A lobbyist with ties to Hillary Clinton’s campaign and family foundation this week filed a years-late disclosure of communications with Clinton’s top aide after the message became public through the latest release of Clinton’s emails.
The Glover Park Group (GPG) admitted to the Department of Justice Friday that Susan Brophy, a managing director at the firm, emailed Clinton chief of staff Cheryl Mills in 2011 on behalf of the South Korean embassy in Washington, one of the firm’s clients.
The amended Foreign Agent Registration Act disclosure also said for the first time that Brophy had represented that embassy, a fact that had not been previously disclosed.
It only made those disclosures after the State Department released the email to Mills in its latest dump of emails to and from Clinton during her time as secretary of state, raising questions about whether GPG would ever have disclosed it had it not become public through other means.
The email and its discrepancies with GPG’s FARA registration statements were first reported by BuzzFeed last month.
GPG managing director Susan Brophy asked Mills in the email to help facilitate then-South Korean President Lee Myung-bak’s speech to a joint session of Congress. Mills forwarded the email to Clinton.
Speaker John Boehner (R., Ohio) would only agree to the speech if the Senate took up a pending Korean free trade agreement, Brophy explained. That required action by then-Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D., Mont.) and then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.).
"So .... if State would like to see the Korean President do a joint session, it sounds like contact with Baucus (and possibly Reid) to encourage forward movement on an FTA markup would be timely," Brophy wrote.
The Oct. 4, 2011, email came a day after President Barack Obama submitted the FTA to Congress. A week later, Baucus’ committee approved the agreement. A day after that, the full Senate followed suit and Myung-bak’s speech to Congress moved forward.
GPG did not respond to a request for comment. Managing director Joel Johnson told BuzzFeed the firm "should have reported that that contact had been made to the State Department and for whatever reason that was not included in our list of activities and it should have been, and I’ll go back and make sure we do whatever is appropriate to amend that."
Brophy is an alumna of the Bill Clinton White House and advised Hillary Clinton’s Senate campaign. She and her husband have donated between $25,000 and $50,000 to the Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton Foundation. The GPG has contributed another $10,000 to $25,000.
Brophy is also backing Clinton’s presidential run. She co-hosted a fundraiser for Ready for Hillary, a group that worked to draft Clinton into the race, in April.