Three days after the first six U.S. troops died in the Iran war, the country’s third-largest defense contractor hired a lobbying firm run by a former Utah congressman and U.S. Air Force veteran in hopes of courting favor with Congress.

Under the contract with Northrop Grumman, Chris Stewart’s Skyline Capitol worked to influence senators and representatives on “issues relating to space, missile defense and advanced national security programs,” according to documents filed under the Lobbying Disclosure Act. And the firm raked in $20,000 in March by doing so.

Less than a month after The Salt Lake Tribune first reported he would leave Washington — and three months before he would officially step down from his seat — Stewart incorporated Skyline Capitol as a limited liability company in Delaware on June 28, 2023.

In the nearly three years since, the former Utah Republican congressman’s self-described “boutique government affairs firm” has made nearly $5 million working for both foreign countries and American companies — most of which have an interest in military spending, according to reports filed with Congress and the Department of Justice. Over 80% of that profit came after 2025.

“There’s a clear reason that you see this exponential growth in Skyline Capitol: it’s Donald J. Trump getting back in the White House,” Ben Freeman, director of the Quincy Institute’s Democratizing Foreign Policy program, told The Tribune in an interview.

The firm’s annual income more than doubled between 2024 and 2025, going from $1,160,000 to $2,651,000. And the first quarter of 2026, which saw the start of the Iran war, has been Skyline Capitol’s most lucrative yet.

So far this fiscal year, Skyline Capitol has made at least $505,000, according to Lobbying Disclosure Act filings. Although it is not required to submit statements on payments from foreign clients to the Justice Department until later this year.

While Stewart was prohibited from connecting clients directly to his former Capitol Hill colleagues until September 2024, he was immediately able to curry favor in the executive branch and offer advice on how to navigate the legislative branch.

In an interview, Stewart said he sees the work he’s doing on K Street similarly to the work he did in Congress — an effort to strengthen national security.

Some of his firm’s clients, he noted, are young Utah companies hoping to draw attention to “really cool” defense technologies they are developing “that really helps the warfighter.”

And Stewart said he sees an “absurdly slow” equipment acquisition process as one of the “great weaknesses” of the military. Connecting decision-makers with his clients could help quicken that, he said.

A relationship with the White House

Beyond his party affiliation, Stewart’s firm has deep ties to the White House.

Former Trump national security adviser Robert O’Brien — who moved to Utah between the two Trump administrations — announced in a September 2023 news release that his company, American Global Strategies, would partner with Skyline Capitol.

“Since its inception, American Global Strategies has prided itself on assembling the top experts in their fields to provide our clients unparalleled geopolitical expertise and analysis,” O’Brien said in a statement praising Stewart at the time. “Our strategic partnership with Skyline Capitol continues this tradition, providing deep Capitol Hill experience to help companies navigate today’s Washington.”

Members of Congress and their staffers moving from the Capitol to K Street and back is a common phenomenon dubbed the “revolving door.” Past research has placed the proportion of departing lawmakers who start lobbying jobs between a quarter and a third.

Skyline Capitol cites committee positions Stewart held during his decade-long congressional career as a particularly valuable asset for clients.

The Utahn previously sat on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, giving him access to confidential foreign policy information, and the powerful House Appropriations Committee — both of which are described as “exclusive” in Stewart’s bio on the firm’s website.

Freeman — who studies money in politics as it relates to defense spending and foreign influence, and co-wrote the book “The Trillion Dollar War Machine: How Runaway Military Spending Drives America into Foreign Wars and Bankrupts Us at Home” — said those roles make retiring members of Congress “highly coveted” as lobbyists.

Representatives leaving the Appropriations Committee “can really help drive money to their now-clients,” Freeman noted. And representatives on the Intelligence Committee are “privy to a lot of information that the vast, vast majority of Americans don’t have,” Freeman added.

“My committee assignments help my work,” Stewart said, “but it’s mostly because that’s my expertise — it’s where I spent my time. So it’s just a natural extension of the work I was focusing on in Congress."

While previous President Joe Biden maintained his predecessor’s historically high military spending, the second Trump administration has requested and enacted much larger increases.

Trump’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2027, $1.5 trillion, would be the country’s largest military budget ever — even after past years’ budgets are adjusted for inflation.

Skyline Capitol’s lobbying registration for Artis LLC, a client that sells a technology that senses and deactivates rocket-propelled grenades and other shoulder-launched missiles called Iron Curtain, says the firm is lobbying on “congressionally directed defense funding.”

Another client, Shipcom Federal Solutions, said it hired Skyline Capitol for, “Monitoring of budget opportunities and national security related legislation.”

The former Republican congressman said working with a GOP-led White House and Congress is an asset, and “it would seem to be obvious that I’d rather be working with Republican majorities than with a Democrat president or Democrat majorities.”

“Having said that, though,” Stewart adds, “I’ll tell you I don’t think it makes as much difference as I thought it would, because a lot of the folks we work with, they need help, whether it’s a Republican majority or a Democrat majority.”

GOP ties attracting business from abroad

When Republican delegates and officials from across the country flocked to Milwaukee in 2024 to formally nominate Trump to retake the presidency, Taiwan urged attendees to join their ambassador at a reception across the river at the private Milwaukee Club.

Skyline Capitol helped arrange the gathering for its first foreign client as part of a “year-long plan … to strengthen relations between [the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office] and those deemed potential insiders should the Republican Party win the White House or Congress,” according to filings submitted to the Justice Department to comply with the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

The U.S. does not officially recognize Taiwan as a sovereign state, but remains one of its closest unofficial allies while arming the island to defend itself against the People’s Republic of China, which views Taiwan as broken away Chinese territory.

Despite Skyline Capitol including in its contract with Taiwan an offer to connect officials with the Republican Party “chairperson and those who will influence the party platform at the convention,” the island was left off the GOP’s 2024 platform for the first time since 1980.

Skyline Capitol has since added three other countries to its client list: Turkey, Azerbaijan and Rwanda. Per reports to the Justice Department, the firm has made a total of over $2 million from foreign clients.

The State Department noted in a 2024 analysis that there were “credible reports” of human rights abuses taking place within all three of the countries that most recently hired Skyline Capitol. And Azerbaijan and Rwanda have been accused of committing war crimes in recent years in conflicts with Armenia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, respectively.

Stewart said Skyline Capitol sees strengthening those countries’ relationships with the U.S. as a method for improving their chances at finding peace.

“What we were hoping to focus on is to help those countries keep the peace agreement on track, help them understand what it is the State Department or the White House needs to see from them and try to advise them on how to communicate what their concerns are,” Stewart said.