Send tips | Subscribe here | Email Alex | Email Tina Welcome to POLITICO’s West Wing Playbook, your guide to the people and power centers in the Biden administration. With help from Allie Bice. JEFF RICCHETTI gets all the attention. But two former Biden aides turned lobbyists have also seen demand for their services skyrocket, while attracting much less scrutiny. CHRIS PUTALA , a former Judiciary Committee aide to Biden while he was the committee’s chairman, has added a dozen new clients since November. He lobbied the White House on behalf of 16 clients in the second quarter, including Comcast, Oracle and T-Mobile, according to disclosure filings. Putala’s one-man firm brought in $930,000 in lobbying revenue in the second quarter of this year — three times what it earned in the second quarter of last year. The drug lobby Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America hired Putala Strategies in June and paid $20,000 for a month of work, which included lobbying the White House and the Senate on issues such as drug pricing and importation — priorities for Biden and his party that the pharmaceutical industry has fiercely opposed. The lobbying firm theGROUP, where the former Biden aide SUDAFI HENRY is a partner, has also picked up more than a dozen new clients since Biden’s election, including Lyft, Intuit and Everytown for Gun Safety Action Fund, former New York Mayor MICHAEL BLOOMBERG’s gun violence prevention nonprofit. The firm’s lobbying revenues in the second quarter were more than double what it earned in the second quarter of last year. The firm also employs KWABENA NSIAH, a former chief of staff to CEDRIC RICHMOND, the former Louisiana congressman who now serves as the White House’s director of public engagement. He also worked for Health and Human Services Secretary XAVIER BECERRA when Becerra was in Congress. There aren’t many former Biden staffers on K Street, considering how long Biden’s been in Washington, and several of the most prominent worked for Biden while he was in the Senate rather than in the vice president’s office. Instead, the most talked-about K Street hire of the Biden era, Jeff Ricchetti, has drawn scrutiny for his connection to one of Biden’s top aides: STEVE RICCHETTI, his brother and former lobbying partner. Jeff Richetti has been profiled in The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal as his lobbying income has soared thanks to new clients like Amazon. (Both brothers have said they don’t talk to each other about their work, and disclosures show that Jeff Ricchetti has stopped lobbying the White House after doing so in the first quarter of the year.) Henry is one of the only — perhaps the only — lobbyists for hire who worked for Biden while he was vice president. He served as Biden’s legislative affairs director, a job in which he “participated in White House efforts to win passage of key pieces of legislation including the Recovery Act, the Affordable Care Act, the Dodd-Frank Financial Regulatory Reform Act, and the extension of middle class tax cuts,” according to a 2011 post he wrote for the White House’s “Celebrating Black History Month” series. The role put him in close proximity not only to Biden but also to many people who now make up the top ranks of Biden’s White House staff: RON KLAIN (now White House chief of staff), ELIZABETH ALEXANDER (now the first lady’s communications director), ANNIE TOMASINI (now Biden’s director of Oval Office operations), EVAN RYAN (now the Cabinet secretary), MIKE DONILON (now a senior adviser to Biden) and JARED BERNSTEIN (now a member of the Council of Economic Advisers). And he apparently got along with everyone. “I remember nothing but absolute joy working by his side,” MOE VELA, who worked with Henry in Biden’s office, told West Wing Playbook. “I can absolutely understand why he might be in demand.” A White House official said that none of the six people who worked with Henry and now hold top White House jobs have had any contact with him since Biden took office. “President Biden has established the highest ethical standards of any Administration in history, and his team has put in place stringent safeguards to protect against any potential conflicts of interest,” the official said. Neither Henry nor Putala responded to requests for comment. Henry appears to have refrained from lobbying the White House for the most part, despite his Biden connections. He lobbied the Executive Office of the President for only two clients, according to disclosure filings: Charter Communications and the American Health Care Association. It’s not the first time the American Health Care Association, which represents the assisted living industry, has hired a lobbyist with ties to a new president. The trade group hired Ballard Partners, the lobbying firm run by BRIAN BALLARD, a top fundraiser for DONALD TRUMP’s campaigns, in early 2017. Asked why it had hired theGROUP weeks after Biden won, AHCA said in a statement that its “advocacy efforts include a broad team to help us reach both sides of the aisles.” Do you work in the Biden administration? Are you in touch with the White House? Are you ZOE HOPKINS-WARD? We want to hear from you — and we’ll keep you anonymous: westwingtips@politico.com. Or if you want to stay really anonymous send us a tip through SecureDrop, Signal, Telegram, or Whatsapp here. | 
