Weiner Became A Corporate Consultant

I've been saying that Anthony Weiner needs to stop looking for a new government gig, but it turns out he has the kind of job nearly every ex-pol gets when they leave office:

Anthony D. Weiner has demystified the details of the 906-page Affordable Care Act for an electronic medical records company. 

He has counseled a biofuel firm about expansion into the emerging markets of Latin America and Africa. 

And he has plunged into the world of start-ups with his own green energy business. 

Over the past two years, it appeared as if Mr. Weiner, once the irrepressible fireball of New York City politics, had spent his days as a stay-at-home dad, licking his wounds and mourning his ambitions after the salacious images and messages that he sent to women prompted his resignation from Congress. 

But it turns out that from the moment he left public view, the man who had relied on a government paycheck his entire adult life was consumed by a corporate career whose profits and progress came to him, by his own account, with remarkable ease. 

...

 

It did not take Mr. Weiner long to embark on a new career after he left Congress on June 16, 2011. On July 7, he quietly incorporated a new firm, Woolf Weiner Associates, named for his great-grandfather, an Austrian immigrant to the Lower East Side. 

Since then, Mr. Weiner said, he has advised more than a dozen companies. He disclosed the names of a few of them after they agreed to waive confidentiality agreements. 

He signed up a New York firm called CureMD, an electronic medical records provider. And he became a consultant to Covington & Burling, an international law firm. 

In interviews, executives at those companies described Mr. Weiner as a quick and nimble student of their businesses with an innate sense of how to navigate the rhythms and personalities of government.

At Parabel, Mr. Weiner was credited with distilling the company’s complex business model into easy-to-understand sales pitches for potential investors and foreign officials, at times to the amazement of the businessmen in the room. Mr. Gubnitsky recalled how Mr. Weiner employed the concept of “economic ecosystems” to highlight the positive impact of the firm’s technology on farmers and consumers. 

Mr. Weiner has advised Covington & Burling as it seeks to persuade the Federal Communications Commission to relax its long-standing objections to major foreign investment in the broadcast industry. He has tutored the firm on the key players and their political sensitivities, using knowledge gleaned from his tenure on the House Energy and Commerce Committee. 

Mr. Weiner said he had reached out to federal officials at the Energy and Agriculture Departments, as well as members of Congress, on behalf of his clients. But he insisted that the work did not meet the legal definition of lobbying, which he said his contracts made clear he would not do. 

He can call these gigs whatever he wants to call them - the truth is, companies pay him for the contacts and access he has to people in government.

In other words, he is a lobbyist.

Again, most of these politicians do exactly the same thing when they leave office.

It's how Weiner could go from a Forest Hills apartment to a Park Avenue address.

I say, if he's so good at this particular kind of activity, he ought to stay in it.