Boehner Confidant Cashes In on Amnesty

House Speaker John Boehner’s ex-chief of staff Barry Jackson (pictured, right) is now working with the Chamber of Commerce to help its lobbying campaign for comprehensive immigration reform.

“The former chief of staff to Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) is working as a consultant for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce as the big business trade group pushes Congress to enact immigration reform,” Politico reported Monday afternoon. 

While his firm Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck publicly registered to lobby for the chamber on immigration reform in June, Jackson’s involvement was not previously known because he is acting as a non-lobbying adviser. BHFS confirmed Jackson is providing strategic advice and counsel. BHFS’s Elizabeth Maier is leading the firm’s effort while veteran Republican lobbyists Will Moschella and Marc Lampkin are engaged in the day-to-day lobbying effort. BHFS reported billing the chamber $80,000 in lobbying fees in 2013.

This news comes as House GOP leadership – Boehner, Judiciary Committee chairman Bob Goodlatte, Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan, and Majority Leader Eric Cantor – are gearing up for a major immigration push.

Before the end of 2013, Boehner hired the ex-top adviser to Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) Becky Tallent to be his immigration adviser. Boehner’s decision to hire Tallent, a famed immigration operative on Capitol Hill who wrote the bill that McCain and the late Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) failed to pass in 2006, is one that has irked conservatives and Republicans who do not want to grant amnesty to illegal aliens in America.

Since that decision to hire Tallent, Boehner, Goodlatte, Cantor, and Ryan have been working on writing immigration “principles” they plan to push on the House GOP conference at the upcoming retreat in Maryland. 

Those leadership officials have not consulted members in the House GOP conference, something that has prompted many of them to begin working to craft their own “principles” alternative to the ones leadership is writing behind closed doors.