Marco Rubio, lobbyist. It has a certain ring to it, doesn’t it? But it’s not a super helpful step on the road to President Marco Rubio, so Rubio’s campaign is denying that Rubio was ever a lobbyist. They just don’t know how this idea could have gotten out there!
The Washington Post first reported that Rubio had registered as a federal lobbyist in the 2003 for the law firm Becker & Poliakoff. His campaign said the senator had no recollection of filing out the registration form, and a former associate who worked with Rubio at the law firm said that he could not recall Rubio lobbying the federal government. The associate described Rubio’s role to the Post as more of a coordinator and facilitator, but not a lobbyist.
A 2005 biography found by BuzzFeed News also describes Rubio’s role as more in line with traditional lobbying. That biography is for a second, different law firm, Broad and Cassel, to which Rubio had moved. One of the bullet points reads that Rubio, then the majority leader of the Florida House of Representatives, represented local governments before Congress.
Todd Harris, a Rubio campaign operative, told BuzzFeed News he didn’t know how the detail made onto Rubio’s page. “You can talk to every firm he’s every worked for and they will tell you he never lobbied the federal government,” Harris said.
Even as their websites tell you something different. It’s just one more piece of Rubio’s past that will be dug into if he starts looking like a front-runner, and while lobbyist for local government probably isn’t a death blow to his presidential hopes, it contributes to the overall picture of Rubio’s years in state government as years spent chasing dollars while trying to figure out how fast he could rise and who he’d need to climb over to do it.