Raimondo, Gina gov RI

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8 24

:{Gina Raimondo Getting Vetted for VP Is a Great Sign for Corporate America

https://substack.com/app-link/post?publication_id=2510348&post_id=147210287&utm_source=post-email-title&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=7ymjw&token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjoxMzM3Mjg0NCwicG9zdF9pZCI6MTQ3MjEwMjg3LCJpYXQiOjE3MjI0NTQ1NjYsImV4cCI6MTcyNTA0NjU2NiwiaXNzIjoicHViLTI1MTAzNDgiLCJzdWIiOiJwb3N0LXJlYWN0aW9uIn0.DJGeMNLVHii8XMUbJBGLPiI7IbR3WePcYTA-JLliMMQ)}:

Even if Raimondo is passed over for Kamala Harris's running mate, the Big Tech favorite will

Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo delivers remarks with U.S Vice President Kamala Harris on September 09, 2021 in Washington, DC. Photo by Anna Moneymaker via Getty.

As Kamala Harris faces pressure from major Democratic donors to drop Lina Khan as Federal Trade Commission chair, the vice president is reportedly vetting Big Tech’s favorite Biden cabinet official as a possible running mate. At the helm of the Department of Commerce, Gina Raimondo has served as the tech industry’s backdoor into the Biden administration, meeting frequently with executives and pushing Big Tech priorities in trade negotiations and to overseas regulators.

LinkedIn billionaire Reid Hoffman, who publicly demanded Harris fire Khan, is a Raimondo fan. “A lot of people from around the world come to Silicon Valley to try to understand what they can learn to improve their region,” Hoffman told Time, referencing a dinner he hosted for Raimondo in Silicon Valley in 2016. “The funny thing is, very few U.S. politicians do that. Gina is one of those few.”

“I try so hard to talk to as many people in the industry as possible,” Raimondo told Time.

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In 2022, a coalition of watchdogs demanded that Raimondo disclose her calendars. The Department of Commerce initially resisted, but ultimately released them. The most recently publicly available calendars, reviewed by Drop Site, reveal that between 2021 and September 2023, she met with executives from the big five tech firms—Amazon, Alphabet, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft—at least 48 times. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had reportedly told Raimondo he felt Amazon was unfairly targeted by the EU tech law.

“You can’t meet with her,” said Emily Peterson-Cassin, the director of corporate power at Demand Progress, which was on the coalition letter. “And then the schedules come out, and she’s meeting with every tech company, every finance company, every corporation under the sun—and when it comes to people who work in the public interest or protect consumers, there’s nothing.”

Between 2021 and September 2023, Raimondo met with executives from the big five tech firms—Amazon, Alphabet, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft—at least 48 times.

“Raimondo postures as big tech’s representative in the Biden administration,” said Jeff Hauser, director of the Revolving Door Project, a progressive advocacy group. “She brags about hiring Wall Street people to exercise the Commerce Department’s radically enhanced jurisdiction.”

By vetting Raimondo, Harris draws from the corporatist wing of the Biden administration and signals a potential shift away from President Joe Biden’s anti-monopoly efforts. Harris has yet to comment publicly on Khan nor indicate whether she will hew to Biden’s antitrust agenda, but her backers in the tech industry who are optimistic she will take a softer approach. An anonymous Democratic donor told the New York Times that Harris has privately expressed skepticism of “Khan’s expansive view of antitrust powers.”

While advocates see the vice presidential ticket as a long shot for Raimondo, they’re concerned about her ambitions within a potential Harris administration. “What I’m worried about is that they’re going to turn the fact that she’s a vetted candidate into making her head of Treasury,” said Peterson-Cassin, “which would be a disaster.”

Venture Capital to Pension Funds

Raimondo came to politics by way of venture capitalism, joining the venture capital firm Village Ventures, and then founding her own, Point Judith Capital, in 2001. In 2010, she was elected treasurer of Rhode Island, fueled by out-of-state financial industry donations. She inherited a crisis in the state pension system, which was being propped up by taxpayers and eating up funding for key state services.

Raimondo tackled the problem by halting cost of living increases for retirees, moving public employee pensions into 401(k)-style accounts, and investing the state’s money into hedge funds like Paul Singer’s Elliott Management—costing the state tens of millions of dollars each year in fees while delivering subpar performance. Amid the overhaul, Raimondo invested state pension fund money in her own Point Judith Capital, which Raimondo still held equity in. That fund also performed poorlywhile collecting more than $1 million in management fees alone from Rhode Island before the state was finally able to withdraw its investments in 2021.

The overhaul won Raimondo the ire of public sector unions—and the praise of the financial industry, which sponsored her bid for governor in 2014 and reelection in 2018. Raimondo touted some progressive accomplishments as governor including making one of the state’s community colleges free. But in 2015 she came under fire from pro-choice groups for negotiating a budget deal that required health insurers to offer plans on the state exchange that excluded coverage for abortions. And progressives attacked her for partially privatizing and repeatedly cutting Medicaid.

During the pandemic, Raimondo drew criticism from public health experts for keeping businesses open as she oversaw some of the highest rates of death from Covid-19 in the country, before being tapped to serve as Biden’s Commerce Secretary.

Backdoor for Big Tech

Upon joining the cabinet, Raimondo quickly became known as a liaison for big tech into the Biden administration. In her first seven months as commerce secretary, Raimondo met or spoke with 230 CEOs, executives, or trade groups, according to her schedules—including the CEOs of Apple and Google. Tech industry officials saw her as a “key advocate” inside an administration proposing antitrust actions they opposed, Axios reported.

The Commerce Secretary job typically goes to someone who can cultivate these business relationships. “You put your rich person talker at Commerce,” Hauser said. “If corporate leaders are trying to find a way into the Biden administration, they can talk to Raimondo.”

At times, Raimondo has worked against Biden administration policies. In her first year on the job, Raimondo criticized proposed European Union big tech regulations for targeting American firms.

“We have serious concerns that these proposals will disproportionately impact U.S.-based tech firms, and their ability to adequately serve EU customers, and uphold security and privacy standards,” Raimondo said at a December 2021 U.S. Chamber of Commerce event, adding, “now more than ever, we encourage officials to continue listening to concerns by stakeholders before finalizing their decision.” Raimondo also reportedly discussed her concerns regarding the antitrust rules with EU officials.

Raimondo, who reportedly “dazzled” Biden’s own vice presidential search committee, has been tasked with implementing major Biden-era initiatives.

The comments “appear to publicly undermine the Administration’s previously announced policies to protect consumers and workers from Big Tech monopolies” U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., wrote in a letter to Raimondo. “It makes little sense for you to go before the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which opposes all these Administration efforts, and promise to defend U.S. Big Tech firms from competition policies designed to achieve the same goals as the Biden Administration’s policies merely because they emerge from our allies.”

The White House ultimately declined requests from major companies like Apple and Google to defy the EU measures. Raimondo has denied that there is a split between her and the rest of the Biden administration when it comes to antitrust. In 2022, she endorsed domestic bipartisan antitrust legislation.

Raimondo’s Corporate Hires

As Raimondo liaised with corporate executives, she staffed her agency with personnel from the tech industry and Wall Street, drawing scrutiny from progressives. When she was leading major digital trade negotiations in 2022, the American Prospect reported that some of her top officials and trade negotiators previously worked or lobbied for Google, Amazon, Dropbox, and Visa. In those trade talks, Raimondo pushed big-tech backed data privacy and data localization rules.

In July 2022, Warren and Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., sent Commerce a letter demanding that Raimondo disclose information about “the abundance of Big Tech alumni within the Department,” which they said “raise serious concerns about your agency’s approach to digital trade policy.”

Raimondo, who reportedly “dazzled” Biden’s own vice presidential search committee, has been given increasing powers as the Commerce Department has been tasked with implementing major Biden-era initiatives including parts of the bipartisan infrastructure law and the CHIPS Act, a funding bill for semiconductor research and manufacturing. (Biden has also made Raimondo the administration’s point person on artificial intelligence—which has pleased the industry.)

In order to implement the CHIPS Act, Raimondo has drawn on Wall Street expertise. She tapped former Goldman Sachs and KKR executives to comprise her team distributing the $100 billion allocated by the law to spur semiconductor production.

“Raimondo is the single best Democrat at impressing the financial class to invest in her as a reasonable Democrat,” said Hauser.

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during Donald Trump's four years as president, his administration was a revolving door. But one person who was part of the Trump Administration throughout most of his presidency was former Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who started in February 2017 and stayed until February 2021. The U.S. Department of Commerce, journalist Shawn Boburg reports in an article published by the Washington Post on May 24, has had an "obscure security unit" that was "tasked with protecting" its "officials and facilities" — and during its Trump/Ross era, according to Boburg, it "evolved into something more akin to a counterintelligence operation that collected information on hundreds of people inside and outside the Department."

According to Boburg, "The Investigations and Threat Management Service (ITMS) covertly searched employees' offices at night, ran broad keyword searches of their e-mails trying to surface signs of foreign influence and scoured Americans' social media for critical comments about the (2020 U.S.) Census, according to documents and interviews with five former investigators. In one instance, the unit opened a case on a 68-year-old retiree in Florida who tweeted that the Census, which is run by the Commerce Department, would be manipulated 'to benefit the Trump Party,' records show."

Boburg adds, "In another example, the unit searched Commerce servers for particular Chinese words, documents show. The search resulted in the monitoring of many Asian-American employees over benign correspondence, according to two former investigators."

John Costello, who formerly served as deputy assistant secretary of intelligence and security for the Commerce Dept. under the Trump Administration, is highly critical of ITMS — telling the Post that ITMS "has been allowed to operate far outside the bounds of federal law enforcement norms and has created an environment of paranoia and retaliation at the Department."

Bruce Ridlen, a former supervisor, told the Post that the ITMS' tactics make it look as though "someone watched too many 'Mission Impossible' movies."

Ridlen, who left ITMS in October 2020, told the Post, "I chose to resign from my position with ITMS after it became clear there was no authority to perform law enforcement functions. There were no policies in place to outline standards of conduct or to establish parameters for investigative activities, which led to investigative inquiries of U.S. persons over protected free speech found on several social media platforms."

Former Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo was sworn in as commerce secretary under President Joe Biden in early March.

Boburg explains, "(ITMS) has managed to keep a low public profile until now, while pursuing investigations into 'counterintelligence, transnational crime and counterterrorism,' as it described its activities in a 2018 budget document submitted to Congress. Incoming Commerce leaders from the Biden Administration ordered ITMS to pause all criminal investigations on March 10, and on May 13, ordered the suspension of all activities after preliminary results of an ongoing review, according to a statement issued by Department spokeswoman Brittany Caplin. The suspension came two days after the Post presented its findings about the unit to the department and sought interviews."

The statement read, "The current Commerce Department leadership team takes this issue seriously. The Department expects that at the end of the review, it can and will implement a comprehensive solution to the issues raised."

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