The first time Jeff Miller showed up for work as a 17-year-old, $5-an-hour intern for the Kern County Republican Party, one of his supervisors, the district field representative for high-powered California congressman Bill Thomas, offered him a helpful fashion tip for his first job in politics. Dump whatever hideous-colored dress shirt you’re wearing, the 26-year-old Kevin McCarthy told Miller, gently. From now on, stick to solid white or solid blue.
Thirty years later, Miller is a connected Washington lobbyist with his own boutique firm, advising some of the most recognizable corporate brands in the United States — and a hard-charging Republican fundraiser and all-around GOP utility player. In the 2020 election cycle, Miller, on a strictly volunteer basis, bundled more than $11.2 million for Donald Trump’s reelection campaign and raised in excess of $100 million, combined, for the former president’s 2020 nominating convention and America First Action, at that time his designated super PAC. The day after the election, Miller started working the phones again, this time as co-chairman of the Georgia Battleground Fund, an effort organized by the National Republican Senatorial Committee to raise resources for a pair of Senate runoff campaigns. Miller ended up collecting $2.3 million for the cause, second only to GOP guru Karl Rove’s $4.2 million on a list of 85 prominent Republican bundlers.
But whether lobbying or fundraising or checking in on Ryan LLC, the global tax services firm in Dallas where he is a partner, Miller’s sartorial uniform remains the same: You’ll only catch him in solid white or solid blue dress shirts. And his old boss from the Kern County GOP? Miller and McCarthy worked together again and again over the years, becoming close friends along the way. Now the House minority leader, McCarthy is in line to be elected speaker of the House of Representatives if Republicans reclaim power in Congress in next year’s midterm elections.
“He taught me how to dress,” Miller recalled over dinner and drinks in an interview with the Washington Examiner at his well-appointed apartment in Washington. “I must have been really awkward-looking.”
Miller was a working-class Jewish kid from rural Tehachapi, California, nestled in the Tehachapi Mountains, nearly 4,000 feet above sea level, and wedged between the Mojave Desert and the San Joaquin Valley, a 116-mile drive due north of Los Angeles.
It’s still a small town. But in the 1970s and 1980s, when Miller was growing up, it was really small. There weren’t any chain supermarkets, just a few mom-and-pop grocery stores. There weren’t many Jews, either. Miller remembers maybe one other Jewish family in town and introducing his schoolmates to a doughy delicacy known as the bagel. To attend Hebrew school and prepare for his bar mitzvah, the Jewish ceremony that marks a boy’s coming of age in the community, Miller’s mother would drive him two hours round-trip to the big city: Bakersfield. At Tehachapi High School, Miller was a varsity football player and helped his team win a couple of league titles.
At age 47, there’s little trace of an athlete who could’ve played offensive line and was routinely assigned to block bigger, faster defensive players rushing the backfield. Miller’s coach, Steve Denman, remembers a tough competitor who used strategy to compensate for his lack of size and speed. “He wasn’t the biggest guy for us,” said Denman, who retired in 2016 after 35 years. “But he was going to figure out [the defense’s] weak spot and get it done.” Though not wealthy, Miller’s parents were hardly destitute; his mother worked on occasion, and his father eventually opened a firm designing and manufacturing specialty accessory pieces for firearms. Running a small business prompted an interest in conservative politics and support for Thomas, the local congressman who, over the course of a 28-year House career, built a formidable Central Valley political machine and rose to the chairmanship of the committee considered the most powerful in Congress: Ways & Means, the tax-writing panel. The elder Miller’s interest in politics — he was more of an activist, not a donor — trickled down to his son. “I was very passionate about conservative politics,” Miller said. “I look back, I was even more conservative then than I am now.” That passion would end up spawning a rather lucrative career and, Miller’s long list of acolytes say, transforming him into the sort of “indispensable” party operative not seen in Washington since Haley Barbour, the legendary chairman of the Republican National Committee-turned-uber K Street lobbyist-turned-governor of Mississippi-turned-GOP elder statesman.
“There are few people in politics who have such a broad spectrum of knowledge. If I look back in time, maybe a Haley Barbour, who knows ins and outs of politics and policy,” McCarthy said. “But he’s also a uniter. It doesn’t matter what camp you’re in, Jeff is in that camp. Jeff is the one that everybody’s with. He’s never sitting on the sidelines.”
Throughout Trump’s time in office, on any given weeknight, you could find Miller holding court at his regular (reserved) booth in the grandiose lobby of the Trump International Hotel along Pennsylvania Avenue, more or less midway between the White House and Capitol Hill. Back then, the place was bustling with Republican members of Congress, administration officials, conservative media personalities, and the various hangers-on who made up the supporting cast of the Trump show during its four-year run. Which made it a great place to do business if, like Miller, you were a Republican and your business, like Miller’s, was relationships, influence, and policymaking.
Miller didn’t start out with Trump. In the 2016 presidential primary, he advised Rick Perry, then-governor of Texas, for whom he had worked since 2012. Toward what turned out to be the end of Perry’s ill-fated campaign, Miller reached out one afternoon, advising me to pay attention to an upcoming speech, assuring me the governor would make some news. He did. “Donald Trump’s candidacy is a cancer on conservatism,” Perry said, along with a few other choice comments about the future president, and his future boss. But once Perry’s campaign was over and it became obvious Trump would be the nominee, Miller pivoted, and so did the governor, backing Trump without hesitation. Miller was pragmatic about it. Trump was a Republican and would be superior on the issues to Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee. And, Trump was “ridiculously” solid on Israel, a major priority for Miller, who is involved with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and sits on the board of the Republican Jewish Coalition.
If Miller had any doubts left, they were assuaged by Trump’s choice of running mate, Mike Pence. Soon after the 45th president’s surprising 2016 victory and Perry’s nomination as secretary of energy, Miller put out a lobbying shingle, opening the nondescript Miller Strategies. Eventually, he signed a roster of corporate clients that would be the envy of any government affairs shop in town. Under federal law, this information must be publicly disclosed. As word got around, Miller became the subject of intense criticism, with the naysayers accusing him of capitalizing on his administration connections to enrich himself, perpetuating the very so-called swamp that Trump ran against and vowed to drain. “Jeff Miller directed Rick Perry’s 2016 presidential campaign and shepherded the Energy secretary through the Senate confirmation process,” E&E News wrote in December 2017. “Now, he’s cashing in.” Declared the now-defunct liberal news website ThinkProgress in April 2018: “Energy companies lined up for Jeff Miller’s services after Rick Perry, his former boss, was named Energy secretary.” Even some Republicans around town looked askance at the growth of his firm. Miller has taken it all in stride. “People hired our firm because we have close relationships with people in government,” he said. “Isn’t that why everyone hires lobbyists?”
In time, Miller Strategies booked more than the handful of energy companies it started with. Pharmaceuticals, technology, financial services, healthcare, biotechnology — all of these industries, and more, signed the firm to lobby the Trump administration. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, an organization that tracks lobbying through the site OpenSecrets.org, Miller Strategies advocated for 76 different companies in 2020, the final calendar year of Trump’s presidency, earning $13.6 million in revenue. That hardly makes Miller the biggest lobbyist in town. But he was something of a prized commodity given the peculiarities of attempting to influence the mercurial Trump, who came to Washington with few allies and a disregard for traditional processes that so many lobbyists depend on to do their job. Miller emerged from the past four years with his relationship with Trump intact, notable since the 45th president was known to sour on people who he thought were getting rich off the sweat of his brand.
“The guy puts in more effort than anyone else in D.C.,” Donald Trump Jr., the former president’s eldest son, whom Miller counts as a close friend, told me. “Half the currency of D.C. is trying to get credit for things you have nothing to do with. He never did that.”
“He’s never even called in a favor, which is something I’ve never experienced in my short time in politics,” Trump Jr. added. “There was never an ask of me, and he was the only person in D.C. who didn’t try pitching me something, whether it made sense or not.”
Business at Miller Strategies is down from last year. Revenue is still strong, however. Miller emphasized that his close relationships with a wide array of Republicans in the House of Representatives and U.S. Senate are now carrying the firm. “Jeff has an amazing ability to monetize whatever circumstances he finds himself in,” said a successful Republican lobbyist, who has been at it a lot longer than Miller. “He seems like he rolls at a level above a lot of us.”
Miller was just shy of 30 years old the first time he asked a Republican donor for $1 million, still a lot of money today but an especially eye-popping “ask” back then.
It was 2003. Miller, who cut his teeth in politics as a Republican fundraiser, was running a unique program for the California Republican Party to raise tens of millions of dollars for the party’s efforts in the 2004 elections, to be spent strictly in the Golden State. The resources were to be invested from the top of the ticket on behalf of President George W. Bush, all the way to the bottom of the ticket, for campaigns for the state Legislature. To jump-start the initiative, Miller scheduled a meeting with billionaire Roland Arnall and his wife Dawn. Arnall, later the ambassador to the Netherlands under Bush, died in 2008. But at that time, he was an influential Republican donor who led the mortgage giant Ameriquest. So, Miller hopped a plane from Sacramento, where he was living, and headed to Los Angeles to have lunch with Arnall at the now-closed Regency Club, a private dining club atop a high-rise office building near the campus of UCLA that catered to wealthy Southern California executives.
Miller was accompanied by a Bush bundler and wealthy businessman in his own right, and the hourlong meeting went off without a hitch. Until, alone in the elevator and halfway to the lobby with the Bush bundler, Miller realized something. “We didn’t ask him for money,” a worried Miller told his companion, who reassured his young charge not to concern himself. “Don’t worry; he’ll do it.” Miller wasn’t convinced, and in any event, he wasn’t going to take any chances. He immediately exited the elevator and headed back up to the top floor, to the Regency Club, by himself. Prolonging the anticipation, the door was locked. Miller had to knock and explain why he returned to gain entry. “What do you want, young man?” Arnall asked him. “Sir, we didn’t get a chance to talk to you about finances,” Miller responded. “Well, what do you want?” Arnall continued. Miller didn’t miss a beat. “We want $1 million.” That contribution from Arnall armed Miller with ammunition to ask other wealthy California Republicans for similarly large checks, and within six months, he had raised $60 million for the party.
Fundraising can be unforgiving. Whereas every other aspect of a campaign is judged on Election Day, fundraising is judged quarterly, or in some cases monthly, due to state and federal laws requiring periodic public disclosures. In that pressure-cooker of an environment, Miller was developing a reputation as a closer who delivered results. All these years later, a Republican operative who worked as a legislative aide in Sacramento recalled Miller’s aggressiveness by remembering the sign that adorned the door to his office at state party headquarters. It read: “If you’re not talking to the person who writes the check, you’re not talking to the right person.”
“Jeff is the hardest-working fundraiser I’ve ever met,” said Jim Brulte, the former chairman of the California GOP who was the top Republican in the state Senate when Miller was in charge of fundraising. “I’ve been blessed with really good staff, but he was the best of the best.” Arnall was so impressed with Miller he later hired him to run government affairs at Ameriquest, Miller’s entree into lobbying. That domino effect explains Miller’s career.
Miller never graduated from college. After a stint in the Navy, a path he chose in part to pay for college, Miller concluded the financial breaks made available through his military service were insufficient to afford higher education. After spending a little time at Sacramento State University, he leveraged connections he began forging as a 17-year-old intern for the Kern County Republican Party and dove into politics full-time, beginning as a staffer for a rank-and-file state assemblyman. Not long after, Miller was tapped as the political director for the Assembly minority leader, which led to his assuming the duties of finance director because his predecessor in the role was ineffective. That path unfolded seamlessly: He was tapped as the top fundraiser for the Republican caucuses in the state Assembly and state Senate, presaging a larger role with the California GOP, which brought him to fundraising, on a volunteer basis, for then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, with whom he is still close. Asked about Miller, the movie star-politician was effusive. “He is a fantastic friend.”
At Ameriquest, with its litany of interests in various states, Miller became active in the Republican Governors Association, through which he developed a friendship with Perry. Meanwhile, Perry had an ulterior motive; he was recruiting Miller to take charge of his political operation. That, combined with his wife’s desire to move back to her native Texas, and Republicans’ miserable, across-the-board defeat in California landed the Millers in Austin, where they still live.
With Trump out of office, Miller continues to moonlight as McCarthy’s consigliere, on a strictly volunteer basis, of course. Beginning the day after the Jan. 6 insurrection on Capitol Hill by grassroots supporters of the 45th president, Miller spent the next 48 hours on the phone with more than 200 of the party’s most valued financiers to make sure they didn’t jump ship. He’s also been lending a hand to Senate Republicans, deciding after raising money for the runoff elections in Georgia that the air is sweet, and profitable, on both ends of the Capitol.
“The thing that stands out about Jeff is that he doesn’t come from a Hill background,” said Sam Geduldig, a Republican lobbyist who did get his start as a congressional aide. “A lot of the most successful lobbyists probably worked on the Hill and have subcommittee expertise and policy expertise. I don’t think that’s as important a quality as our clients think.”
David M. Drucker is the senior political correspondent for the Washington Examiner.
