NEW BUSINESS: Global diamond giant De Beers has hired Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck as part of a recent ramp up in the jeweler’s D.C. lobbying footprint. The hire coincides with a push backed by De Beers for G7 countries to ban imports of Russian diamonds as punishment for the war in Ukraine — a move that would kneecap one of De Beers’ chief rivals, Kremlin-backed Alrosa. — Axios reported earlier this year that traceability was a key hurdle in preventing stiffer sanctions on Russian diamonds, but De Beers has teamed up with another industry player to market its blockchain supply chain service Tracr to track stones throughout the supply chain, per the industry publication Rapaport. — Former State Department officials Samantha Carl-Yoder and Lauren Diekman along with former Kyrsten Sinema aide Kate Gonzales and David Cohen will work on the account for Brownstein to rally “support for De Beers G7 diamond protocol solution†as well as educate policymakers about the brand, according to a newly filed disclosure. — The Duberstein Group lobbied for De Beers from 2001 to 2007, but the company lacked lobbyists at the federal level until March, when it hired Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher and registered three in-house lobbyists, disclosures show. TIKTOK HAWKS PREPARE TO TRY AGAIN: “Earlier this year, banning the Chinese-owned video sharing app [TikTok] was a rare point of bipartisan agreement,†our Gavin Bade reports, with signs across Washington pointing to an impending clampdown. “Fast forward to the fall and little has changed.†— “Biden’s national security review of the app is still frozen by legal concerns and Congress’ headline TikTok bill — the RESTRICT Act — is stuck in the mud despite backing from senior members of both parties. In an effort to break the logjam, the administration is now throwing its support behind alternative legislation that has yet to be released.†— “Despite the outcry, TikTok has barely come up on Capitol Hill in recent months amid the turmoil over government funding and the House speakership — until Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo went to the Senate last Wednesday.†— “There, she announced her support for a new bill being written by Commerce Committee Chair Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) — the Guard Act. The hope is that legislation — still unreleased — will give her agency broader authority to ban TikTok and other foreign based apps, without the First Amendment concerns that stalled the RESTRICT Act. … Raimondo’s statement was an admission of how stuck the TikTok issue is.†TRANSIT GROUPS, BATTERY MAKERS LAUNCH NEW COALITIONS: Several local mass transit systems and a Florida municipal government have teamed up with self-driving shuttle service Beep Inc. to represent the priorities of public transportation as Congress and states weigh regulations for the AV industry. The Automated. Connected. Electric. Shared. — or ACES — Mobility Coalition will push policymakers to prioritize an “incremental approach to autonomous travel†and a focus on job creation amid the move AVs while ensuring transportation planners have the ability to integrate self-driving and electric transit into their networks. — The coalition’s members include the city of Altamonte Springs, Fla., the Contra Costa, Calif., transportation authority, Houston Metro, Jacksonville Transportation Authority, Florida’s Lynx system, commuter rail systems Metra and Metrolink, the Pinellas Suncoast Transit Authority and the Regional Transportation Commission of Southern Nevada. — A group of domestic battery stakeholders is also banding together to try and make sure that in all the attention being paid to investing in sustainable supply chains for critical minerals and other materials that go into making batteries, investing in domestic production of the machinery that manufacturers batteries doesn’t fall by the wayside. — U.S. Battery Machine Builders includes Abbott Furnace, Bechtel Global Corporation, BW Papersystems, Charles Ross & Son Company and Siemens, and argues that a focus on onshoring equipment for everything from extracting critical minerals to assembling batteries will accomplish the same sustainability, economic and national security objectives cited in focusing on the supply chain for the raw materials themselves. KOCH SEEDS HIS POLITICAL EMPIRE: “Charles Koch is making big moves to ensure that his charities and causes are funded long after he’s gone,†with the Koch Industries co-CEO and prolific conservative donor telling Forbes’ Matt Durot that “over the last four years he has quietly transferred $5.3 billion of his $125 billion (2022 sales) conglomerate’s nonvoting stock to a pair of nonprofits with fewer restrictions on lobbying and politics than traditional charities.†— “The staunch libertarian has donated an estimated $1.8 billion to charity over his lifetime (excluding amounts that have not yet been distributed by affiliated nonprofits), with a focus on education, poverty alleviation and reforming the criminal justice and immigration systems. Most of that has flowed through his Stand Together nonprofit†that includes the grassroots group Americans for Prosperity. — “But Koch didn’t make gifts of his company stock directly to Stand Together. Instead he chose groups that support the network and are allowed to directly engage in political campaigns and to do an unlimited amount of issue lobbying (as long as those are not their primary activities). — “Last year, he donated $4.3 billion of his Koch Industries stock to a newly created 501(c)4 nonprofit group Believe in People, named after his 2020 book Believe in People: Bottom-Up Solutions For A Top-Down World. The gift and the existence of this group have not been previously reported,†but the nonprofit is run by several members of Koch’s inner circle. — “In 2020, Koch gave $975 million of his company stock to another C4 with a similar mission called CCKc4, which bears the initials of his 46-year-old son, Chase (his full name is Charles C. Koch), who runs the nonprofit.†— “It’s hard to easily parse where Koch’s donations have gone. So far, most of the $254 million in grants made by Believe in People and CCKc4 over the three years through 2022 have gone to Stand Together. But that network is a maze of C3 and C4 nonprofits that also raise money from like-minded business people, making it difficult to track Koch’s gifts to their final recipients.†HORNEDO TEAMS UP WITH PRIME: Hornedo Strategies, the consulting firm founded earlier this year by Democratic strategist and NBA agent George Hornedo, has struck up a strategic partnership with the K Street mainstay Prime Policy Group. — Hornedo is a veteran of several Democratic presidential races, and served as a national deputy political director and national delegate director for now-Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s 2020 campaign. Before launching Hornedo Strategies in July, Hornedo was a public affairs attorney in the D.C. office of Ice Miller. — Hornedo will be a senior consultant at Prime Policy Group, which is now home to former Rep. Tom Reed.
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