The mainstream media is starting to pay attention to Fred Thompson’s decades-long gig as a well-heeled Washington lobbyist. His client list has been noted in this space and elsewhere. What Thompson actually did for one of these clients, the British insurance firm Equitas Ltd, was fleshed out in a must-read column by the Washington Post‘s Jeffrey Birnbaum today.

His main assignment: to use his connections to then-Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) to extract information about goings-on inside Congress and use it to benefit his multibillion-dollar client.

In exchange for this insider wisdom he was paid a cool $760,000…

Thompson’s client, London-based Equitas Ltd., held billions of dollars to pay off claims from people sickened by asbestos, a once-common building material. It wanted Congress to limit how much it had to pay into a trust fund to cover those liabilities.

In an earlier era, the term of art for what Thompson did would have been "foreign agent." 

So the so-called folksy outsider in the Republican presidential field was until recently an access man aka foreign agent for a British insurance giant. My colleague David Corn notes that this story appeared on page A23, as part of Birnbaum’s "On K Street" column, with no mention or tease on the front page. David invokes the old I.F. Stone adage: "you never know where in The Washington Post you’ll find a front-page story."