An investigation by The Dallas Express into Senator John Cornyn’s legislative record and his daughter Haley Cornyn’s lobbying career reveals a pattern of overlap: as Haley’s employers and clients benefit from key federal decisions, her father’s Senate actions often align to advance their interests.
Senator’s Daughter’s Lobbying Ties Raise Serious Ethical Concerns
The overlap between the two has raised mounting questions about influence peddling, conflicts of interest, allegations of pay-to-play influence peddling, and whether public office is being quietly used to enrich the Cornyn family.
Senator John Cornyn has long portrayed himself as a crusader for integrity in Washington, most notably in 2022, when he called for full accountability in the Hunter Biden corruption scandal.
“There is no way of knowing the entire scope of the investigation, but evidence seems to be mounting that Hunter Biden committed numerous federal crimes, including, but not limited to, tax fraud, money laundering, and foreign-lobbying violations,” Cornyn said at the time, joining 32 other Senate Republicans.
Yet even as Cornyn was publicly demanding accountability for alleged influence-peddling in the Biden family, his own daughter was quietly engaged in a career that raises strikingly similar ethical questions.
The Rapid Rise of a Lobbyist with a Famous Name
Haley Cornyn began her professional journey with minimal political or policy experience, yet ascended rapidly into elite lobbying circles.
After just one year working as a paralegal, she was hired by the Patriot Group, a Texas lobbying firm, as an executive assistant. Despite Ms. Cornyn’s junior position, she became the firm’s public face, telling the Austin Business Journal that the Patriots planned to open a “very, very large D.C. shop.”
Why was a newly hired assistant, and the daughter of a sitting U.S. senator, speaking publicly about a major lobbying expansion in Washington? And why did she represent the firm in press statements before ever lobbying a client?
Her next role provided the answer.
Without any significant lobbying record or government policy background, Ms. Cornyn was hired by HillCo Partners to specialize in “state healthcare issues.” Within a year, she had signed some of the largest pharmaceutical and healthcare clients in the world, including PhRMA, Amgen, McKesson, and Daiichi Sankyo Inc.
In addition, Ms. Cornyn worked for the Texas Attorney General’s Office between 2016 and 2019, where she served as a senior legislative advisor to the Title IV-D Director, overseeing issues related to child support enforcement and federal compliance.
By 2019, Ms. Cornyn joined the powerful law and lobbying firm Greenberg Traurig (GT) as a legislative affairs manager, a firm with billions of dollars in foreign and domestic interests. Yet, according to federal filings, she did not register a single lobbying client between 2019 and 2024.
So what was she doing?
The Greenberg Traurig Connection
Greenberg Traurig’s Texas Government Law and Policy practice is co-chaired by Demetrius McDaniel, a long-time political donor who has contributed more than $25,000 to Senator Cornyn since 2005, including $5,000 in 2024.
Ms. Cornyn’s job title at GT focused on legislative affairs. Yet, her years-long absence of declared lobbying activity raises an obvious question: Was she quietly leveraging her father’s influence to protect the firm’s major financial interests?
The timing of her father’s advocacy and her position at GT makes that question even more difficult to ignore.
One of GT’s most lucrative lines of business is the EB-5 visa program. This federal initiative enables wealthy foreign nationals to obtain U.S. green cards by investing a minimum of $800,000 in American development projects. The program, widely criticized for abuse by Chinese nationals and CCP-linked entities, has long been a “cash machine” for large law firms like GT.
When Ms. Cornyn joined Greenberg Traurig in 2019, the EB-5 program was under growing scrutiny in Washington. Yet her father became one of its loudest defenders in the Senate.
The EB-5 Visa Defense
In 2021, when the EB-5 Regional Center Program was set to expire, Senator Cornyn was one of only three senators fighting on the Senate floor to reauthorize it. Greenberg Traurig was actively lobbying for the same bill at the time.
Even after the measure failed, Senator Cornyn lamented the program’s expiration, saying he supported its “resources it delivers to the community” and sought to “improve the integrity and security” of the system.
In 2022, Cornyn voted for the Consolidated Appropriations Act, which reauthorized the EB-5 Regional Center Program through 2027 — a major victory for Greenberg Traurig.
When the Biden administration later attempted to tighten oversight of the program, Cornyn joined Democrats Jerry Nadler and Chuck Schumer to block the measure. GT publicly praised his intervention. “We are very pleased that Congress is providing guidance to the agency,” said GT partner Laura Foote Reiff at the time.
The firm, meanwhile, continued to promote itself as a “go-to industry leader” in EB-5 applications, boasting over $12 billion in structured deals.
By 2025, Greenberg Traurig was fighting to preserve the program against President Trump’s proposed “Gold Card” visa reform, and once again, Cornyn stepped in.
“There’s an EB-5 visa program that I’ve been working on for many years with Senator Grassley,” Cornyn told reporters in April. “That would be something that would be added on top, not in lieu, of the EB-5.”
The Senator’s defense came despite mounting evidence of fraud and foreign manipulation within the program.
Chinese Influence and Haley’s Client List
By 2025, Haley Cornyn finally began registering lobbying clients, and many of them directly benefited from the same visa system her father was working to preserve.
Among them was Citigroup, a financial institution that profits from EB-5 bridge financing and escrow services, and Alibaba, a Chinese company with deep connections to the Chinese Communist Party.
In fiscal year 2024, nearly 70 percent of EB-5 visas went to Chinese nationals, according to federal data. Congressional critics have repeatedly warned that the program is “being abused by the CCP.”
A 2023 Breitbart investigation found that Chinese EB-5 investors financed the purchase of a Texas state park — raising alarms about foreign money influencing local development.
So why does Senator Cornyn continue to defend a program so widely condemned for corruption and foreign exploitation, one that enriches his daughter’s firm and clients?
Ms. Cornyn’s connection to Alibaba has been flagged by prominent right-wing media personalities, such as Laura Loomer, who called out Cornyn and Hayley.
“Senator John Cornyn, a U.S. Senator for Texas since 2002, has long been associated with policies prioritizing state and national security. However, his daughter’s lobbying for a CCP-linked company raises questions about the alignment of such activities with the need to safeguard Texans’ data privacy and our national security in the U.S. It also exposes how the CCP has direct ties to U.S. Senators via their family’s self enrichment through cushy lobby positions that benefit our foreign adversaries,” Loomer posted on X in the summer of 2025.
Patterns of Influence: Big Pharma and Beyond
This pattern stretches back well before Ms. Cornyn’s tenure at Greenberg Traurig.
During her early years at HillCo Partners, Ms.Cornyn lobbied for some of the most powerful pharmaceutical firms in the world, including PhRMA, the industry’s main lobbying arm.
In 2010 and 2011, PhRMA led an aggressive campaign to dismantle the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), a key Obamacare entity designed to cap Medicare costs. Just weeks after PhRMA’s leadership announced this as a top priority, Senator Cornyn introduced legislation in the Senate to weaken or eliminate the board, aligning directly with the organization’s demands.
Similarly, one of Ms. Cornyn’s former clients, Roche Diagnostics Corp, was among those poised to benefit from Senator Cornyn’s 2012 effort to repeal a medical device tax before it took effect. Roche later reported that the tax had cost it over $30 million in its first year, savings that Cornyn’s legislation would have prevented.
Questions That Demand Answers
The trail of overlap between Haley Cornyn’s lobbying and Senator John Cornyn’s legislative agenda is long — and raises serious ethical questions that Texans deserve answers to.
How did a young lobbyist with limited experience secure multimillion-dollar clients so quickly? Why did she spend five years at one of America’s largest lobbying firms without registering a single client? Why do her father’s votes, letters, and public advocacy so often align with her firm’s financial interests and her clients’ priorities?
And perhaps most importantly, has Senator Cornyn’s office ever been used to advance private business interests connected to his daughter’s career?
A Case Study in Washington’s Nepo Corruption
The parallels between Haley Cornyn’s trajectory and her father’s political power suggest a Washington family benefiting from access, influence, and insider privilege — a dynamic reminiscent of the Biden family influence-peddling controversies Senator Cornyn himself has criticized.
Greenberg Traurig, HillCo Partners, and PhRMA have all made millions from the policies Senator Cornyn supported. That record leaves Texans asking the same questions about loyalty and accountability that Cornyn once demanded of others.
The web of relationships, campaign donations, and legislative actions may never be fully transparent. But the questions surrounding the Cornyn family’s entanglement in lobbying and lawmaking demand answers.
Until those answers are provided, the appearance of corruption and erosion of public trust will only deepen.
The Dallas Express reached out to Senator John Cornyn’s office, his campaign, and Haley Cornyn’s employer, Greenberg Traurig, for comment, but did not receive a response. This story will be updated if responses are received.