POLITICO Influence: Another Trump lawyer gets into lobbying

By CAITLIN OPRYSKO  | 04/28/2025 07:16 PM EDT
Link to article on POLITICO.com

With Daniel Lippman

FIRST IN PI — FORMER TRUMP LAWYER HANGS A SHINGLE: Another one of President Donald Trump’s personal attorneys is jumping into lobbying. Jim Trusty and veteran gaming attorney Jeff Ifrah, who founded Ifrah Law — where Trusty has worked for the past eight years — are launching NexusOne Consulting, which will advise clients in the emerging technology space on changing tides for crypto, artificial intelligence and social media regulation.

— Trusty helped steer Trump’s D.C.-based legal team between presidencies, including representing Trump during special counsel Jack Smith’s classified documents probe and the investigation into Trump’s alleged efforts to subvert the 2020 election. Trusty withdrew from Trump’s legal team following Trump’s 2023 indictment in the documents case which — like the election obstruction case — has since been dismissed. Evan Corcoran, another veteran of Trump’s legal teams, now works at Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck.

— Ifrah is a former federal prosecutor who has become a go-to attorney for the gaming industry and cases involving sports betting. He also helped launch the gaming industry group iDevelopment and Economic Association. In an interview, Ifrah said that after Trump’s election win in November, he began batting around the question of “was there something to do with the fact that we now had a former client in the White House?”

— The idea for NexusOne is “to help our clients who are in the crypto AI and digital space, actually leverage the contacts that we may have in the White House, the executive branch, and hope that they can have a seat at the table as policy accelerates,” Ifrah said, pointing to the Trump administration’s retreat from the aggressive crypto enforcement posture of the Biden era (which Ifrah said had shuttered many of the crypto clients his firm worked for previously) and its promises to enact landmark AI policy.

— “It seemed like there was an opportunity there to really represent our clients in a way that was different than how we represented them before,” which until recently had been in a defensive or reactive posture rather than proactive, he added. In addition to crypto and AI, the firm expects to work on issues related to drones, prediction markets, data privacy and social media companies, according to Ifrah.

— Ross Branson, a lobbyist at Saildrone who served in the Commerce Department during the first Trump administration, will also join the new firm as managing director.