Thread by @MesMitch

Ex-lobbyist used Trump agriculture job to boost industry allies, emails reveal😣
A former lobbyist for the herbicide industry helped Dow as it sought approval of its seeds 😱in China

This story was co-published with ProPublica.

In 2017, Dow Chemical scored a long-sought-after victory: after a push from the US government, China approved the import of the company’s genetically modified herbicide-resistant corn seeds.

A grateful Dow lobbyist emailed a senior agriculture department official whose support had been critical: “Thank you for your efforts in support of U.S. agriculture.”

That official, Rebeckah Adcock, was no stranger🤔😡 to Dow. Before joining the Trump administration, Adcock was the chief lobbyist for the herbicide industry’s trade group, of which Dow was a prominent member.

It’s unclear if Adcock sat in on the meeting, but her government ethics agreement allowed her to communicate extensively and offer her assistance to the association’s members, including Dow.

Adcock isn’t the only lobbyist who has made her way to the federal government. Roughly one of every 14 appointments in the Trump administration has been a lobbyist. But previously unreported emails show Adcock repeatedly trading notes with industry players to craft policy.

“As a US official, she cannot represent any person’s interest other than the [US government’s] in matters in which US interests are at stake,” Canter said.

Like other officials, Adcock signed a Trump administration ethics agreement, promising to avoid conflicts of interest.

But the agreement gave Adcock wide berth, allowing her to offer help to Dow and other clients of the herbicide and pesticide trade group she worked for.

Adcock enjoys a broad mandate at the agriculture department. She initially ran a team responsible for rolling back regulations deemed overly burdensome to industry. Since then, she has become a close confidante of Perdue,

and she has been involved in everything from coordinating Perdue’s 2018 rural bus tour in support of an expansive new farm bill to reinterpreting the federal Clean Water Act.

Industry players have asked Adcock to reach down into the bureaucracy on even small issues. After a farmer in rural northern Illinois filled and graded a tributary and cleared four acres of forest along a government-protected creek,

and the US army corps of engineers threatened him with fines of up to $37,500 per day until it was improved to the government’s liking, Don Parrish, a senior director at the American Farm Bureau Federation, contacted Adcock.

Emails show Parrish and Adcock repeatedly emailed about a section of the Clean Water Act that prevents companies from draining or filling wetlands and tributaries that flow into navigable water.

Adcock told Parrish she was “getting answers” to his questions. It is unclear if the farmer had to pay any fines.

The ethics agreement Adcock signed said she would not work on “the impact of crop protection products (including herbicides, fungicides and insecticides) on water”, and the emails reviewed do not show her doing so.

But the agreement did not specifically bar Adcock from working with trade groups like the Farm Bureau on Clean Water Act enforcement.

It was against that backdrop that, in May 2017, Shipman, the lobbyist for the Dow subsidiary Dow AgroSciences, emailed Adcock seeking a meeting between Dow AgroScience’s CEO and the agriculture secretary, Perdue.

In one email exchange, Adcock asked Shipman for background information on trade barriers for seed products and Shipman sent three documents on China’s biotechnology crop approvals.

Shipman was registered as a lobbyist for Dow AgroSciences through his firm, Cornerstone Government Affairs. Lobbying records show he worked on biotechnology approval issues for the company in 2017, with Cornerstone earning $290,000.

Shipman did not report that he was lobbying the agriculture department. Rather, the records indicate he was lobbying the Senate and the House, which carry fewer government lobbying restrictions.

In the correspondence, he shared questions that Dow wanted a House member to ask Perdue in a hearing the next day. The questions largely focused on China’s slow genetically modified crop import approvals.

The congressman, Rodney Davis (an Illinois Republican), chairman of a biotechnology subcommittee, ended up asking Perdue about “serious risks and uncertainty” in “the global marketplace”

China posed, mirroring some of the wording the Dow lobbyist had emailed his office and the House agriculture committee. Davis’s office declined to comment about his role in asking the questions proposed by Dow.