title: BREAKING: CLINTON CHAIRMAN’S SISTER-IN-LAW Lobbied Clinton’s State Department…Earned Six Figure Income
text: Amid the tumult of the 2016 presidential campaign, John Podesta is best known as Hillary Clinton s campaign chairman and the individual from whose private account WikiLeaks is presently publishing some 50,000 hacked emails.Released in daily batches, these documents have laid bare the inner workings and tensions of the Clinton campaign in an unprecedented way, while also offering insights into the operations of the Clinton Foundation and the State Department in the years when Clinton, now the Democratic presidential nominee, served as secretary of state.At that time, when Clinton was traveling to a record number of foreign countries, Podesta, a former White House chief of staff under President Clinton, held dual titles at the State Department: as a senior advisor   entitled to an annual salary of $130,000 never paid him, the department maintains   and as a member of a prestigious foreign policy advisory board Secretary Clinton created. Records obtained from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management show Podesta s tenure at State extended from Sept. 25, 2011 to Jan. 4, 2014.For several months in 2012, Clinton s final year as secretary of state, Raytheon, the leading defense contractor, hired Podesta s sister-in-law, Heather Podesta, as a lobbyist, federal records show.Raytheon was looking to enlarge its share of foreign military sales   transfers of advanced weapons systems to other countries that are reviewed and approved by the Department of State, then implemented by the Department of Defense   and was beefing up its lobbying operation to accomplish that goal before Secretary Clinton left office.On the LD-2 lobbying disclosure form completed by her company, Heather Podesta + Partners, LLC, in July 2012, the veteran lawyer and Democratic fundraiser listed in the space provided for a description of her lobbying activities,  Engaged the Executive Branch on the economic benefits of foreign military sales.  In the space requesting the specific locales of her lobbying, Ms. Podesta listed the White House and the State Department.At the same time, Raytheon retained two other lobbyists, John Merrigan and Matt Bernstein, both associated with the powerhouse D.C. law firm DLA Piper. All three of these lobbyists, including Ms. Podesta, were major donors or bundlers to Hillary Clinton s 2008 and 2016 campaigns. Federal records show they have raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for Clinton s campaigns and earned hundreds of thousands of dollars lobbying her State Department.In the final three quarters of 2012, DLA Piper earned some $360,000 in lobbying fees from Raytheon, courting the State Department and other agencies, while Ms. Podesta, within that same time frame, received $100,000 from Raytheon for the same purpose.The gambit appears to have worked: Records maintained by the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, the arm of the Defense Department that coordinates the transfers of weapons systems once they have received State s approval, show Raytheon as a prime contractor in at least seventeen foreign military sales in 2012, worth an estimated total of $26 billion. Of those contracts, three with the Gulf nation of Qatar   for missile defense, Apache attack helicopters and other materiel   accounted for $19 billion.READ MORE: FOX NEWS 