ADVERTISEMENT

Ex-Trump Campaign Aide Leaves State Department to Be Consultant

Ex-Trump Campaign Aide Leaves State Department to Be Consultant

(Bloomberg) -- Matthew Mowers, a former Donald Trump campaign staffer who was in the president’s first batch of political appointees at the State Department, is leaving to start a consulting company and work on the president’s re-election effort.

Mowers, 29, arrived at the State Department as a senior White House adviser the day President Trump was inaugurated in 2017. He wielded influence behind-the-scenes with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and his successor Michael Pompeo, even after he left the advisory role to become chief of staff in the department’s Office of the Global AIDS Coordinator.

Ex-Trump Campaign Aide Leaves State Department to Be Consultant

“With 2020 right around the corner, I feel it is now time for me to rejoin the private sector and reengage with political life, as I believe it is paramount that we ensure the continued leadership of the president,” Mowers wrote in a letter to Pompeo confirming his decision to leave at the end of the week.

Mowers’s place in the secretary’s inner circle was evident on Tillerson’s first day at the department. As the former chief of Exxon Mobil Corp. addressed State Department employees from a staircase in the building lobby, Mowers stood directly behind him, alongside senior career diplomats in the U.S. foreign service.

A former aide to New Jersey Governor Chris Christie who testified in the trial concerning the “Bridgegate” scandal, Mowers helped shepherd the confirmations of numerous State Department nominees, including Tillerson, Pompeo, and more than two dozen others. He often played the role of a Democratic senator in rehearsals for the Senate hearings that nominees faced.

Mowers started out on the department’s “beachhead team” that oversaw the transition to Trump’s administration. He said he will start a consulting firm and join political efforts in support of Trump’s 2020 campaign.

To contact the reporter on this story: Nick Wadhams in Washington at nwadhams@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Bill Faries at wfaries@bloomberg.net, Larry Liebert

©2019 Bloomberg L.P.