Brother of top White House aide makes $8M with boost from Biden agenda
The lobbyist brother of a senior White House aide has raked in more than $8 million from clients since President Biden took office in January 2021 — with several companies who retain the tied-in firm receiving direct boosts from the administration’s legislative agenda.
Jeff Ricchetti, the brother of counselor to the president Steve Ricchetti, took in $8.3 million between the first quarter of 2021 and the third quarter of 2023, according to Senate lobbying disclosures.
That’s roughly four times as much Jeff earned between the first quarter of 2017 and the third quarter of 2019, when Donald Trump was in the White House and the lobbying firm Ricchetti Inc. received around $2.2 million.
The windfall has come while the Biden administration repeatedly celebrated the work of businesses Ricchetti lobbied for — including one of the largest US auto manufacturers, medical and pharmaceutical companies and Amazon.
The family ties have prompted ethicists to call for Steve Ricchetti to recuse himself from any discussions with lawmakers that could relate to his brother’s firm, where Steve worked from 2001 to 2012.
“Steve Ricchetti ought to completely recuse himself from any part of the legislation that his brother’s firm is lobbying on, and then have the White House not take calls from his brother,” Richard Painter, the former chief ethics lawyer in the George W. Bush administration, told the Washington Free Beacon, which first reported on the arrangement.
Walter Shaub, the Obama-era director of the US Office of Government Ethics, laid into the Biden administration in June 2021 for having engaged in “illegal” acts of nepotism during its first-year hiring spree.
“I’m sorry, I know some folks don’t like hearing any criticism of him. But this royally sucks. I’m disgusted,” he said. “A lot of us worked hard to tee him up to restore ethics to government and believed the promises. This is a real ‘f— you’ to us — and government ethics.”
“I do not lobby my brother, nor have I lobbied the White House this quarter,” Jeff Ricchetti told the Wall Street Journal in July 2021 when asked about his work.
The White House has also maintained that Steve Ricchetti recuses himself from his brother’s lobbying business efforts.
During his first year in office, Biden paid a visit to a General Motors electric vehicle factory in Detroit — months after Congress passed his $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure package, which included $7.5 billion for electric vehicle charging stations and $5 billion for electric and low-emission buses.
Jeff Ricchetti’s lobbying disclosures for 2021 show he was paid six-figure sums to handle “issues related to tax incentives for electric vehicles and charging stations” and “issues related to climate policy that affect the automobile industry, generally.”
One month later, Biden also signed an executive order forcing vehicles purchased by the government to be zero-emission by 2035.
Jeff Ricchetti also represents the semiconductor manufacturer Applied Materials, whose headquarters Vice President Kamala Harris visited in May to promote the passage of the CHIPS Act, which provided $52 billion in subsidies for domestic semiconductor production
The Taiwanese vaccine distributor Medigen also hired Jeff to lobby Congress on “issues related to Covid-19 vaccines accepted for foreign travelers to the United States.”
The following year the National Institutes of Health granted Medigen a global technology license to fight the rapidly spreading Omicron variant, which was later used to vaccinate nearly 1 million Taiwanese citizens.
Other clients of Ricchetti Inc. include the health and pharmaceutical companies GlaxoSmithKline, Horizon Therapeutics, Vaxart Inc., Neurocrine Biosciences, Ipsen Biopharmaceuticals and Eisai.
At the same time, Jeff Ricchetti has worked for TC Energy Corporation, which runs the Keystone XL pipeline that Biden shut down shortly after assuming office.
The White House and Jeff Ricchetti did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
