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Pelosi’s Picks

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) added three senior aides to her office Thursday, hiring Cheryl Parker Rose, Ellen Qualls and Joseph Onek.

“These three individuals bring impressive credentials and knowledge as well as national and state experience to the Speaker’s operations,” Pelosi said in a statement. [IMGCAP(1)]

Rose takes on duties as intergovernmental affairs director, filling the vacancy created when Pelosi selected former aide Lorraine Miller to become Clerk of the House.

The Florida native is a former senior aide to then-Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack (D), and she also has worked for the Service Employees International Union, at the Democratic Governors Association and in the Education Department under President Bill Clinton’s administration.

Qualls, who led strategic communications and media relations for former Virginia Gov. Mark Warner (D), becomes the senior adviser for strategic planning, a new post in the Speaker’s office. She also served as senior adviser for communications at Warner’s leadership political action committee, Forward Together, in the 2006 cycle.

Onek, who had served as both senior counsel to the Constitution Project and special counsel to the Open Society Institute, steps in to Pelosi’s office as senior counsel. The New York native has worked for the Senate Judiciary and Labor panels, as well as serving in the administrations of former Presidents Jimmy Carter and Clinton.

Ethics Addition. As part of a bid to staff up the ethics committee, new Chairwoman Stephanie Tubbs Jones (D-Ohio) has hired Dawn Kelly Mobley as a counsel.

Mobley worked for Jones in Ohio’s Cuyahoga County prosecutor’s office and currently is head of Project Safe Neighborhoods, which aims to reduce nationwide gun crime, and the Sixth District Community Prosecutor’s office at the Justice Department in Washington, D.C.

A former trial lawyer in the North Carolina district attorney’s office, Mobley then served in Cuyahoga County where she specialized in homicide, rape, felony and narcotics cases. In a later stint there, she was the supervisor of the felony and juvenile justice sections.

Jones said Mobley is one of several new attorneys she plans to hire in a restructuring of the ethics panel, which is charged with enforcing sweeping new gift and lobby rules.

— Jennifer Yachnin and Rachel Van Dongen

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