The Kurdish regional government signed up several new firms around the turn of the year, even opening up a liaison office.
Of the country’s political groups, Iraq’s government has spent the most money, more than $12 million so far, for legal services from Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton in helping to restructure its debt, according to Justice Department records.
With help from a Michigan-based firm, Tariq al-Hashemi, Iraq’s Sunni vice president, has criticized al-Maliki, like Allawi has in the last month. He wrote an op-ed for The Washington Post this winter and also e-mailed comments critical of the prime minister to top administration officials, such as Meghan O’Sullivan, a deputy national security advisor for Iraq and Afghanistan.
In the series of e-mails over the last year, Hashemi, through his lobbyist in America, wrote that the prime minister could not “control the security situation” and described his government as “weakening.”
Hashemi’s lobbyist, Muthanna al-Hanooti, president of Focus on Advocacy & Advancement of International Relations, wrote in an e-mail to The Hill that the problems with al-Maliki involved his “exclusionary nature” and that he was more loyal “to the sect [Shiite] and his party than anything else.”
Al-Hanooti was representing the Iraq Tawafuq Front, or the Iraq Accordance Front — a coalition of Sunni political parties. The contract was cancelled in April due to “lack of funds,” according to al-Hanooti.
Al-Hashemi, a very public critic of the prime minister, has seen some of his coalition’s Cabinet ministers quit al-Maliki’s government.
Other lobbyists are working with nonprofit groups operating in Iraq. An expert adviser to the Iraq Study Group, Levinson represents the Iraq Memory Foundation, a U.S. nonprofit that is cataloguing crimes by former members of Saddam Hussein’s regime.
Greg Gill and others at his firm, Cassidy & Associates, are representing the Iraqi Red Crescent organization, a humanitarian organization working to resolve the country’s refugee crisis.
“I was opposed to the war, but I was not opposed to helping refugees,” Gill, an executive vice president, said.
Cassidy lobbyists are trying to secure a visa for one of the group’s leaders. The firm hopes to bring its three top officials — a Sunni, a Shiite and a Kurd — for an autumn visit to federal agencies, Capitol Hill and the United Nations.
The firm is lobbying Congress for more funding for agencies, such as the U.S. Agency for International Development, that give out foreign aid to organizations such as the Iraqi group.
Gill sees his work as helping the next logical step for the U.S. presence in Iraq.
“The major challenge has been to focus on the refugee crisis, instead of the war,” the lobbyist said. “The question is what happens when we pull out.”
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