Elizabeth Sloane (Jessica Chastain), telling us Lobbying is about foresight and anticipating your opponent's moves and devising countermeasures. She is with her lawyer who tells her to say "Upon the advice of counsel, I must respectfully decline to answer your question, based on my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution". The media is covering the hearing, saying that Elizabeth is a lobbyist being charged with bribery and corruption. We flashback to SEVEN MONTHS EARLIER.Elizabeth is chatting with her friend Jane (Alison Pill) at the law firm they are lobbyists. Elizabeth talks about the palm oil tax that is being taxed by the Federal Government, depleting the funds for Indonesians. She suggests the senator proposing the bill goes on an all-expenses-paid field trip (by the Indonesian Govt, who has hired Elizabeth's firm to lobby for them) to one of the plantations in Indonesia and then showered with gifts; when he returns, his bill will die.She is called to meet George Dupont (Sam Waterson), owner of the firm, as well as the president of the Gun Lobby. They are concerned about the Heaton-Harris Amendment which would require background checks for those trying to purchase firearms. The Gun Lobby president wants Elizabeth to be the face on a bill against background checks since she is a great lobbyist and also a woman so she will appeal to the masses. She tells him she believes in the other side of the bill. George accuses her of being biased because she was a victim of gun violence. He points out she reps Indonesians and Elizabeth says she does so to stop the government from looting one of their sources of incomes.Elizabeth talks to her doctor about pills she takes to help her sleep. A Journalist tells her he's impressed that she only works for clients whom she believes in. He asks if she knows anything about the Gun Lobby's opponents, Peterson Wyatt. She says they're a small law firm and the president is probably a wuss. He then reveals that he is Rodolfo Schmidt (Mark Strong), the president of Peterson Wyatt. He wants her to lead a fight to pass a bill. He writes down a quote A conviction-lobbyist never cheats. On the other side, he writes down the amount that Peterson Wyatt would be able to pay her.Back at the office, Elizabeth announces that she's decided to leave the firm and will start up as a consultant for Peterson Wyatt. As part of her deal, she negotiated for all of them to come with her with no change to their compensation. One colleague, Pat Connors (Michael Stuhlbarg), says the Gun Lobby just recently agreed to hire them to fight against the bill and he refuses to join her. But one by one, everyone does except her best friend, Jane, who now says she is thankful to be at one of the best firms in the city and she is staying.In present day, Elizabeth is in court, being questioned about the Indonesians bribing a senator but she continues to invoke her fifth amendment. The congressman (John Lithgow) asks her about the medication she takes to treat her insomnia, she blurts out that she's not a drug addict and that her medication is no different than a double espresso and corrects him that Indonesia is a republic on the continent of Asian and not an Asia republic. He has tricked her into breaking so she can no longer invoke the fifth amendment. Outside, Elizabeth's lawyer is livid and says she could get five years minimum.We go back to six months earlier. Elizabeth goes into a hotel room where a man (Jake Lacy) is sprawled on the bed. She asks where Mark is. He says Marks moved on and he's Forde, an escort that Elizabeth has hired. They size each other up and then she begins to undress. At Peterson Wyatt, right after learning that the palm oil tax Elizabeth fought against was dropped. Elizabeth meets Esme (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) who is the firm's authority on gun control. They need exactly 60 senators to vote for the bill and not a single less. While they have some senators locked in, the other side only needs seven and there are 22 senators in play. They need to appeal to the voters because the Gun Lobby has much more money than them.The group gets a man who lost his daughter in a mass shooting to go on TV and discuss his push for background checks. This irritates the lobbyists fighting for the Gun Lobby (Sloane's old firm). Elizabeth makes a phone call, asking someone in the media to make sure they capture an event. She is sending one of her colleagues, Clara, to a fundraiser and she will ask a question about where a congressman stands on the amendment. A colleague tells Elizabeth the opposite side is going opt take the angle that their bill is the first step towards a national register of firearms. She counters that the bill will simply delay acquiring a gun by two weeks, but Americans will wait six months for an MRI. She tells them to use sound bites and points out that anyone desperate to get a gun immediately shouldn't be allowed anywhere near one.At the fundraiser, the congressman takes questions from the audience. Clara was planted to be called on but he skips her. From outside the ballroom, Elizabeth talks to Clara through a cell phone and points out that Jane and others from the rival firm are there and when they vetted Clara, they would have found out she worked with Peterson Wyatt, using her as a decoy. The last question is asked by a doctor claiming to work for the Pulmonary Associates of America. He asks how the congressman plans to vote on the Heaton-Harris Amendment. Elizabeth admits that he's actually an actor they hired and when they vetted him, it linked to a doctor with that name, and they assumed the actor is him. Because they thought Clara was their representative, they didn't research him too thoroughly. On stage, the congressman feels pressured to say he will support the amendment and it's all caught on camera so that he can't change his mind later. Elizabeth goes to the hotel room again and Forde and her chat with each other. He is curious why she uses escorts. Elizabeth says she never has time to date and if she wasn't able to squeeze it in her 20s, she's not going to do so now.Back at the office, Clara is upset that she was used as a decoy. She checked with Finance and found that the actor hired as the doctor was paid out of Elizabeth's pocket to keep them from detecting him. Clara suggests Elizabeth is afraid to trust her because someone on their staff might be a rat. The group knows one senator will bring seven people with him if they can get his vote. They ask at a rally if senator supports the Heaton-Harris Amendment at a rally and he says they've got his vote. We then see that senator playing billiards with George Dupont, who tells him they're going to back a powerful man to run for office. The man thinks they're threatening his political career and is not worried because he knows he can beat the man. He is then told that man will be running against his son, who is just beginning his political career unless he votes against the Heaton-Harris Amendment.Back in D.C., Elizabeth and her group now have a lot of supporters and only a handful left to go before they get enough to pass the amendment. Elizabeth suggests they will focus on swinging Florida, but the others protest its very gun-friendly and will never change. They also learn of the senator who has done a 180 (after the Gun Lobby threatened to put a strong candidate against his son) which loses them eight senators, all transferring to the other side. Elizabeth suggests making him feel the weight of his policy change.Elizabeth goes to a television network and watches as Connors, the lobbyist who refused to join her company move, preps for a debate on the amendment. He asks why she isn't participating and suggests the two of them debate in the future. She agrees. Back in the strategy room, everyone discusses going to Florida. Elizabeth points out they're not really going to Florida and tells them to turn to tab 12 in their notebooks. One of the women, Cynthia, doesn't have anything there but everyone else has a picture of Cynthia meeting with Connors in the park. Elizabeth explains that Florida was false information to see who would spill it. Security is called and Cynthia is escorted out. Elizabeth says they are going to focus on Colorado while the Gun Lobby is focused on Florida.Elizabeth takes Esme her to her favorite Korean BBQ spot, a sort of hole in the wall but with great food. Elizabeth mentions she looked at Esme's resume and noticed a huge gap of time unaccounted for. She asks if she would talk about her background if it helped the issue. Esme says, yes. The next day, Clara asks Elizabeth how she knew the woman was involved in leaking information. She simply had every single one of them followed and watched to make sure no one was a mole. Elizabeth meets some men in a mobile surveillance unit. They can do 24-hour surveillance using a cockroach which has been retro-fitted with electrodes to record things, to use against the senator who flip-flopped. Rodolfo, the president of Peterson Wyatt, has followed Elizabeth and he convinces her not to go through with what would be blackmailing of a member of Congress. She agrees.At a fundraiser, Elizabeth runs into Forde, but she pretends she doesn't know him. One of the lobbyists at Elizabeth's old firm witnesses the exchange. An inflatable rat is driven around town, attacking the senator who turned on the amendment, until he buckles and returns his support to the amendment. The congressman is advised to change his position on Heaton-Harris before it ruins his career. The group now has 18 votes locked with 16 to go.Elizabeth is getting her makeup on, preparing for a televised debate with Connors. She asks that Esme get touched up, too. The debate begins and its intense with Elizabeth using sound bites that were prepared in advance. She points that Americans require driver's licenses for drivers and it's illegal to operate a car without going through rigorous tests and those tests don't infringe on the freedom for people to drive cars. Connors talks about the Second Amendment and Elizabeth counters that it was signed at a time when life expectancy was 38 and very few people lived in America its not representative of the country as it exists today. She adds nothing is unimpeachable, not even the Constitution and people hide behind it like people do with the Bible and gay rights. Elizabeth adds there are many people affected by violence and background checks will be done for them. She personally knows someone who had to hide in a locker room while a shooter shot up her school in 1998 her name is Esme Manucharian and she's there with her today. The camera films Esme who runs away, frightened.Rodolfo is astonished that she set Esme up. Elizabeth has known about her story all along since she researched the staff before she met them. She has raised about 15 million in a PAC set up for the cause of women in the Gun control legislation. Now they can combat the Gun Lobby. Esme becomes the face of their movement and gets a lot of media coverage. This helps shift Americas support for background checks. Meanwhile, Connors and his team begin to worry and know they have to make a big move to get momentum to swing back to their side.In the usual hotel room, Elizabeth meets with Forde. He asks why she pretended not to know him at the gala. She says, in public, they are strangers. Elizabeth suggests spending the night ordering room service and talking. They bond, as friends. She tells him it's the closest she's ever been to being on a date because she was too busy with business and her professional life.Esme calls Elizabeth while she dines at the Korean BBQ place they first went to dinner at. Distracted, she bumps into a man and walks away without a pencil. When Esme goes outside, a man follows her. He is a gun owner upset that she is the face of the amendment which would require background checks for gun owners and points a gun at her, preparing to shoot her. But he is stopped by the man who has followed Esme to return her pencil.The man who saved Esme now becomes the face for the Gun Lobby because he had a registered gun. When asked about the Heaton-Harris Amendment, he says he opposes it. Connors and his team paint D.C. with posters of his face; he's also given awards and declared a hero. Elizabeth tries to spin this in that he's someone who is a responsible gun owner and background checks would actually be in their best interest. But it doesn't work. They start losing support. The group is defeated. Alone, Elizabeth calls her old friend, Jane, but Jane replies by telling her she has the wrong number.Jane points out to her team that the public is still in favor of gun control and voter pressure is strong. Without Elizabeth, their campaign has nothing, so they have to remove her somehow. They want a congressional hearing to look into Elizabeth's unorthodox lobbying practices because George knows a Congressman he can persuade. Everyone on the firm is asked to dig up some dirt on Elizabeth that they can use to launch the hearing. Jane finds out that Elizabeth violated the gift ban with the Indonesians and the palm oil tax.George meets with Congressman Sperling & convinces him to lead an inquiry into Elizabeth's affairs. George tells him they're arranging an article on Elizabeth's misdeeds which would justify the launch of the investigation. George says the Gun Lobby will blitz him with negative finance and they'll reduce him to nothing if he doesn't cooperate.At the office, Elizabeth's secretary tells her she found a letter from a newspaper doing a feature on her, asking for an interview. Elizabeth realizes they didn't reach out via phone because they don't want Elizabeth to respond so they can claim she had no comment but instead, she wants to grant an interview, defending herself. During the interview, Elizabeth tells the reporter that the media is part of the problem because it generates hatred for individuals and chooses scandal over insight.The article comes out and everyone at the office is upset at how it has attacked Elizabeth. She shrugs it off. But a week later, more and more articles against Elizabeth turn up from past acquaintances. They're 29 days until the vote and they've lost all ground and are afraid the bad press will lead to an indictment. Were back to present day while the indictment is going on. Congressman Sperling asks about the palm oil tax. She insists it was paid for by the Indonesian government and, but the congressman says it was paid for by a pooled account controlled by Elizabeth. She accuses him of holding some special interest (hinting that he's trying to slander her name, so it keeps their gun lobby amendment from getting passed). He then tells the court that he has one more witness Robert Forde (the escort). Forde admits he is an escort. But when they ask if he's ever met Elizabeth before, he responds that he did once, at a fund-raising event and never as a client.In the lawyer's office, Rodolfo and Elizabeth discuss how Heaton-Harris is dead and the issues gone cold. Elizabeth is told it will take an earthquake to revive it. Back at the Congressional Hearing Room, Congressman Sperling asks if there's anything Elizabeth wants to say. She says that she received an offer to take up a position advocating for gun control and gives a speech about how important it was for her to refuse the Gun Lobby and work on the Heaton-Harris campaign.In the public gallery, Jane leans over to George Dupont and says she's like to discuss her future. He tells her it's not the time. Elizabeth continues, Lobbying is about foresight. About anticipating your opponent's moves and devising countermeasures. The winner plots one step ahead of the opposition and plays her trump card just after they play theirs. "It's about making sure you surprise them, and they don't surprise you".Jane approaches George again and tells him she's resigning and doing post-grad work. Elizabeth reveals that she retained an operative of hers in George's ranks. We flashback to see Jane was working in tandem with Elizabeth all along, which is why Jane gave them the info of Elizabeth signing the paperwork that led to her indictment. The surveillance team that Elizabeth met with had used the cybernetic cockroach to film George blackmailing Congressman Sperling. In the present, Elizabeth tells everyone to type a DNS address into a browser and download the file named Earthquake.We flashback to Elizabeth looking through things in her home including the offer that was made to her. On the other side is the offer Peterson Wyatt offers $0 for your services. Elizabeth is sent to prison for the breach she committed by signing the contract. She is granted five years minimum, although suspected to be free in less than a year on parole. Her lawyer visits the prison and tells her the Gun Lobby is the most hated lobby group now and the amendment passed. But he points out that now guns are sold on the black market, and it resulted in career suicide for her.The credits roll and then we see Elizabeth leaving the prison. George Dupont and Congressman Sperling are facing charges of conspiracy, corruption, and abuse of powers. The public now knows Elizabeth was the victim of a smear campaign and the amendment is passed into law.