With Daniel Lippman, Adam Wren FICO HIRES AKIN: Fair Isaac Corp., the financial analytics company behind FICO credit scores, has added its first new outside lobbying firm since 2020. FICO retained Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld last month to lobby on issues related to credit scores, according to a disclosure filing. — People working on the account for Akin Gump will include Ed Pagano, an Obama White House and Senate Judiciary alum; Casey Higgins, a former Paul Ryan aide; Virgil Miller, a former chief of staff to then-Rep. Cedric Richmond (D-La.); and Jose Borjon, a former chief of staff to Rep. Vicente Gonzalez (D-Texas). — The company also retains Federal Street Strategies, Mindset Advocacy and Rich Feuer Anderson, according to disclosures. Its most recent hire came days after Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) accused the company, whose credit scores inform the vast majority of consumer credit decisions, of abusing its position of power in the credit score market. — In a letter to DOJ antitrust chief Jonathan Kanter on March 12, Hawley hammered FICO’s recent price hikes, noting that government agencies like the Federal Housing Administration and Department of Veterans Affairs use FICO credit scores to issue mortgages. Hawley argued that “FICO’s price increases will lead to either higher upfront costs or higher interest rates for borrowers, especially lower-income borrowers who may take longer to purchase a home,” and asked Kanter to open an antitrust probe into the company. — In a blog post days later, FICO CEO Will Lansing defended the company’s decision to increase royalties, writing that the rates “have historically been priced substantially below the value derived from our scores by other market participants” and asserting that “our success has been hard-earned through continued product innovation and a commitment to safety and soundness, and not as the result of any government action or anticompetitive practices.” — The Justice Department previously investigated FICO for possible antitrust violations in 2020, but the company announced that December that the probe had been closed without any enforcement action. — The Federal Housing Finance Agency is in the midst of an overhaul of its credit scoring process for mortgages, our Katy O’Donnell has reported, approving a new FICO credit score model and a new model developed by the three leading credit bureaus back in 2022. Happy Monday and welcome to PI. Send tips: coprysko@politico.com. And be sure to follow me on the platform formerly known as Twitter: @caitlinoprysko. FIRST IN PI — HARE JUMPS TO DENTONS: Veteran public affairs strategist Neil Hare has left GVC Strategies, the government affairs firm he founded almost 20 years ago, to join the law and lobbying firm Dentons as a partner in the firm’s D.C. office. — Hare was working at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce when public affairs and communications campaigns began to emerge as a salient strategy to shape policy in Washington. He founded the public affairs firm Global Vision Communications after leaving the Chamber in 2005, and the firm added a lobbying arm and rebranded as GVC Strategies several years ago. — At Dentons, Hare will work to further boost the firm’s public affairs offerings by marrying its D.C.-centric work with grassroots and coalition building efforts. “Their national and global reach is just second to none,” Hare told PI. “We live in a global economic environment, and so for me to bring what I bring to the table along with what they're already building here in Washington and nationally, internationally, it was just a perfect fit.” — That reach will be especially important heading into this year’s elections, Eric Tanenblatt, who leads Dentons’ public policy practice, said in an interview, “because I think that it's an opportunity to raise issues back home in the states that will ultimately make their way to Washington.” He added: “Having the ability to reach policymakers, influence policymakers out around the country — outside of Washington — I think will benefit us on behalf of our clients in Washington.” SPEAKING OF: The Wall Street Journal over the weekend published an excerpt from the new book out next month by Brody and Luke Mullins about how public affairs campaigns have “taken a much more sophisticated form in the years since lobbyists were banned from using the traditional tools of their trade to curry favor with elected officials” after the lobbying scandals of the mid-aughts. — Lobbyists “recognized that, given the new restrictions, the best way to influence members of Congress was through the people who sent them to Washington in the first place. … With this incentive structure in mind, lobbyists began spending more of their time targeting ordinary people living thousands of miles outside the Beltway” in order to “foment seemingly organic public outcries designed to pressure lawmakers and compel them to take actions that would benefit the lobbyists’ corporate clients.” — No one deployed these new tactics better than Silicon Valley’s then-K Street novices, the Mullinses write, with the technique’s staying power on display more recently in TikTok’s efforts over the past month to fend off a potentially existential threat from lawmakers. FIRST IN PI: A top GOP Senate aide failed to properly disclose an outside role with a Hill nonprofit when he started with the group, Daniel and Adam report. — Brent Robertson, chief of staff to Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.), serves as a board member to the Senate Working Group. The “off-the-hill” group is aimed at providing Senate staffers “educational opportunities and trainings” and connecting “Senate staff to policy experts, thought leaders, and constituents that can assist in their efforts,” according to its website. — The organization reported that Robertson worked for the outfit 10 hours a week but took $0 in compensation, according to the group’s 2022 tax filing. That was a jump from one hour per week in 2021, according to that year’s filings. But his 2021 financial disclosure, which he filed on May 17, 2022, did not list the role on the board in its “positions” section, which he later made an amendment to, saying he had started at the group in October 2021. — The group spent more than $600,000 on conferences in 2022 out of a $1.2 million budget, according to its 2022 filing. Because it’s a 501(c)4, it doesn’t have to report its donors. In a post-travel disclosure, Robertson reported going to the Greenbrier in March 2022 for a three-day retreat for Senate chiefs of staff and staff directors paid for by SWG. But he did not mention the trip on the reportable “travel” section of his financial disclosure for 2022 that he filed in May 2023. — A Marshall aide said that his involvement with SWG is fully compliant with Senate ethics and has been properly disclosed. “SWG wasn’t formed until late 2021, and he already made a technical amendment to that disclosure for the voluntary position,” said the aide. — “While a number of senior staff sit on advisory boards for similar Hill nonprofits, I’m particularly proud of the small role I’ve played in SWG’s noteworthy success," Robertson said in a statement. — SWG executive director James Kimmey echoed Robertson, adding: “The only unusual thing about SWG is that it is a wildly successful new organization catering to Republicans, which we are incredibly proud of.” ANNALS OF FUNDRAISING: “In the years after Donald Trump lost the presidency to Joe Biden, Trump sent so many emails and text messages asking for money that Republican consultants warned his mailing lists could become useless. The former president’s friends told him that they were being asked for too much, too often, and Trump himself ordered aides at one point to slow the solicitations. Some of his fans, pockets emptied, mailed handwritten letters apologizing for not being able to give more,” according to The Washington Post’s Josh Dawsey, Michael Scherer and Clara Ence Morse. — “Now, as Trump and Biden prepare for a rematch, Trump’s vaunted small-dollar fundraising operation is not bringing in as much money as it once did. … Trump’s success in 2020 led more candidates to want in. Nearly every Republican elected official signed on with one of the handful of firms, mostly based in Northern Virginia, that specialize in helping politicians persuade ordinary Americans to hand over their credit card details.” — “By early 2023, the small-dollar boom had slowed. Donors had been sent ‘too many messages that guilt them into donating,’ or were ‘being duped’ into donating to candidates they didn’t know their donations were supporting,” former GOP small-dollar fundraiser John Hall told the Post. — The drop-off prompted small-dollar fundraising firms to manage expectations among GOP clients, and by the time former Vice President Mike Pence launched his short-lived White House bid last year, “officials at Targeted Victory, a small-dollar digital firm, warned him that ‘returns were way down because of oversaturation,’ according to Marc Short, his former chief of staff.”
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