We’ve said it before: One result of the Citizens United case is that lobbyists will have new power. Whether real or implied, lobbyists can threaten members of Congress and their staff to do their bidding or face the consequences of a barrage of anonymous, negative campaign ads. And now, thanks to an informal survey by Public Citizen, we know that staffers on Capitol Hill agree.

The survey was not scientific, but one response to an open-ended question provides an honest assessment of the concern.

“The prospect of a massive donation to an outside organization that would run ads against my boss and not have any identifying information about who is behind them has a chilling effect on our decision-making.” 

The split between Democrats’ and Republicans’ responses to the survey is telling. Could Republican staffers be less concerned about the impact of undisclosed campaign expenditures because, at least in 2010, those expenditures tilted heavily in favor of their bosses?

To see who wields power in Washington, voters need to be able to connect the dots. But the dots only appear with better disclosure. Anonymous corporate campaign expenditures should not be a lobbyist’s secret weapon.

AT&T is already the second largest mobile phone operator in the country and is looking to get bigger through a merger with T-Mobile, the fourth biggest mobile operator. That merger will be the focus of a hearing held by Sen. Herb Kohl, D-Wisc., in the Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights. In preparation of scrutiny from Congress and the Justice Department AT&T is spending big on lobbying and campaign contributions.

In the first three months of this year AT&T has already spent $6.84 million lobbying the federal government. That is 44 percent of the amount they spent during the entirety of 2010. In addition, the phone giant's political action committee spread $616,500 to lawmakers and political parties, according to a Sunlight analysis covering January through March of 2011.

The Senate Office of Public Records shows 31 lobbying firms registering lobbying activity for AT&T, including four new registrations, all to lobby on the merger, this year.

One of those newly registered firms is Peck, Madigan, one of Washington's biggest lobbying firms. The former staff director of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which is hosting today's hearing, and the former chief of staff to committee member Sen. Amy Klobuchar are both registered with Peck, Madigan to lobby for AT&T.

The AT&T lobbying team also includes six former members of Congress. Two of those former members, Trent Lott and John Breaux, hold one of the most expensive lobbying contracts with AT&T at $120,000 from January through March.

The AT&T/T-Mobile merger has been controversial as it would consolidate 80 percent of the mobile market in just two companies--AT&T and Verizon.

Much of the opposition to the merger has come from Sprint Nextel, currently the third largest mobile provider. An official statement from Sprint Nextel stated, "If approved, the proposed acquisition would create a combined company that would be almost three times the size of Sprint in terms of wireless revenue and would entrench AT&T’s and Verizon’s duopoly control over the wireless market."

Sprint Nextel's lobbying spending barely registers when compared to AT&T's. Sprint spent $583,000 lobbying from January through March or less than one-tenth of AT&T's lobbying expenses. There are currently nine lobbying firms registered to lobby for Sprint. (As mentioned above, there 31 lobbying firms registered with AT&T.)

Today's hearing will feature testimony by the CEOs of AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint Nextel.

The Sunlight Foundation will be covering the hearing through the Sunlight Live platform. The hearing will begin at 10:15 am.

Norm Coleman has decided to join the cadre of former senators now employed as “senior advisers” for Washington lobby shops. We call his ilk non-lobbyist lobbyists. Tom Daschle is the poster child for this group of important influence peddlers in Washington who, due to a quirk in the law, don’t register as lobbyists or report their activities. Others include recent exiles from Congress such as Evan Bayh, Bob Bennett and Gordon Smith.

But what makes Coleman special is that in addition to his role as a non-lobbyist lobbyist, he is the chairman of the American Action Network, a 501(c)(4) group that shielded donors from disclosure while spending $20 million on electioneering ads during last year’s election.

As the chairman of AAN, Coleman knows who donated money to ad campaigns that favored conservative candidates. The public doesn’t. As a non-lobbyist lobbyist, Coleman knows whose interests he represents before Congress. The public doesn’t. He can encourage his corporate clients at his new firm to contribute to ANN. He can decide the political races in which ANN will run ads. He can let his former Senate colleagues know that, either as a favor or as a threat, AAN will spend heavily for or against their re-election campaigns.

Efforts to uncover dark money contributions to elections through legislation failed. Even a modest effort by the Obama administration to require disclosure of dark money by government contractors is being met with vigorous opposition by groups representing corporate donors.

Efforts to uncover more about lobbying activity have only just begun. (You can receive updates to Sunlight’s work on lobbying disclosure here.) The case of Norm Coleman illustrates that when hidden money collides with undisclosed influence a handful of moneyed interests enjoy the benefits while the rest of us are left in the dark.

Merchants, retailers, and their trade associations have arrayed a team of former government officials turned lobbyists in one of 2011's biggest lobbying battles as banks and credit unions seek to overturn part of the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill. According to data compiled from the Senate Office of Public Records and the Center for Responsive Politics, merchants and retailers lobbying in support of debit interchange fees rules employed 124 lobbyists with previous government experience.

The Federal Reserve has proposed rules to set limits on the amount that banks can charge retailers every time a customer uses a debit card for a purchase, known as debit interchange fees. These fees, set by electronic networks, including VISA and MasterCard, provide big profits to banks and diminish returns for retailers, often leading to rising prices for consumers.

Retailers lobbied hard to get a limit on interchange fees included in the Dodd-Frank bill and succeeded when retail ally Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., offered an amendment, which was adopted, to the bill requiring the Federal Reserve to write rules governing the fees. The Fed released their rule earlier this year. Much to the dismay of banks and electronic network operators the Fed rules capped interchange fees at 12 cents per swipe, or a more than 70 percent reduction in fees.

Banks and their allies--payment networks and credit unions--have swamped Capitol Hill with lobbyists and the retailers and merchants, including Wal-Mart, have done the same.

Major members of the Electronic Payments Coalition, the chief organizing vehicle for the banks opposed to the fee rules, have hired 118 former government officials to lobby and made at least $500,000 in political action committee (PAC) contributions to members of Congress.

Retailers and merchants have largely organized through the Merchant's Payments Coalition. Organizations listed as members of the Merchant's Payments Coalition, all of whom are trade associations, accounted for half of the 124 revolving door lobbyists hired by retailers and merchants. The other half come from supporting companies including Wal-Mart, Home Depot, 7-11, and Best Buy.

Below you'll find a table listing all the revolving door lobbyists affiliated with the retailers and merchants. These are all lobbyists who were specifically listed as lobbying on debit interchange fee rules on their lobbying disclosure forms for 2010 or 2011. Revolving door lobbyists affiliated with the Electronic Payments Coalition can be found here.

A coalition of banks, credit unions, and electronic payment networks have hired a vast team of lobbyists that includes 118 former government officials as they aim to derail the implementation of rules governing the price charged to retail businesses by banks and credit unions every time a customer uses a debit card to pay.

The Electronic Payments Coalition is opposed to a new rule proposed by the Federal Reserve that would cap debit interchange fees, the cost per debit card swipe charged to retailers, at 12 cents per swipe. This would amount to a 70 percent reduction in the fee, a boon for retailers and cut in profits for banks.

The lobbying operation consists of some of the biggest names in Washington and keeps growing. Already this year coalition members have registered with five new lobbying firms to lobby on the interchange rules. FIRST Group, Hollier & Associates, and Cornerstone Government Relations are all registered as lobbying for Visa, Covington & Burling is registered with Wells Fargo, and SNR Denton is registered with the Independent Community Bankers Association.

A Sunlight Foundation report from earlier this week showed that the political action committees of coalition members have contributed $500,000 to lawmakers over the first two months of this year.

Below is a chart of all revolving door lobbyists for Electronic Payments Coalition members that were listed as registered to lobby on debit interchange fee rules in either 2010 or 2011:

The recent outpouring of revulsion over Maine's state of transparency including criticism from governor LePage's own and our call for open government, have led to some positive change. But with every step forward, the state seems to take two backwards and any attempt at opening up its government has been received with counter productive actions, most of which created by its governor. Now, there is a possibility that a new proposed legislation, coupled with citizen demand for accountability will turn a fresh page for LaPage's state.

• A new bill to improve Maine transparency has been introduced. Sponsored by Senator John Patrick, the LD1260 will subject the governor elect's transition team to Freedom of Access laws. It will also impose a one year waiting ban on lobbying activities for former public officials and add economic provisions that indicate a possible conflict of interest for a lobbyist. Gerald Weinand analyzes the issue of transition teams which are not considered part of any government body and are therefore not subject to FOAA requests. See who is classified as a former lobbyist and a former legislator on Dirigo Blue.

• Maine Governor Paul LePage, who likened  the Freedom of Access Law to internal terrorism, has replaced the citizen Board of Environmental Protection with administrative law judges in order to limit citizens access to state decision-makers. For Sharon Treat, a state legislator, this decision could not have come at a worse time. Treat writes that part of this new provision revives “concept drafts” which are given to the state legislature to summarize a new bill without providing an opportunity for the public to contribute their input. See how Treat is trying to change this trend on From the North.

• Chicago’s Inspector General, Joe Ferguson, has introduced a new initiative to make the city more transparent. “Open Chicago” will be hosted on the recently redesigned Office of Inspector General’s website and will provide a better understanding of city government for the public while increasing effectiveness in the city’s operations. As a way of showing initial compliance to the IGO’s office, Open Chicago has already posted its collective bargaining agreements and Andy Shaw shares that it will periodically update its website with new datasets. Read more on the Shaw Blog

• One year after the fatal West Virginia mine accident that killed 29 miners, Jon Hale examines the lessons learned. Explaining an investigation of public records that revealed that authorities were late in responding to calls for help, Hale writes that a detailed report showing regulatory oversight and failed government inspections will soon be available for the public. On the bright side, the unfortunate incident lead to an increase in unannounced impact inspections with 39 already conducted in Kentucky and 32 in West Virginia. Read more about mine safety and open government on the Rural Blog. (For more on the relationship between the West Virginia mining accident and open data check out a video we produced last year shortly after the blast.)

• An additional open government section has been added to the New York Open Meetings Law . The Public Officers Law means that any meeting of a public body will be open to being recorded or photographed by New Yorkers but Justin Mosebach feels that for better transparency, the public officials should take the initiative and record the meetings themselves and make them public, making it more difficult for people to use public information out of context. See how he explains it on Video Minutes.

• Lobbyists in Florida will no longer conduct back-room business deals. According to Brittany Wallman, every lobbyist who meets with a Broward County public official will now be required to log into the county employee visitors’ list with details of who they are meeting. Get introduced to the county’s Open government website on Broward Politics.

The New York Times ran a story today on the nuclear industry's lobbying efforts over the past decade to revive the industry. The lobbying and PR campaign has been brilliant and effectively catapulted the nuclear industry into the discussion of clean energy in Washington that brought both parties together on a pro-nuclear consensus. That consensus looks to be fraying after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor disaster currently unfolding in Japan.

The Times story cites and links to a story I wrote earlier this week, so I thought I'd share some of the data directly. Here's the relevant Times quote:

And the industry has spent tens of millions more lately on lobbying. Last year, electric utilities, trade groups and other backers spent $54 million hiring lobbyists, including former members of Congress, to make their case, according to a separate analysis by the Sunlight Foundation, which also tracks money and politics.

And here's the relevant quote from my post:

An analysis of the lobbying expenses of electric utilities operating a majority of the nation’s nuclear reactors and the main industry trade group show a doubling on lobbying spending since 2004. The industry’s lobbying jumped from $27 million prior to the nuclear-friendly Energy Act of 2005 to nearly $54 million in 2010.

In collecting this data I looked at the thirteen major companies operating nuclear reactors and the main industry trade group, the Nuclear Energy Institute. Some reactors are operated by government cooperatives or the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), so these were excluded. I also had to exclude Pacific Gas & Electric because they file their lobbying disclosure reports in a dramatically different way than the other utilities. Including PG&E's numbers would have wildly skewed the data upwards.

PG&E reported spending over $45 million on lobbying in 2010. Only a small fraction of this number was actually spent on lobbying the federal government. The rest was spent on state-level lobbying and campaigns against propositions they opposed. PG&E does list, as a note, a separate amount for federal lobbying on their quarterly filings, however, this is not consistent for the number of years that I covered in reviewing the nuclear industry's lobbying.

Anyway, here's the list of companies and trade group that I looked at and their lobbying spending year over year. (All data came from the Center for Responsive Politics):

When it comes to money in politics, Sunlight's Poligraft helps you see the relationships between organizations and the people in power through data collected from its sister project: TransparencyData.com. Another notable organization that tracks money in politics is OpenSecrets.org. With a concise mission to inform citizens, empower voters and advocate for a transparent and responsive government, the organization has garnered acknowledgment for their work. Now continuing the transparency movement is a new project that has been created to, as Stacy Donohue, director of investments at Omidyar Network, puts it  "bring attention to the nation's statehouses".

• The National Institute on Money in State politics (a Sunlight grantee) has started a new project that will involve hiring political reporters in every state capital to rank states for their “susceptibility to corruption”. The State Accountability project is funded by the Omidyar Network through the Center for Public Integrity, Public Radio International and Global Integrity. Read more as Anne Sherwood explains how the project will create online reporting and technology tools to empower citizens to demand for better accountability from their state officials. Its all on Follow the Money.

• The Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy, a free-market think tank in New Hampshire, has launched a new website for the state’s checkbook. NHOpenGov.org is a free, searchable online database that shows details of the state’s spending. Grant Bosse blogs that the website is funded by private donations with information collected through public records requests from official state sources. Check out how the think tank’s transparency director, Josh Elliott-Traficante, is giving the website a nod of approval on the New Hampshire Watchdog.

• Providence, Rhode Island has approved a new ordinance that will require anyone lobbying on behalf of a cause or business to identify themselves as such. Also included in the new ordinance is the requirement that lobbyists register with City Hall and file quarterly reports. Richard Dujardin writes that City Council president  Michael Solomon believes that, although other states may have requirements for lobbyists to register, Providence is certainly among the first cities to actually implement the law. See which lobbyists will be exempted from this new ordinance at the Projo 7 to 7 News Blog.

• Governor Rick Scott has responded to Florida’s struggle with transparency by creating a new website with searchable information on state payroll and retirement records. The website, Florida has a Right to Know contains information of all state employee salaries, though Bob Shaw notes that searches for the Governor's staff came up blank. Is this a half-hearted attempt at being transparent, from the governor whose closing remark on the website is “We will be better if you hold us accountable”? Find out at the Central Florida Political Pulse.

• Now here is an example of how good sunshine laws can help fight corruption: Samantha Swindler, a former news editor of the Times Tribune in Kentucky, noticed a discrepancy in record-keeping in the Whitley County Sheriff’s office and immediately got on it. When she appealed to the state attorney general for open records on the Sheriff’s office, she discovered that the Sheriff was not only selling guns in his barber shop, but also did not record any of these transactions. Caleb Brown shares more about this citizen investigation into public office misconduct using open records on Blue Grass Policy blog.
• Tom Jones, the former spokesman and policy-maker for Shelby County in Tennessee, is asking the Shelby County Legislative Delegation to oppose a proposal to close some public records - pushed mainly by companies looking for government incentives. In his post - “a solution in search of a problem” - he explores keeping the balance between special interests and government while doing away with the culture of secrecy that benefits special interests at the expense of the American people. Smart City Memphis blog has details.

In his final State of the Union address President Jimmy Carter dedicated five paragraphs to a discussion of nuclear energy and safety. It would take twenty-four years before another President discussed nuclear energy in a State of the Union again. Since then, no State of the Union has been without a call to build more nuclear plants.

This period, stretching from the middle of the first decade of the 21st century to now, has been referred to as the “nuclear renaissance.” Republicans and Democrats have both supported the construction of new nuclear power plants. This cross-party agreement, and the so-called “nuclear renaissance,” may come apart as the crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan continues.

On March 11 the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant suffered major damage from a 9.0 earthquake and the ensuing tsunami. In the following days the plant’s condition has deteriorated dramatically. Evidence has emerged of partial meltdowns in three reactors at the plant. Explosions have occurred at three reactors, while a fire broke out at a fourth. A small, dedicated group of workers remains at the site in an attempt to avoid a full meltdown at the plant. Traces of radioactivity are being found as far as Tokyo, although not at harmful levels yet.

As public opinion on nuclear energy collapses, the nuclear industry’s lobbyists in Washington have begun to take their case to lawmakers.

According to BusinessWeek, the Nuclear Energy Institute and lobbyists for Exelon have held meetings with lawmakers and staff on Capitol Hill on March 14 to explain that reactors in the United States “can withstand disasters such as the earthquake and tsunami that crippled nuclear reactors in Japan.”

Having invested large sums of money in lobbying and campaign contributions over the past seven years, the industry is not without its share of allies.

Lobbying, PAC Contributions

An analysis of the lobbying expenses of electric utilities operating a majority of the nation’s nuclear reactors and the main industry trade group show a doubling on lobbying spending since 2004. The industry’s lobbying jumped from $27 million prior to the nuclear-friendly Energy Act of 2005 to nearly $54 million in 2010.

Not all of this lobbying has been directly focused on growing the nuclear industry, but the key bills spurring much of the lobbying activity have included major government support for nuclear power plant growth.

The industry’s lobbying team is filled with former government officials, sixty-eight percent of them, including twelve former congressmen. Among them, former Sens. Trent Lott and John Breaux lobby for Entergy, former Rep. Dick Gephardt works for Progress Energy, and former Sen. Don Nickles holds Southern Co. as a client.

These connections undoubtedly help connect industry policy priorities to the congressional process drafting legislation on energy and climate issues.

Over the same period, the industry increased its spending on campaign contributions through political action committees (PAC). According to data obtained from TransparencyData.com, contributions increased from $3.5 million in the 2004 cycle to approximately $4.5 million in both the 2008 and 2010 cycles.

These contributions, while favoring Republicans overall, track closely with party control of Congress and the White House. Industry contributions did not shift to the Democrats until after the 2008 cycle swept the party into the White House and large majorities in both the House and the Senate.

Much of the shift to Democratic campaigns came as President Barack Obama had promised to overhaul the nation’s energy policy with legislation aimed at reducing fossil fuel use to mitigate the effects of climate change. This would include increased support for nuclear energy.

The new Democratic president’s push for more nuclear energy came after the nation’s biggest nuclear power company strongly backed his candidacy.

Illinois-based Exelon was one of the biggest corporate backers of then-Sen. Obama’s 2008 presidential run. The company’s director, John W. Rogers, served on Obama’s finance committee and bundled $193,598 to the Illinois senator’s campaign, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Rogers also sat on the president’s Inaugural Committee and donated $50,000 to the 2009 Inauguration. ComEd CEO Frank Clark bundled $75,100 in contributions to the Obama presidential campaign. (ComEd is a subsidiary of Exelon.)

Former White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel made millions when he joined an investment bank in Chicago and shepherded through the merger deal between PECO Energy and Unicom that created Exelon.

Exelon operates seventeen nuclear reactors in the United States, the most of any company in the nation.

Focus on legislation, subsidies

While the industry has touted the “nuclear renaissance” there have always remained concerns of cost overruns in the construction of new plants. Alleviating this problem through loan guarantees, which some describe as subsidies, has been the key policy that Congress and two presidents sought to implement to help increase the country’s nuclear capacity.

In 2005, Congress enacted and President George W. Bush signed the Energy Policy Act of 2005. The Energy Policy Act included $18.5 billion in loan guarantees for companies building new nuclear reactors. This was the first foray in government policy to aid the nuclear industry during the “renaissance” period.

During the first two years of the Obama administration energy companies focused on the attempt by Congress and the White House to rewrite the nation’s energy policy with a focus the reduction of fossil fuel use and the increase in renewable, or non-emitting, forms of energy production. The White House made it very clear that this would include nuclear energy.

The President’s budget has included an increase in loan guarantees for nuclear construction in both his FY 2011 and FY 2012 budgets. The proposal would add $36 billion to the program’s already existing $18.5 billion. This priority for the industry has remained stalled in the budget morass of Congress since it was first proposed in 2010. The administration, however, has tapped the $18.5 billion loan guarantee fund to back two new reactors to be built at the Southern Co. operating plant in Georgia.

In 2009 the House of Representatives passed a bill to create a cap and trade system for carbon pricing that also included substantial investment in renewable energy. The Nuclear Energy Institute praised the House’s passage of the bill for “the inclusion of provisions promoting greater use of clean-energy technologies, including nuclear energy.” The climate bill, and spending to increase the nation’s nuclear capacity, ultimately stalled in the Senate.

Post-Fukushima

The future for the nuclear industry suddenly looks far more difficult than the one policy makers saw just two years ago. While the president and congressional Republicans remain dedicated to increasing nuclear power in the country others, some who have supported nuclear energy recently, are calling for a review of all current and future reactors.

The first wary comment came from Sen. Joe Lieberman, who had worked on a Senate energy bill in recent years and supported more funding for nuclear expansion, “I don’t want to stop the building of new nuclear power plants, but I think we’ve got to quietly, quickly put the brakes on until we can absorb what has happened in Japan as a result of the earthquake and the tsunami and then see what more, if anything, we can demand of the new power plants that are coming on line.”

Last week Senate Democrats on the Environment and Public Works Committee questioned Nuclear Regulatory Commission chairman Gregory Jaczko over safety at plants in the United States. Sen. Frank Lautenberg voiced concerns later echoed by other members of the committee, “We’ve got an inferno in front of us and we have to make sure that we do whatever we can to stop it.”

Jaczko has promised a full review of nuclear reactors.

Secretary of Energy Steven Chu has acknowledged that there will be a review of reactors and that the future siting of new reactors may change due to concerns about natural disasters. Chu told Fox News, “Certainly where you site reactors and where we site reactors going forward will be different than where we might have sited them in the past, I would say."

As winter has turned to a democratic spring in the Arab world, the Kingdom of Bahrain has found itself swept up in the region wide protests. Protesters in the country, largely composed of the nation's Shiite majority, took to the streets in February to call on King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa, a member of country's Sunni minority, to institute a constitutional monarchy. The peaceful protests were met with an initial crackdown  as protesters were swept out from their encampment in the capital's Pearl Square by an armed police force.

After attempts at discussions, and a brief détente, between the protesters and the government, the King decided to reach out to the Saudi monarchy, a Sunni ruling class in a country with a sizeable Shiite minority, to send their military into Bahrain to end the protests. The King framed the ensuing crackdown in sectarian terms, blaming Shiite Iranian agents for fomenting rebellion in the island kingdom. What has followed has been a brutal crackdown largely captured on YouTube for the world to see.

While the world may watch the murder of unarmed protesters on YouTube, Bahrain is hiring a U.S. PR team to spin events to their benefit. Last Tuesday, day after Saudi troops entered Bahrain to repress protests calling for a constitutional monarchy, a new foreign agent registered for the government of Bahrain. (Update: The contract between Potomac Square Group and Bahrain was signed on February 17, not March 15. This pre-dates the Saudi incursion into Bahrain.) Potomac Square Group, run by former journalist Chris Cooper, registered to do PR work for the Bahraini government at the most controversial moment in the country's recent history.

Cooper is a former Wall Street Journal national and foreign correspondent. The Potomac Square Group is a new firm formed in February of this year and incorporated in Delaware. A LinkedIn profile lists Cooper's work history as well as a description of his work at the Potomac Square Group, which currently does not have a web presence, "Founding parter of a public affairs boutique. Clients include a foreign government seeking help in dealing with an internal crisis."

The Potomac Square Group's work for Bahrain is set by a monthly contract worth $20,000 that client can choose to renew after the first month.

While the Potomac Square Group is the most recent registrant for Bahrain, they are not the country's only PR firm in the United States. Qorvis Communications, one of Washington's biggest PR firms, inked a deal with the island kingdom last year. The firm offered the kingdom's most recent spin on the protest crackdown in a press release highlighting statements made by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, while omitting her statement that the government was "on the wrong track."

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton today emphasized the commitment of the United States toward Bahrain and her hope for the success of the National Dialogue in the island kingdom. She also affirmed the "sovereign right" of Bahrain to invite security forces from allied countries, and stated that the U.S. shared the goals of the GCC regarding Bahrain.

Since the uprising in Bahrain began, Bahrain's Crown Prince has called on all parties to engage in a dialogue to reconcile differences. Secretary Clinton said the goal of the United States is "a credible political process that can address the legitimate aspirations of all the people of Bahrain."

Ambassador Houda Nonoo appreciated the Secretary's comments that dialogue should unfold in a peaceful, positive atmosphere that ensures that students can go to school, businesses can operate and people can undertake their normal daily activities. Said Ambassador Nonoo, "The government of Bahrain has consistently maintained that differences should be resolved peacefully around the negotiating table, but unfortunately, the opposition has not responded to this offer and instead has chosen to continue along the path of violence and disruption of normal life in Bahrain. It is my government's belief that wisdom will prevail among the opposition and they will come to the negotiating table to resolve all differences peacefully."

Qorvis' work with Bahrain began a month before an election in the country, which featured the arrest of prominent Shiite clerics and a very favorable outcome for the ruling family.

The United States has long had good relations with Bahrain. The Navy's Fifth Fleet is currently stationed in Bahrain and the two countries have formed close economic ties.

Qorvis is not only contracted with Bahrain, but with the Saudi government as well. The company's representation of the Saudi monarchy was controversial when they signed the contract in 2002. After the 9/11 attacks and revelations that Saudi money flowed to Al Qaeda, the global terror network that executed the attacks, the contract to spin U.S. media and policy makers for the Saudi monarchy was not met well. Three of Qorvis' partners quit in protest.

Recently, Qorvis' work for Saudi Arabia has involved providing advice, preparing press releases, and helping the nation connect to social media. The company's foreign agent statement from last fall states that Qorvis worked to assist "with developing content for the YouTube and Twitter pages."