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https://www.amazon.com/Servants-Damned-Donald-Corruption-Justice/dp/0063266210

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Ex-Trump solicitor general representing Chinese social media giant in case against US government

Ex-Trump solicitor general representing Chinese social media giant in ...

From 2017-2020, attorney Noel J. Francisco served as solicitor general during the first Trump Administration. Francisco went on to join a major law firm, Jones Day, after leaving the White House ...

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https://www.npr.org/2022/09/13/1122536384/trump-lawyers-jones-day-servants-of-the-damned-david-enrich

NPR fresh air underwriter

no lnx

How lawyers from one giant DC firm influenced Trump's Supreme Court picks

September 13, 20221

Heard on Fresh Air

Terry Gross

President Trump appointed three Supreme Court justices and nominated 274 individuals to federal judgeships. Journalist David Enrich says many of those picks were influenced by lawyers from the firm of Jones Day.

Editor's note: Jones Day is an underwriter for NPR and has done work for NPR in the past.

While campaigning for president in 2016, Donald Trump famously cast himself as a Washington outsider, someone who would "drain the swamp" of special interests and cronyism. But New York Times journalist David Enrich notes that both Trump's candidacy and his administration were shaped, in no small part, by Jones Day, one of the most politically connected law firms in DC.

For much of Jones Day's history, it was a juggernaut in the field of corporate litigation, raking in billions a year in fees from tobacco, opioid, gun and oil companies, among many other giant corporations. But, as Enrich writes in his book, Servants of the Damned, the firm became particularly embroiled in politics during the Trump administration.

"They were more embedded in the Trump administration than any law firm I can think of in any past presidential administration," Enrich says. "Throughout the White House and the Justice Department, as well as other agencies, basically, everywhere you looked, you would find a once and future Jones Day lawyer."

Enrich points out that Don McGahn, a prominent Jones Day lawyer, left the firm to become Trump's White House counsel. McGahn assumed the responsibility of picking the judges Trump would nominate to the federal courts, including the Supreme Court.

"One of the core kind of tenets of McGahn's judicial philosophy was this real antipathy toward what he calls derisively 'the administrative state,'" Enrich says. "And one of the biggest results of that is that it translates into judges who no longer give nearly as much deference to the rights and authority of federal agencies as had been the norm."

Enrich says lawyers from Jones Day cycled back and forth between the Trump administration and private practice, where they would go right back to representing corporate clients — in some cases with interests before the Trump administration.

"The notion that this outsider trying to shake things up would turn to a firm like Jones Day to staff his administration and help pick his judges and things like that, it is really antithetical to that," Enrich says. "When I think of the swamp and I think when Trump thinks of the swamp, there are few swampier things than that type of inside baseball lobbying."

Interview highlights

On the outsized role Jones Day played in the Trump administration

Starting in 2015, the law firm represented his campaign, and they did so through the 2016 cycle and then again the 2020 campaign, that was work that basically started on Inauguration Day of 2017. And so they were front and center on both of his presidential campaigns, but they were not representing him personally. ...

The White House counsel, Don McGahn, was a very prominent Jones Day lawyer, and he surrounded himself in the White House with several senior Jones Day partners and associates who he brought with him. At the Justice Department, the solicitor general, Noel Francisco, was once and future Jones Day partner.And in the upper echelons of both in the civil division of the Justice Department you had some of the people right beneath the attorney general were from Jones Day. You had someone at the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the Commerce Department, on and on the list goes.

On Jones Day accomplishing political interests once Trump was in office

Trump Guts Requirement That Employer Health Plans Pay For Birth Control

Shortly after Trump became president, Jones Day lawyers, both inside the administration and outside the administration, those still at the firm, started accomplishing things that they had long sought to accomplish but had not been able to do. And the clearest example of this to me is aseries of lawsuits that Jones Day had brought on behalf of a bunch of Catholic organizations that were basically challenging an important provision of Obamacare, the Affordable Care Act. ... One of the first things that [the Trump] administration does with the help of Don McGahn, is they basically say they're going to end an Obama administration policy that sought to require employers to provide contraception coverage for their employees, which was part of Obamacare. And this was the subject of the lawsuit. So right on the face, it represented a big win for Jones Day and its clients.

On Jones Day's political agenda

The law firm isn't a monolith, and I think it's important to kind of say that at the outset. And this is a law firm that has something like 2,500 lawyers in dozens of countries all over the world. And like any large organization or large law firm, there are employees and lawyers at Jones Day that have, I think, a wide range of political views ranging from far left to far right. What sets Jones apart is the degree to which the leadership of the firm is fairly uniform in their conservative thinking. ...

Their agenda ... ranged from lots of deregulation and really getting the government out of the affairs of businesses to a very large extent, and then also an agenda of what I think the right people on the right would call "religious liberty." And I think people on the left and to a certain degree, people in the center would say much dramatically eroding the separation of church and state in a way that allows religion to play a much more prominent role in public and political life.

On how Don McGahn, former Jones Day lawyer, ended up picking SCOTUS nominees for Trump

[Wave Of Young Judges Pushed By McConnell Will Be 'Ruling For Decades To Come'

Shortly after Trump was elected, Mitch McConnell gave some advice to Don McGahn. The advice was that instead of relying on a committee at the White House to debate and pick nominees for the Supreme Court and other federal courts, McConnell's advice was, "Look, you should get Trump's permission to just do this by yourself. You alone should have the power to pick the judges that Trump will nominate." McGahn liked the sound of that. He proposed it to Trump and Trump when he offered McGahn, the job of White House counsel, readily agreed to this. And so McGahn, very quickly, before Trump even was sworn in as president, all of a sudden was sitting on this enormous power that was really quite unusual historically. And he was the one who would be picking the people that Trump nominated to all sorts of federal courts.

On McGahn going back to Jones Day after working in the Trump administration

He came right back, got a big promotion, got a bunch more money. And he was kind of the first in what would become a whole parade of people who went from the Trump administration back into the law firm. A lot of these were people who had started off of Jones Day, then went to the Trump administration and then returned. But there were also a lot of people who had not previously worked at Jones Day, had worked at maybe at other law firms. And with the return of McGahn, Jones Day became essentially a refuge for veterans of the Trump administration, who many of whom had really developed quite controversial backstories and had taken quite controversial and polarizing and legally dubious actions while in the Trump administration and therefore, I think, were pretty radioactive for many other big law firms. But Jones Day welcomed many of them with open arms.

[ron johnson, herschel walker]

On Jones Day taking advantage of the judicial revolution it set in motion

It's now bringing cases through the Supreme Court and through the lower courts that were basically made possible by this deluge of very conservative federal judges that are now on the benches of many courts. So just in the Supreme Court's past term, which was obviously one of the most radical and farthest reaching the Supreme Court terms, certainly of my lifetime, and Jones Day played pivotal roles in some of these cases. And I think the biggest one was the case, the West Virginia versus EPA case that dramatically hemmed in the power of the EPA to regulate carbon emissions. And that was brought on behalf of the Jones Day client, a big coal company.

Jones Day was the law firm thatbasically ended the eviction moratorium [judge fla] during the pandemic that the Biden administration had imposed. And Jones Day, just reading the tea leaves and talking to their lawyers now, it's quite clear that they are plotting a wide range of attacks on the power of the federal government to oversee private businesses and private companies in a way that goes back to Don McGahn and his colleagues' hatred of the so-called administrative state. And they are now in a position to be able to much more forcefully advocate those positions and be successful in their advocacy — thanks to all of the judges that Trump, at McGahn's direction and with McConnell's support, managed to get on to virtually every federal court in the country.

After leaving the FEC, McGahnreturned to the law firm Patton Boggs.^[16] In 2014 he moved to the law firm of Jones Day in Washington, D.C.^[17] He also worked for the Koch affiliated Freedom Partners.^[20] McGahn brought five Jones Day lawyers with him to the White House, and six more were appointed to senior posts in the Trump Administration.^[21] Jones Day has representedAlfa-Bank and done work for businesses belonging to a long list of Russian oligarchs, including Oleg Deripaska, Viktor Vekselberg, and Alexander Mashkevich.^[21]

https://www.citywatchla.com/index.php/cw/guest-words/24209-the-money-trail-ginni-thomas-emails-to-overturn-biden-s-election-leads-to-charles-koch

2020 ELECTION CONSPIRACY - The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward and Bob Costa of CBS News have unleashed a fury of renewed interest in the work of the House Select Committee investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol.

Last Thursday, Woodward and Costa set off a political firestorm when they released the contents of emails that Ginni Thomas, wife of the sitting Supreme Court Justice, Clarence Thomas, had sent to President Donald Trump’s Chief of Staff, Mark Meadows, in 2020, urging him to overturn the Biden election win and attempting to steer his efforts in that regard.

A total of 29 emails were obtained by Woodward and Costa, with the bulk of the emails occurring in just the month of November 2020, raising questions as to how many more emails are still out there from Thomas to the White House from December 1, 2020 through January 20, 2021 when Biden was sworn in.

Much of the current news debate around the emails is focusing on whether Clarence Thomas should recuse himself from cases involving groups with which his wife is involved and whether the Select Committee should subpoena Ginni Thomas to testify. While those are certainly important issues, what has thus far been ignored is the smoking gun trail that leads directly to the doorstep of billionaire and right-wing Republican political mastermind, Charles Koch, the Chairman, CEO (and majority owner with the heirs of his deceased brother David) of the fossil fuels conglomerate Koch Industries.

Wall Street On Parade has previously documented that at least three of the front groups that fomented the Big Lie that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen from Trump and that actively solicited thousands of people to turn out for the January 6 event at the Capitol, were funded by Koch Industries or its front groups.

The smoking gun in the Ginni Thomas email thread occurs in an email dated November 10, 2020 when she tells Meadows to “Listen to Rush. Mark Steyn, Bongino, Cleta.” Thomas is clearly referring to conservative commentators Rush Limbaugh, Mark Steyn and Dan Bongino, and lawyer, Cleta Mitchell.

Cleta Mitchell is best known in the Trump election saga as the lawyer who was on the January 2, 2021 call with Donald Trump when he phoned the Secretary of State of Georgia, Brad Raffensperger, and told him this: “I only need 11,000 votes. Fellas, I need 11,000 votes. Give me a break.” That call took place two months after the presidential election. (Mitchell stepped down from her long-term employment at law firm Foley & Lardner after her presence on that call made the news cycle.)

But Cleta Mitchell’s relationship with Ginni Thomas dates back at least a decade earlier – and not in a good way.

Cleta Mitchell had filed an amicus brief in the Citizens United case before the Supreme Court that was decided on January 21, 2010. That case would be the tipping point to allow unlimited sums from corporations – like Koch Industries — in U.S. elections.

Just eight days after Justice Thomas voted in favor of that decision to open the floodgates to corporate money in campaigns, Cleta Mitchell made a move that looked very much like a quid pro quo to Ginni Thomas. Mitchell, then still a partner at Foley & Lardner, filed an application with the Internal Revenue Service to set up a nonprofit called Liberty Central, Inc. on behalf of Ginni Thomas. According to IRS tax filings, Liberty Central received a combined $1.478 million from dark money donors in 2009 and 2010.

On the IRS tax filings for Liberty Central for 2009 and 2010, Ginni (Virginia) Thomas is listed as President and CEO. The 2010 tax filing shows that Ginni Thomas received $120,511 in compensation from Liberty Central that year. She eventually stepped down from an official post at the nonprofit, stating she would serve as a consultant.

Liberty Central had the fingerprints of Charles Koch all over it. Acting as General Counsel in 2010 for Liberty Central was a former lawyer for the Charles G. Koch Foundation, Sarah Field. A former Koch lobbyist, Matt Schlapp, served on the Board of Liberty Central at inception.

Mitchell’s law firm, Foley & Lardner, employed three attorneys working as lobbyists for a Koch Industries affiliate, Koch Companies Public Sector, LLC in Madison, Wisconsin in 2011. The Koch-related lobbyists were Ray Carey, Jason Childress and Kathleen Walby.

Mitchell, herself, was a former lobbyist at the federal level in years 2005 through 2008 for the Alliance for Charitable Reform, a project of The Philanthropy Roundtable, another tax-exempt organization. Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund, two dark money groups which also have Charles Koch’s fingerprints all over them, were spun off from the Philanthropy Roundtable in 1999. (See our report: Koch Footprints Lead to Secret Slush Fund to Keep Fear Alive.)

Mitchell is listed on the 2018 federal tax filing for Steve Bannon’s charity, Citizens of the American Republic, as an officer of the organization, holding the position of Secretary. Bannon and others were charged in August of 2021 by the Department of Justice with bilking donors out of hundreds of thousands of dollars through that charity.

Senator Ron Johnson, a Republican from Wisconsin, was one of those pushing the narrative on television that the election had been stolen from Donald Trump. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, lawyers and staff of Foley & Lardner were the third largest donor to Johnson’s campaign committees since 2015. Employees and officials of Koch Industries ranked fifth.

There were only eight Republican Senators who refused to certify the votes for the challenged states of Arizona and/or Pennsylvania. Those Republican Senators were: Ted Cruz of Texas; Josh Hawley of Missouri; Rick Scott of Florida; Tommy Tuberville of Alabama; Roger Marshall of Kansas; Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi; John Kennedy of Louisiana; and Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming. Every Republican Senator who refused to certify the election results on January 6 received funding from Koch Industries PAC.

Trump’s Chief of Staff, Mark Meadows, whom Ginni Thomas enlisted in the White House to help overturn Biden’s election win, was previously a member of the House of Representatives from North Carolina from 2013 to 2020. He also received campaign funding from the Koch Industries PAC throughout his time in Congress.

Charles Koch is usually very careful in keeping an arm’s length relationship between himself and his political operations. But on at least one occasion Koch conducted a dinner meeting directly with sitting Justice Clarence Thomas at a private club in California.

In January 2008, Justice Thomas attended an all-expenses-paid, four-day trip to the Koch brothers’ semi-annual political gathering in the Palm Springs area of California. (According to his 2008 disclosure form and the Supreme Court’s public information office, Thomas’ expenses for that trip were paid by the Federalist Society, a conservative nonprofit that Koch foundations have generously supported.)

Justice Thomas’ trip to the Koch event occurred in the same year that the Citizens Unitedcase was accepted by the Supreme Court. The Court accepts less than two percent of all cases appealed to it.

Wall Street On Parade was previously able to confirm with Scott Markley, Public Information Specialist at the Supreme Court, that during that January 2008 visit to the Koch political gathering, Justice Thomas was hosted by Charles Koch and his wife, Elizabeth, at the private Vintage Club where Charles Koch is a member.

The Citizens United decision did not pass the smell test when it was approved in a 5-4 vote by the Supreme Court. Four of the nine justices wrote a scathing dissent that raised the issue of unprincipled behavior, writing that the majority had ruled on issues that were not even legally before the court.

The money that the Koch political machine pumped into putting Trump in the Oval Office quickly paid big dividends in his first term (and made it clear as to why Charles Koch would have wanted to see a second Trump term).

Koch Industries’ law firm, Jones Day, sent 12 of its law partners to staff up key positions in the Trump administration on the very day Trump was inaugurated. Jones Day has since sacked the press release it issued at the time but you can read the reporting on it at the American Bar Association Journal.

Once Trump was settled in the Oval Office, a Koch front group, then known as Freedom Partners, mapped out the agenda it expected Trump to march to. In a document titled “Roadmap to Repeal: Removing Regulatory Barriers to Opportunity,” the group listed the laws and regulations it expected to be repealed in the first 100 days of Trump’s administration. The Trump administration dutifully marched to the beat. Repeal the Paris Climate Accord – done. Tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy – done. Gutting federal regulations and the Environmental Protection Agency – done.

By the spring of 2018, 12 people who previously worked at Freedom Partners were working in the Trump administration. Freedom Partners has since disbanded but when we last took a look at the nonprofit in July 2018, we found that all but one of Freedom Partners’ 9-member Board of Directors was a current or former Koch company employee. The Board Chair of Freedom Partners at that time was the same Mark Holden that was the General Counsel of Koch Industries.

It’s time for the House Select Committee to subpoena not just Ginni Thomas and Cleta Mitchell. It’s time to hear from Charles Koch directly on how so much money bearing his fingerprints ended up fomenting the attack on the Capitol on January 6.

There will never be a better time than now for the American people to finally get at the truth.

(Pam Martens & Russ Martens are authors at CounterPunch.org. This originally appeared on Wall Street on Parade

ref 1

a dozen lawyers from Jones Day are headed to new jobs in the Trump administration that range from White House counsel to special assistant to the secretary of agriculture.

Jones Day announced the moves in a press release, and several publications picked up the story, including Above the Law, the National Law Journal (sub. req.) and the Wall Street Journal Law Blog.

One appointment—that of Donald McGahnto serve as White House counsel—was previously announced. Also working in the White House are Bill McGinley (deputy assistant to the president and cabinet secretary),Greg Katsas (deputy counsel to the president), David Morrell (associate counsel to the president), James Burnham (senior associate counsel to the president),Annie Donaldson (special counsel to the president and chief of staff to the White House counsel).

Jones Day lawyers working in the Justice Department include Noel Francisco (principal deputy solicitor general), John Gore (deputy assistant attorney general, civil rights division), Chad Readler (principal deputy assistant attorney general, civil division), and Michael Murray (counsel to the deputy attorney general).

Rounding out the list are James Uthmeier (special adviser to the Secretary of Commerce) and Stephen Vaden (special assistant to the Secretary of Agriculture).

A 13th lawyer, Kaytlin Roholt, will serve as special counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee.

https://newrepublic.com/article/165782/republicans-putin-history-relationship-manafort

no lnx many

Craig Unger/March 18, 2022

How Republicans Spent Decades Cozying Up to Putin’s Kremlin

The man who once worked to connect Tom DeLay and Jack Abramoff to Russia is now chief of staff to Marjorie Taylor Greene. Any questions?

“Do you think Americans give a fuck about Ukraine?!”

—Secretary of State Mike Pompeo speaking to NPR broadcaster Mary Louise Kelly in January 2020

Whatever Americans were thinking two years ago, when Pompeo gave his NPR interview, they now do give a fuck about Ukraine—and therein lies a problem: For more than 25 years, the party of Reagan has been transforming itself into the party of Putin, only to discover that Vladimir Putin may not be a great role model after all. As a result, one leading Republican after another has begun to perform Simone Biles–level gymnastics in their bids to condemn their party’s most powerful patron.

Consider that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis now calls Putin “an authoritarian gas station attendant with some legacy nuclear weapons.” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell called Putin “a ruthless thug who’s just invaded another sovereign country and killed thousands of innocent people.” And on Twitter, Senator Lindsey Graham openly called for Putin’s assassination. “The only way this ends is for somebody in Russia to take this guy out,” he tweeted. “You would be doing your country—and the world—a great service.”

For more than 25 years, a large swath of the GOP has enjoyed mutually rewarding relationships with Russian operatives.

But if you think this is hard-line Cold War tough talk from the Reagan-era GOP of yore, think again. It’s not just Donald Trump who’s in Vladimir Putin’s pocket. For more than 25 years, a large swath of the GOP has enjoyed mutually rewarding relationships with Russian operatives funding and working with K Street lobbyists, political consultants, super PACs, campaign fundraising operations, disinformation and propaganda campaigns, social media operations, cyber-warfare efforts, money laundering schemes, think tanks harboring Russian intelligence operatives, and much, much more.

Jonathan Winer, former deputy assistant secretary of state for international law enforcement, has observed the relationship for years. “If you go back to the days of Jack Abramoff, when Americans started going to Moscow in the ’90s, and then to Paul Manafort in Ukraine, and so on, you start to see the spine of a secret influence campaign between the Republicans and Russia that has been built up over decades,” he said. “It goes right up to Tucker Carlson rooting for Putin on Fox today. It has been built up over decades, and it is not new, and it deeply infects the Republican Party. You have two forces with deep political ties that are fighting American democracy in order to keep Putin in power and install a Putin-like system in America. And to that end, they have penetrated deep into our think tanks, our media, our journalism—everything.”

Take Ed Buckham, the recently appointed chief of staff for Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene. Today, Buckham handles a congresswoman who proudly attends “white supremacist, antisemitic, pro-Putin” rallies, as Congresswoman Liz Cheney characterized them, and has become renowned for touting conspiracy theories about how the California wildfires were started byJewish space lasers. On Thursday, when the House of Representatives voted to suspend normal trade relations with Russia and Belarus, Greene, not surprisingly, was one of eight Republicans who voted against it.

Buckham’s ties to Russian interests date back 25 years to 1997—before Putin came to power—when he served as an aide to House Majority Whip Tom DeLay. This was the heyday of “Casino Jack” Abramoff, the lobbyist-conman who took on pay-for-play clients ranging from the Choctaw Indian tribe of Mississippi to the Kremlin with a panache made for Hollywood. At the time, Buckham, in addition to his job with DeLay, oversaw a lobbying outfit called the U.S. Family Network, which presented itself as a public advocacy group but was really a vehicle funded largely by clients of Jack Abramoff.

In this case, the relevant clients linked to Abramoff were executives from Naftasib, the Russian energy giant. If DeLay’s lavish six-day excursion to Moscow in 1997 is any indication, the Russians made cultivating DeLay a high priority and spared little expense, as the junket involved golf, lavish dinners, and a meeting with Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin. But the icing on the cake was a $1 million contribution by the Russians to the U.S. Family Network. According to The Washington Post, Buckham told the former president of the U.S. Family Network that Russians made the $1 million contribution specifically to influence DeLay’s vote on legislation to finance a bailout of the collapsing Russian economy.

Ultimately, DeLay was forced out of Congress, indicted, convicted, and sentenced to three years in prison for money laundering and conspiracy charges relating to campaign financing. In 2013, however, his conviction was overturned on appeal. Abramoff served 43 months in jail for mail fraud, conspiracy to bribe public officials, and tax evasion. As for Buckham, he is now back in the fray, a top aide to one of the most controversial and extreme members of Congress. (Buckham did not respond to multiple requests for an interview for this article.)

But Buckham’s and DeLay’s Russian intrigues paled next to those of Paul Manafort, the Roy Cohn–trained fixer and political consultant who represented the interests of corrupt despots the world over—the Philippines’ Ferdinand Marcos, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, Romania’s Nicolai Ceausescu, Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko—and Vladimir Putin.Manafort’s ties with Russia go back to 2004, when he began his journey into the shadowy world of flight capital, offshore companies, and Russian intelligence. In all, over $75 million in Russian funds flowed through Manafort’s operations into his offshore accounts. According to a Senate Intelligence Committee Report, Manafort appointed his constant companion, a Russian intelligence officer named Konstantin Kilimnik, as head of his Ukraine operations with full “power of attorney” to interact with pro-Putin oligarchs who were funding Manafort.

Manafort set up sophisticated disinformation campaigns, using phony think tanks and phony journalists to write phony stories—all supporting Putin’s phony narratives.

He also set up sophisticated disinformation campaigns, using phony think tanks and phony journalists to write phony stories—all supporting Putin’s phony narratives. As Manafort’s deputy, Rick Gates, once explained, “Paul has a whole separate shadow government structure.… In every ministry, he has a guy.” And much of it was in service to Putin’s objective of taking over Ukraine, not by military force as we are seeing today but from the inside, via the pro-Putin Party of Regions, whose oligarchs paid Manafort, and its candidate Viktor Yanukovych, an oligarch worth $12 billion.

Manafort launched Yanukovych into the Ukrainian presidency in 2010. But by 2013 the pro-European facade he had created for his candidate had been stripped away, revealing Yanukovych to be merely another of Putin’s pawns. After the massive protests in Maidan Square in 2014, when nearly 100 activists were killed, Yanukovych was forced to leave the presidency and flee to Moscow.

Text messages between Manafort’s two daughters, Andrea and Jessica, suggest they felt their father was responsible for the deaths that took place at Maidan. “Don’t fool yourself,” Andrea Manafort texted her sister. “That money we have is blood money.”

So by the time Manafort became Donald Trump’s campaign manager, the die had been cast. Deeply in debt to Putin’s oligarchs, he maintained, according to the report by the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in 2020 cited above, ongoing contacts with Kilimnik that “represented a grave counterintelligence threat” because his “presence on the Campaign and proximity to Trump created opportunities for Russian intelligence services to exert influence over, and acquire confidential information on, the Trump campaign.”

According to the Mueller Report, in August 2016, Manafort met with Kilimnik at the Grand Havana Club in New York and, according to an assessment by the Treasury Department, provided “Russian Intelligence Services with sensitive information on polling and strategy,” presumably for use in influence campaigns on behalf of Trump.

Of course, Manafort was not alone among Republican lobbyists in carrying water for Putin. According to Open Secrets,quite apart from Manafort, Russian interests have spent about $182 million on lobbying, influence operations, and propaganda in the last six years.

As I reported in American Kompromat,Jones Day,the fourth-largest law firm in the land, represented at least 10 major corporations and organizations close to Putin. These included: Oleg Deripaska’s Basic Element; theAlfa Groupand Access-Renova Group, which jointly own billions in oil and gas assets; Alfa Bank, the largest private commercial bank in Russia; Letterone, a $30 billion holding company for assets in technology, oil, and gas;Rosneft,the world’s largest listed oil company; the Sapir Organization, which helped fund Bayrock’s Trump SoHo; and more.

Likewise, Kirkland and Ellis is the biggest law firm in the world, with a star-studded cast of GOP power brokers in its ranks—among them, former Attorney General William Barr; former solicitor general and GOP attack dog Kenneth Starr; Supreme Court Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh; Viet Dinh, chief legal and policy officer of Fox Corporation, and as such the secret power behind Fox News; and former national security adviser John Bolton, to name but a few. Its most prized Russian clients have included Alfa Bank, whose key figures, Mikhail Fridman and Petr Aven, were entirely dependent on Putin for their wealth, and Oleg Deripaska’s En+ Group, the largest producer of aluminum in the world outside of China.

Now that Putin has begun waging an old-fashioned war with bombs, bullets, and boots on the ground, and is doing so in an astonishingly brutal and clumsy fashion, it is tempting to forget that in recent years, he has been far, far more successful with the kind of asymmetric hybrid warfare we saw in the 2016 election. So as the horrifying carnage in Ukraine flickers across our television screens, let’s not forget Russian trolls activating strategic influence operations on multiple social media platforms, the money laundering through real estate that enriched Donald Trump and his associates, and the Russian conspiracy theories that just happen to be echoed by QAnon, former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, and the like.

Of course, now that there are far more forceful sanctions in play and Russia has become a pariah state and Operation Kleptocapture is underway, the once-close relationship between figures on the American right and the Kremlin was bound to change. It wasn’t that long ago that Steven Brogan, the powerful managing partner of Jones Day, could interact withpartners Don McGahn and Vladimir Lechtman, the head of Jones Day’s Russia practice, and in doing so talk to one man who served as Donald Trump’s attorney and another who was likely the single most trusted corporate counsel to Putin’s oligarchs. Things can’t be quite that cozy these days.

“The sanctions that have been put into place are intended to choke Putin’s entire system of economic as well as military power. In the near term, there is nothing but risk for those who engage with Russia, and intense pressure to withdraw from Russian relationships,” says Jonathan Winer, who is credited with coming up with the Magnitsky Act, applying sanctions to Russian officials who were responsible for the death of Sergei Magnitsky, the tax accountant for Hermitage Capital Management who uncovered massive corruption by Russian officials and was tortured to death. “The international law firms and accounting firms operating in Russia are mostly shutting down for now,” he added.

“Russian security state influence networks are pervasive and persistent, and they are not going to suddenly disappear just because Putin has now made himself the world’s most hated person.”

But that doesn’t mean it’s all over between Russia and the GOP. When Lindsey Graham calls for the head of Vladimir Putin, me thinks he doth protest too much. The relationship will continue. “Russia has been in the influence business a very long time, and it’s a core part of its military doctrine, especially during what others think of as peacetime,” says Winer. “Russian security state influence networks are pervasive and persistent, and they are not going to suddenly disappear just because Putin has now made himself the world’s most hated person. Instead, they are likely to just go deeper underground.

“The oligarchs relied on twin pillars for support, both of which are under attack right now,” Winer adds. “Putin was the wallet, and the West provided entry into the global elite.”

As for the first pillar, the whole world can monitor Putin’s fate day by day, hour by hour, as his army slowly slogs its way across Ukraine getting shelled mercilessly in a showdown that had been billed as an easy win.

And as for the second, the consequences of truly harsh sanctions, of Task Force KleptoCapture, and of other efforts will become evident over time in terms of how much Putin’s oligarchs will be able to enjoy the riches of the West. “That is the great question,” said Winer. “What is our capacity to enforce money laundering? The EU finally made it illegal for corporations to pay bribes. But how will they enforce it?”

And finally, there are other areas, such as cryptocurrency, that are so new that one can’t make any predictions at all. “We know for sure the Russians use crypto for influence operations working out of their St. Petersburg troll farm,” Winer added. “But it is grossly unregulated.” What happens with crypto may be the biggest question of all.

Craig Unger is the author of five books on the Republican Party’s assault on democracy, including, most recently, NYT bestsellers House of Trump, House of Putin, and American Kompromat, which has just been published in paperback.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's mask mandate for domestic travelers was struck down on Monday by a federal jurist who was appointed by former President Donald Trump. The decision is the latest in a string of blows to President Joe Biden's efforts to curb transmission of the coronavirus.

The CDC last week extended the rule until May 3rd.

Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle of the United States District Court for the Middle District of Florida wrote in a 59-page ruling that the CDC exceeded its authority in requiring passengers on airlines and any other "conveyance" of public transportation to wear masks to help slow the spread of COVID-19.

Mizelle – whom the American Bar Associated dinged as "not qualified" after she was installed by Trump at the age of 33 – said that passengers who refused to comply and were "forcibly removed from their airplane seats, denied board at the bus steps, and turned away at the train station doors" had their rights against "detention and quarantine" violated.

"The Mask Mandate is best understood not as sanitation, but as an exercise of the CDC's power to conditionally release [from what?] individuals to travel despite concerns that they may spread a communicable disease (and to detain or partially quarantine those who refuse). But the power to conditionally release and detain is ordinarily limited to individuals entering the United States from a foreign country," she proclaimed.

“Wearing a mask cleans nothing,” Mizelle opined, even as cases are once again rising in pockets throughout the country, such as in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, which has re-instituted a mask mandate. The virus has also been spreading in the nation's capital, infecting White House officials and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California).

Steve Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas, blasted Mizelle's order in a Monday afternoon tweet.

"This is both a big deal and a truly preposterous (nationwide) injunction. The CDC’s statutory authority is specifically directed at preventing the spread of communicable diseases across state lines," he wrote. "Where else is such spread more likely to occur than transport hubs like airports?"

omg

https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/mcconnell-judges/

raw

on Wednesday, The Daily Beast examined the "dangerous" record of 33-year-old Kathryn Kimball Mizelle, one of the final judicial nominees to be forced through by Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans — and her complete lack of qualifications for the job, beyond her high-powered conservative connections.

"One of five judicial nominees waved through by the lame duck Senate in a final vote before lawmakers left town for Thanksgiving, Mizelle's confirmation is themost galling," wrote Eleanor Clift. "Mizelle is only eight years out of law school (University of Florida), and the ABA's standard for a lifetime seat is 12 years of legal experience. She has had four distinguished clerkships, including one for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, but her only trial experience is as an intern before she graduated from law school. She will take her seat on the Eleventh Circuit for the Middle District of Florida having never tried a case — civil or criminal — as a lead attorney or co-counsel."

Very few judges are ever confirmed to the federal bench in their early 30s, noted Clift. "Mizelle joins that exclusive club because she is a well-connected Washington lawyer with conservative cred who travels in the right circles. At Jones Day, President Trump's favorite law firm, where she has been an associate since last year, Mizelle's profile page highlighted her successful representation of the Chamber of Commerce in fending off a demand from the AFL-CIO for greater worker protections during the COVID crisis."

"She is married to Chad Mizelle, who faced similar questions about his youth and inexperience last year when his friend and ally at the White House, Stephen Miller, smoothed the way for him to become the acting general counsel at the Department of Homeland Security, leading DHS' legal office of 2,500 attorneys just six years after graduating from law school," wrote Clift. "Apart from her skimpy experience, concerns about Kathryn Mizelle's ideology are at the core of Democratic opposition, and they originate with her tenure at the Justice Department in 2017 and 2018 supervising litigation handled by the Civil Rights Division. It was a time when many voting rights and LGBT protections were being rolled back."

omg

https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/mcconnell-judges/

raw

"One of five judicial nominees waved through by the lame duck Senate in a final vote before lawmakers left town for Thanksgiving, Mizelle's confirmation is the most galling," wrote Eleanor Clift. "Mizelle is only eight years out of law school (University of Florida), and the ABA's standard for a lifetime seat is 12 years of legal experience. She has had four distinguished clerkships, including one for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, but her only trial experience is as an intern before she graduated from law school. She will take her seat on the Eleventh Circuit for the Middle District of Florida having never tried a case — civil or criminal — as a lead attorney or co-counsel."

Moreover, concluded Clift, since 1896, only one judicial nominee was ever advanced during a lame duck session of a defeated president.

"In 1980, a lame duck Senate confirmed Stephen Breyer to the Court of Appeals," wrote Clift. "Nominated by President Jimmy Carter, who had just lost reelection, Democrat Ted Kennedy and Republican Strom Thurmond saw Breyer's confirmation as a fitting reward for the work he had done as chief counsel of the Judiciary Committee, which they had led. More than a decade later, President Clinton elevated Breyer to the Supreme Court. Kathryn Mizell, I'm tempted to say, is no Stephen Breyer."

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some lawyers at Jones Day and Porter Wright, which have filed suits about the 2020 vote, said they were worried about undermining

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/walmart-was-almost-criminally-charged-over-opioids-trump-appointees-killed-the-indictment/

no lnx

Walmart was almost criminally charged over opioids. Trump appointees killed the indictment

Written by Jesse Eisinger, James Bandler / Pro Publica March 25, 2020

On a Tuesday just before Halloween in 2018, a group of federal prosecutors and agents from Texas arrived in Washington. For almost two years, they’d been investigating the opioid dispensing practices of Walmart, the largest company in the world. They had amassed what they viewed as highly damning evidence only to face a major obstacle: top Trump appointees at the Department of Justice.

The prosecution team had come to Washington to try to save its case. Joe Brown, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Texas, led the group, which included Heather Rattan, an over-20-year veteran of the office who had spent much of her career prosecuting members of drug cartels.

They first went to the Drug Enforcement Administration’s headquarters to meet the acting administrator, Uttam Dhillon. There Rattan laid out the evidence. Opioids dispensed by Walmart pharmacies in Texas had killed customers who had overdosed. The pharmacists who dispensed those opioids had told the company they didn’t want to fill the prescriptions because they were coming from doctors who were running pill mills. They pleaded for help and guidance from Walmart’s corporate office.

Investigators had obtained records of similar cries for help from Walmart pharmacists all over the country: from Maine, North Carolina, Kansas and Washington, and other states. They reported hundreds of thousands of suspicious or inappropriate opioid prescriptions. One Walmart employee warned about a Florida doctor who had a “list of patients from Kentucky that have been visiting pharmacies in all of central Wisconsin recently.” That doctor had sent patients to Walmarts in more than 30 other states.

In response to these alarms, Walmart compliance officials did not take corporate-wide action to halt the flow of opioids. Instead, they repeatedly admonished pharmacists that they could not cut off any doctor entirely. They could only evaluate each prescription on an individual basis. And they went further. An opioid compliance manager told an executive in an email, gathered during the inquiry and viewed by ProPublica, that Walmart’s focus should be on “driving sales.”

After they finished their presentation, Dhillon sat back in his chair and exclaimed, “Jesus Christ,” according to five people familiar with the investigation. “Why aren’t we talking about this as a criminal case?”

That’s precisely what had occurred seven months earlier: Rattan had informed Walmart that she was preparing to indict the corporation for violating the Controlled Substances Act. Indictments of Fortune 500 companies are unheard of, let alone of one with $500 billion in annual revenue and over 2 million employees. But Rattan, with support from her boss Brown, believed the evidence justified such an unprecedented step.

Before the Texas prosecutors could file their case, however, Walmart escalated concerns to high-ranking officials at the DOJ, who then intervened. Brown was ordered to stand down. On Aug. 31, 2018, Trump officials officially informed Walmart that the DOJ would decline to prosecute the company, according to a letter from Walmart’s lawyer that lays out the chronology of the case.

But the Texas prosecutors hadn’t given up. Now, two months later, they still thought they had a chance to bring the then-deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, and other top officials around. After the first presentation at the DEA offices that day, the Texas group — now accompanied by the DEA’s Dhillon — caravanned over to the DOJ.

They filed into a big, bright conference room, where they were received by Rosenstein and a collection of political appointees and career staff. Rattan and her team were given a half-hour to make their presentation. She explained that dispensing opioids without a legitimate medical purpose is legally akin to dealing heroin. Criminal law says if a person or entity is willfully blind or deliberately ignorant, they are as liable as if they had acted intentionally. Once Walmart’s headquarters knew its pharmacists were raising alarms about suspicious prescriptions, but the compliance department continued to allow — even push — them to fill them, well, that made the company guilty, the Texas prosecutors contended.

This was not a question of a few rogue employees, Rattan explained. Walmart had a national problem. Worse, the prosecutors contended, the company was a repeat offender. Walmart had agreed to a settlement with the DEA seven years earlier in which it had promised to improve its controls over the abuse of opioid prescriptions. Still the problems persisted. That’s why the prosecutors believed they needed to pursue the extraordinary path of a criminal prosecution. As they concluded, Brown was emphatic, telling Rosenstein: “We have to act.”

A fine would not be a sufficient deterrent, the DEA’s Dhillon added, since Walmart “has more money than it knows what to do with.”

“Not that there’s anything wrong with that,” Rosenstein responded, according to five people familiar with the investigation. “We are all capitalists here.”

Rosenstein’s quip brought the prosecutorial team up short. They weren’t pursuing Walmart because it was profitable but because, in their view, the company had put its customers at deadly risk.

Not long after, Rosenstein’s assistant entered the room to say he had a call. He left. The prosecutors’ push to persuade Rosenstein to revive the criminal case had failed.

Still, there were multiple avenues left to pursue: After the meeting, the Texas prosecutors focused on bringing criminal charges against individual employees, as Rosenstein and other Trump DOJ officials directed them to do. But later, when the prosecutors sought to indict a mid-level Walmart manager, the Trump officials blocked that, too.

That left potential civil claims. After the meeting with Rosenstein, Brian Benczkowski, the head of the criminal division, had told Brown, “You have a whopper of a civil case,” according to four people familiar with the investigation.

But the civil case, too, was stymied by Trump appointees in the DOJ who continued to side with Walmart.

In its dealings with the DOJ, Walmart pursued a classic strategy. It relied on Jones Day, an influential law firm that has salted officials throughout the Trump administration. Walmart conceded mistakes and opened the door for a civil settlement. But the company consistently denied that any of its employees committed crimes.

In the view of many prosecutors and agents, Walmart never fully cooperated. (From the beginning of the investigation, Walmart said it was cooperating and taking action to fix its opioid dispensing practices. Still, the company acknowledged that it halted its cooperation in mid-2018 after it became convinced prosecutors were not acting in good faith.)

And Walmart and Jones Day added a Trumpian tactic: At a moment when the president had established a habit of attacking the investigators in his own government, the company followed a similarly aggressive approach. Walmart lawyers complained to Washington about the Texas prosecutors, accusing them of seeking to “embarrass” the company while using the threat of criminal charges to extort a larger civil fine. Criminal and civil investigations can run in parallel, but it’s an ethical violation for prosecutors to use the threat of criminal penalties to generate a higher civil settlement.

In a statement to ProPublica, Walmart spokesman Randy Hargrove reiterated the company’s complaints: “The United States Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Texas (EDTX) engaged in misconduct multiple times as it investigated Walmart, including threatening to bring meritless criminal charges against Walmart in order to extort an unjustified civil settlement from the company. This behavior was clearly improper, violated the Department of Justice’s own internal policies and rules of legal ethics, and was entirely inconsistent with the Department’s long-standing policies.”

Hargove added that having failed to bring “baseless” criminal charges against the company, “It appears that one or more individuals familiar with EDTX’s investigation have violated Department of Justice rules in an attempt to achieve through leaks what they could not accomplish in a court of law.”

In response to the Walmart statement, the U.S. attorney, Brown, offered his own to ProPublica: “Drug Enforcement Agency investigations of multiple opioid overdose deaths in the Eastern District of Texas resulted in our office opening parallel civil and criminal investigations of Walmart’s pharmacy practices. These investigations have been handled appropriately, and according to Department of Justice policy. These investigations, which we would typically not confirm or deny, but do so now because of Walmart’s statement, continue. Accordingly, it would be inappropriate to comment further on the specific facts of the case.

“Walmart chooses now to attack the investigators, a tried and true method to avoid oversight. We are confident that once all of the facts in this matter are public the hollowness of this criticism will be apparent. It is not the goal of our office to embarrass Walmart. Walmart’s behavior in dispensing opioid medication in the middle of a public health crisis should embarrass Walmart.”

Walmart’s ability to go over the heads of the Texas office left the U.S. attorney’s team profoundly frustrated — so much so that the lead civil prosecutor on the case resigned in protest on Oct. 25, 2019. “I deeply regret that Department leadership prevented EDTX from filing its lawsuit in 2018,” Joshua Russ, then the head of the Eastern District’s civil division, wrote in his resignation letter, a copy of which (with Walmart’s name blacked out) ProPublica obtained. “Corporations cannot poison Americans with impunity. Good sense dictates stern and swift action when Americans die.”

The investigations of Walmart have not been previously reported. This account is based on hundreds of pages of Walmart internal emails and investigative documents, correspondence between the company’s attorneys and the Justice Department, and interviews with nine people familiar with the investigation. All of the conversations described in this article were recounted either in those documents or by multiple people with knowledge of the conversations. The DOJ declined to make anyone available for interviews and did not answer an extensive list of questions.

The news of the Walmart investigation comes at a time when the Trump administration is being assailed for legal favoritism and cronyism. Attorney General Bill Barr has inserted himself into multiple investigations of Trump friends and associates. In February, four prosecutors on the case of Roger Stone, a Trump friend and adviser, quit the case in protest after political appointees undercut their sentencing recommendation.

The Trump DOJ has also pulled back on white-collar and corporate investigations and prosecutions.White-collar prosecutions are at a record low. Walmart itself seems to have already benefited from the Trump administration’s approach to corporate misconduct. The company was the subject of a seven-year investigation into bribery allegations in Mexico and around the globe. The Obama administration sought $600 million in fines, according to The New York Times, which broke the story, but failed to reach a resolution with the company. The Trump DOJ settled the charges for $282 million in June 2019. (“Walmart took the investigation very seriously, cooperated with the DOJ and the SEC’s investigation, and took extensive steps that have established its comprehensive Global Anti-Corruption Program,” the company said.)

Even as Trump’s DOJ was preventing its own prosecutors from getting tough on Walmart, the Trump administration told the public it was confronting the nation’s opioid crisis.In March 2018, Trump said his administration would hold those responsible accountable, pledging that federal lawsuits against opioid drugmakers “will happen.” The same month that Rosenstein declined to revive the criminal case against Walmart, Trump signed legislation aimed at curbing the opioid crisis. A key element was a public-private partnership with several companies, including Walmart, to implement measures such as opioid addiction education initiatives. “Together we are going to end the scourge of drug addiction in America,” Trump said. (This month, Walmart CEO Doug McMillon appeared in the White House’s Rose Garden to pledge the company’s help in combating the coronavirus.)

For those who spent years investigating Walmart, the chasm between the public posturing and the behavior behind closed doors has been deeply discouraging. By the end of the experience, one said: “I wanted to ask for a Walmart greeter badge. It’s got much more stroke than a DEA badge.”

The case against Walmart originated in the summer of 2016, with an investigation of two Texas doctors, Howard Diamond and Randall Wade, who were prescribing opioids on a vast scale. Prosecutors would link each to multiple deaths. The lead prosecutor on the criminal case, Rattan, made it clear to the DEA agents on the case that this should be run like any drug investigation. They should focus on cutting off the dealers’ sources of drugs.

One of those was Walmart. In August, DEA agents, surveilling Wade’s clinic, followed three women to a Walmart in McKinney, Texas. Shortly afterward, all three walked out with large quantities of painkillers.

On Dec. 7, 2016, DEA agents raided that Walmart, seeking records about Diamond and Wade. The two doctors were eventually convicted of illegal distribution of opioids, with Wade sentenced to 10 years in prison and Diamond 20 years.

Walmart has the fifth-highest pharmacy revenue in the country and was the fifth-largest opioid distributor in Texas from 2006-14, according to the DEA. But Walmart pharmacies had not been raided before; raids of Fortune 500 companies are exceedingly rare. Alarmed, Walmart’s lawyers quickly asked the government to conduct no more raids and pledged full cooperation.

The Texas prosecutors broadened their investigation and began to amass evidence that extended far beyond Diamond and Wade. Between 2011 to 2017, they discovered, Walmart pharmacists repeatedly filled prescriptions that they worried were not for legitimate medical purposes, including large doses of opioids and mixtures of drugs the DEA considered red flags for abuse. Walmart pharmacists not just in Texas but in Maine, North Carolina, Massachusetts, Kansas and Washington state raised alarms to the company’s national compliance department about doctors.

Sometimes, these pharmacists requested permission to stop filling opioid prescriptions for certain doctors. In February 2015, a pharmacist wrote to the national compliance department about Diamond:

“We are all concerned about our jobs and about filling for a pill mill doctor. I’m in my 29th year with walmart and have never had a situation this bad with a doctor. Other chains are refusing to fill for him which makes our burden even greater. Please help us.”

Another wrote that same month:

“doctor Diamond is a problem and a liability on us…

Filling for him is a risk that keeps me up at night. This is a serious situation.”

But even after more than a decade of soaring addiction and deaths had transformed opioids into a national crisis, Walmart had a policy that pharmacists could conduct no “blanket refusals” that shut off prescriptions written by a particular doctor. Nor would Walmart put doctors on a prohibited list from headquarters, known as a “corporate block.”

Some of Walmart’s competitors had stopped filling Diamond’s and Wade’s prescriptions, company pharmacists told headquarters. Why wasn’t Walmart doing the same?In February 2014, for example, Kroger sent a letter to Diamond saying it would no longer fill his controlled substances prescriptions. Walmart pharmacists were telling headquarters that CVS, Walgreens and Target were doing the same. (A CVS spokesman said the company implemented a policy of corporate blocks several years ago but, citing privacy, declined to comment on whether the policy was applied to Diamond and Wade. Spokespeople for Kroger, Walgreens and Target did not respond to requests for comment. Walmart insists there is no evidence that competitors issued corporate blocks against Diamond and Wade.)

A Walmart pharmacist in September 2016 wrote an alarmed note about a Pennsylvania doctor who was “under investigation by the DEA for what we believe is a pill mill operation.” He added:

“Rite Aid has sent him a blanket denial letter. …

And since then we have seen our almost solely narcotic and controlled prescriptions from him double….

We are putting pharmacists and Walmart in a bad situation legally….”

Instead of blanket refusals or a corporate block, Walmart’s compliance department said each prescription had to be evaluated separately. To block a prescription and report the refusal, a pharmacist had to fill out a form that could take 20 minutes, a bureaucratic hurdle that pharmacists sought to avoid because they were under pressure to fill prescriptions quickly.

From early 2014 to when Walmart finally blocked Diamond in March 2017 — after the federal investigation had started — the company’s pharmacists filled over 13,000 controlled substances prescriptions from Diamond, an average of 11 a day, according to documents reviewed by ProPublica. That amounted to over 1.3 million doses. Walmart only blocked Wade in November 2016, a month after he was indicted. Between the first Walmart employee’s alarm and then, Walmart pharmacies filled an average of nine controlled substance prescriptions a day written by Wade, amounting to 875,000 doses. Between 2011 and 2016, over 100 different Walmart pharmacies in 17 different states filled Wade’s opioid prescriptions.

More troubling to the federal investigators, for much of this period, Walmart was operating under a secret settlement, known as a Memorandum of Agreement, with the DEA, reached in 2011 and running four years. (The existence of the MOA has not been previously reported.) According to that agreement, a Walmart pharmacy in California had been filling prescriptions “for other than a legitimate medical purpose and/or outside the usual course of professional practice in violation of federal and state law” and had “dispensed controlled substances to individuals that [the pharmacy] knew or should have known were diverting the controlled substances.”

As part of the agreement, in which Walmart did not admit or deny wrongdoing, the company agreed to install national procedures to identify bad prescribers and prescriptions not written for legitimate medical purposes and report them quickly to the DEA.

In addition, Walmart had repeatedly run afoul of the Controlled Substances Act.The company had received more than 50 “Letters of Admonition” from the DEA for its prescribing practices from 2000 to 2018, according to records obtained by ProPublica. And it had paid two small Controlled Substances Act settlements in 2007 and 2008, one for filling unlawful prescriptions and the other for recordkeeping violations.

Prosecutors believed that Walmart was not fulfilling the terms of its agreement with the DEA. The company had an internal system for compiling pharmacists’ “refusals to fill” that it would send to the DEA. They found that Walmart didn’t always send the DEA its alerts. When the company did so, the notices were not complete. The form included a comments field, where pharmacists might write notes flagging concerns about doctors whom they believed were operating pill mills. Walmart sent the DEA the information that a prescription had been refused but excised the employee comments.

On Feb. 13, 2015, when a regional manager received a list of “Refusal to Fill” prescriptions from headquarters, he asked, “Does your team pull out any insights from these we need to highlight?” according to an email reviewed by ProPublica.

Brad Nelson, then a director of Health and Wellness Practice Compliance at Walmart, wrote back:

“The MOA that requires the reporting of the Refusal to fills expires in 30 days. We have not invested a great amount of effort in doing analysis on the data since the agreement is virtually over. Driving sales and patient awareness is a far better use of our Market Directors and Market manager’s time.”

Walmart maintains that Nelson was expressing relief that the onerous burden of alerting the DEA to its refusals to fill was coming to an end, and that in urging the manager to “drive sales,” he was referring to immunizations. Walmart depicted Nelson as a popular middle manager who was the first in the office every morning. He’d come in at 4:30 or 5 a.m. and spend the next three hours faxing refusals to fill to the DEA. Then he would make popcorn for his colleagues.

On Jan. 8, 2015, Nelson emailed colleagues that a pharmacist had contacted him with concerns, indicating “that he is feeling pressured” by his supervisor to fill prescriptions for controlled substances. If the pharmacist doesn’t fill the prescriptions, Nelson added, “then that would be a significant issue.”

Walmart says this email shows that Nelson was consistent: Pharmacists could not issue blanket refusals but could refuse prescriptions on a case-by-case basis. (Nelson referred questions to his lawyer, who did not respond to repeated requests for comment.)

Walmart told the investigators that the evidence the Eastern District compiled was misleading. The company said the DEA never required “corporate blocks” or “blanket refusals-to-fill.” The DEA did not respond to repeated requests for comment for this article.

Meanwhile, some state boards of pharmacy and medical boards protected doctors from being cut off by pharmacies on the grounds that companies should not interfere with the doctor-patient relationship, Walmart says.

For its part, Texas has no rules that would prohibit a pharmacy chain like Walmart from instituting a corporate block or blanket refusal policy, said Allison Benz, executive director of the Texas State Board of Pharmacy.

In Texas, pharmacy chains may, indeed, impose corporate-wide blocks on doctors whom they suspect are running pill mills, according to Sherif Zaafran, president of the Texas Medical Board. Zaafran said the board has told Walmart and other pharmacies that if they have concerns about a doctor, they have a legal obligation to file a complaint with the board while providing information supporting their concerns. “We never weigh in on a corporate block,” he said. “The corporation can instruct a licensed pharmacist to do so. It is the licensed pharmacist who has the legal ability to not dispense something.”

For its part, Walmart says it was taking its responsibilities seriously. The company says it flagged over 60,000 concerning prescriptions its pharmacists refused to fill during the period the investigation covered. It maintains Nelson was vigilant in urging his pharmacists to refuse to fill if they saw prescriptions they did not like, and to fill out the forms so that the company could send the information to the DEA. In the case of Diamond, Walmart says one of its pharmacists alerted the Texas Medical Board of its concerns. The board allowed Diamond to continue practicing medicine, finding that his “prescribing was appropriate.” (It did place him on a “remedial plan” to fix his allegedly sloppy record-keeping.) The board did not revoke Diamond’s license until October 2017, after his arrest.

The company argues that, as the regulatory entity that licensed doctors to dispense opioids, the DEA, not Walmart, was responsible for the failure to shut down pill pushers like Diamond sooner. After the investigation started, Walmart reversed itself and began instituting corporate blocks, which suggested to prosecutors that the company could have been doing so all along. Since Walmart began the policy, multiple states have assailed and even investigated Walmart for improperly interfering with doctors’ decisions.

The prosecutors did not find Walmart’s many explanations convincing.The fact that the company had sent so many refusals to the DEA for a given doctor and yet would turn around and keep filling prescriptions for the very same sketchy physician suggested the problem was widespread. As far as federal prosecutors and the DEA were concerned, the MOA had placed Walmart on parole — and the company had violated its terms.

In the spring of 2018, the Eastern District of Texas informed Walmart that it was preparing criminal charges against the company. In traditional criminal investigations against individuals, indictments often come as a surprise. The government accumulates evidence and makes its arrest. The defense eventually sees the evidence and can respond then, sometimes only at trial.

Criminal investigations of big corporations don’t typically work that way in the United States. They have developed into a ritualized series of give-and-takes between prosecutors and the company. Prosecutors lay out their evidence and theories and the company gets the opportunity to respond in great detail — all out of public view. The Eastern District of Texas skipped this dance.

Stunned and worried, Walmart requested a meeting with the prosecutors. In April 2018, the two sides sat down.

Walmart had a powerful team. Karen Hewitt, the partner-in-charge of Jones Day’s California region, was the company’s lead outside lawyer. She had been the U.S. attorney in the Southern District of California, appointed by George W. Bush and then serving under President Barack Obama, accumulating a record for prosecuting corrupt politicians and drug and border crimes. Walmart’s inside lawyer was Bob Balfe. Walmart’s chief counsel for global investigations, Balfe also had been a U.S. attorney, serving as the head of the Western District of Arkansas, which includes Walmart’s hometown of Bentonville. In the biggest case of his career, he’d successfully prosecuted a Walmart legend, then-vice chairman Tom Coughlin, for a bizarre embezzlement scheme. Since he’d come to Walmart, Balfe had helped steer the company through the seven-year bribery investigation.

Most of the interactions between the government and the Jones Day lawyers were politely choreographed. Hewitt and Balfe were the picture of affability. “When you meet with them, it’s like those two chipmunks,” said one person familiar with the investigation, referring to the Looney Tunes characters Mac and Tosh, gophers that speak with posh British accents. “‘After you.’ ‘No, after you.’ They are so polite.”

The two sides largely agreed on the facts, but differed completely on whether they justified a criminal charge. And a dispute over the use of a single word would poison relations between the two sides, with Walmart using the word as a cudgel to attack the prosecutors.

The word in question was “embarrass.” According to two people familiar with the prosecution, Rattan told the Walmart side that the company should feel embarrassed by its conduct. Walmart would portray it differently, claiming that Rattan said her goal was “to embarrass Walmart” with a criminal indictment. (Walmart’s account is captured in a letter of complaint Hewitt sent the next month to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.)

For the moment, though, the two sides maintained decorum. Walmart asked for 30 days to respond. Prosecutors agreed. On May 3 and 4, the two sides met again, this time in Plano, Texas, where the U.S. attorney’s offices are located.

By this time, Josh Russ had ramped up his office’s civil investigation. He did not plan to attend the May meeting, because it was a meeting led by the criminal side.

Walmart’s lawyers said they hoped to resolve any criminal or civil investigations in one shot and insisted on Russ’ presence. The prosecutors, leery of being accused of improperly coordinating the criminal and civil cases, demanded that Walmart make the request in writing. Walmart did, and Russ agreed to attend. Soon, however, Walmart would accuse the prosecutors of precisely the behavior they were attempting to avoid.

During the first six hours of the meeting, Hewitt and the Walmart lawyers described the results of their own internal investigation, saying the company’s outside lawyers had found no evidence of criminal wrongdoing by the company or its employees. They’d found no evidence of collusion or any improper financial relationships between doctors or customers and Walmart pharmacists. They also admitted that “Walmart could have and should have done more to voluntarily combat the opioid crisis,” according to the letter Hewitt sent to Rosenstein.

The Walmart lawyers outlined the risks to shareholders, employees and the public that could result from a criminal prosecution. But the prosecutors were unmoved. Rattan said that Walmart was no different from an individual criminal defendant who pleaded with the government for leniency by stating that her children would be harmed by her incarceration. Civil Chief Randi Russell took her remarks a step further, saying that Walmart’s size didn’t make it above prosecution. Balfe, becoming animated, touted Walmart’s opioid reforms and the company’s extensive cooperation with law enforcement.

“All of our defendants find Jesus in jail,” one person present recalled thinking. “But that doesn’t mean they don’t go to prison.”

The country was in a crisis, with hundreds of thousands of people dead and major companies poisoning people like drug dealers, as the prosecution team saw it. To the prosecutors, Walmart’s attitude was not only that it hadn’t done anything wrong, but that Walmart didn’t even need to take the prosecutors seriously. That point was reinforced the next day when Walmart made its first settlement offer: $34 million. Calling the offer “insulting,” Russ said Walmart could do better. The parties, he said, were “in different solar systems.”

The discussions reached a crescendo after one of Walmart’s outside lawyers accused the prosecutors of unethically trying to use the threat of a criminal prosecution to leverage higher civil penalties. Russell, angry, demanded that the Walmart lawyer retract his statement. Russ left the room, saying he would not tolerate an attack on his ethics.

The Eastern District thought Walmart should pay an amount that was several times larger than the then-record $150 million civil penalty that McKesson, the giant pharmaceutical distribution company, had paid for its alleged violations of the Controlled Substances Act. Russell suggested a payment of $1.2 billion.

Later, Rattan pulled out her phone, announcing she’d received a “confidential text message” from her boss, U.S. Attorney Joe Brown, who was attending an NRA rally that day with President Donald Trump. According to Hewitt’s written account, Rattan read the text aloud to the slack-jawed Walmart lawyers: “Walk away, indict them, and then be willing to settle with them after the indictment.”

After another counteroffer, Rattan read Brown’s reply aloud: “That doesn’t hurt Walmart in the least.” Walmart, which had earlier boasted to the group of giving $1 billion a year away to charities, could do much better, the government prosecutors said. Civil Chief Russell quoted the New Testament: “To whom much is given, much is required.”

Some of the prosecutors were willing to trade off a large fine, however, if they could add greater detail to the statement of facts that would eventually go public.Russell said Walmart had to admit it had “killed people.” Jones Day appeared to be eager to avoid such an admission, which would have brought bad publicity and made the company vulnerable in private and state lawsuits. (Walmart is a defendant in the massive opioid lawsuit brought by the states.)

On the way home, Walmart’s lawyers processed what had just happened. Balfe told his colleagues it felt like a hostage situation. A week later, Hewitt wrote to Rosenstein, reiterating the complaint about the office’s purported ethical violations. In a subsequent letter to the DOJ, she appeared ready to make a civil deal: “Walmart is a responsible corporate citizen and stands ready to engage in a principled and reasoned dialogue concerning any potential conduct of its employees that merits a civil penalty under the CSA.”

Rattan and her fellow criminal prosecutors insisted they were sincere. “The threat of indictment is real,” she said, as she concluded the May meeting. “I am not bluffing.” Rattan had amassed a highly successful record in her dozens of trials. “I’m telling you right now,” she would say around the office of the case against Walmart. “Swear in 12 people and present the evidence and they are in trouble.”

Josh Russ began preparing to file the Eastern District’s civil complaint. He sent it to the DEA, which signed off on it. In August 2018, the U.S. attorney’s office commenced planning to bring its civil charges; it began preparations for a press conference to make the announcement.

Meanwhile, Walmart continued appealing up the chain to top officials in Washington. On Aug. 10, Jones Day’s Hewitt sent a letter to Benczkowski, assistant attorney general and head of the DOJ’s Criminal Division, complaining about the investigation. The letter argued that a conviction could harm “millions of low-income and elderly citizens” who rely on federal programs for food and medicine. A convicted corporation might not be permitted to participate in those programs any longer. She outlined what she said were Walmart’s “remedial” measures to become “an industry leader in the Nation’s fight against the opioid crisis.”

Soon after, an official in the deputy attorney general’s office called Brown and told him to halt the Texas office’s criminal investigation, according to five people familiar with the investigation.

Officials at DOJ in Washington then turned their attention to the civil probe. In a video conference call in late August, Stephen Cox, the deputy associate attorney general and a top official in the civil division, and Mary Daly, a daughter of Bill Barr and then the director of opioid enforcement, asked Russ’ team about its tactics and evidence. Cox, who had never been a federal prosecutor and joined the agency from Texas energy company Apache, appeared upset that the Texas prosecutors had sought emails between compliance officials and their bosses, senior executives at Walmart. He seemed to view that tactic as overly aggressive, according to a person familiar with the investigation. The Texas prosecutors said they did so to find out what top Walmart executives knew.

Russ and others contended the civil suit was ready to be filed. Cox said it wasn’t. To spur Cox and his colleagues to action, Russ began to send daily examples of what the prosecutorial team viewed as particularly egregious prescriptions Walmart pharmacists had filled. His message: People had died because of opioids Walmart had dispensed, and every day that passed meant another lost opportunity because of the ticking clock on the statute of limitations.

Meanwhile, Walmart exercised its PR and political muscle. Just days after the contentious May meeting with Eastern District officials, Walmart launched what it billed as a sweeping effort “aimed at curbing opioid misuse and abuse.” The cornerstone was that it would restrict initial opioid prescriptions to no more than a seven-day supply. In September 2018, Ivanka Trump visited a Walmart in Mesquite, Texas, very close to the Eastern District’s offices. She was there, the White House said, to learn how Walmart trains and retains workers. The trip seemed to indicate just how close the company was to the White House.

Then came the meeting with Rosenstein in October 2018.Asked about his comments that day, Rosenstein responded by email that he did not recall his comment about everyone being “capitalists” but said: “If you lack the courage to decline a proposed criminal prosecution when you conclude that it is a mistake, you do not belong in a leadership job. We reached every decision after considering the non-partisan factors set forth in the Justice Department’s principles of federal prosecution.”

Trump officials ordered a six-month cooling off period, directing the U.S. attorney’s office to try to reach a settlement with Walmart.

Meanwhile the DOJ formed a national Walmart Working Group, with four other U.S. attorney’s offices in New York, North Carolina, Florida and Colorado.State attorneys general were brought in. On the one hand, the creation of the group underscored the national character of Walmart’s opioid problems. On the other, it dispersed responsibility among different offices and Russ, who was appointed co-head of the group, told colleagues he thought his investigation was being taken away from him.

In January 2019, the DEA presented Walmart with a new, broad subpoena. Walmart had been furnishing what it contended were huge volumes of materials. But it had not handed over everything the government requested. Walmart complained to the prosecutors that the requests were too onerous and overreaching, and that the company needed more time.

Prosecutors felt Walmart wasn’t sufficiently cooperative. Walmart never furnished a full list of doctors its pharmacists were concerned about. Walmart did not give the government full information on its internal databases to analyze prescribing information and patterns. Perhaps most crucially, Walmart had not turned over the emails the Eastern District had subpoenaed between compliance officials and their bosses (the ones Cox had been so shocked about).

Russ begged Washington officials to take it to a judge to enforce the government’s subpoena. The Trump appointees refused, telling the Working Group to keep negotiating.

The Texas prosecutors worried Walmart had an even better inside track than it had already displayed. In June 2019, they learned that Hewitt and Balfe had met with Barr.

The company says the three met as part of a national conference of U.S. attorneys and that it amounted to a grip-and-grin photo op in the presence of several other U.S. attorneys. No one raised the investigation, according to Walmart: “Bob Balfe and Karen Hewitt did not have any discussions with Attorney General Barr or his staff about Walmart.”

In response to an extensive list of questions for this story, DOJ spokeswoman Kerri Kupec responded with a statement that read in whole: “While the Department does not generally confirm, deny, or acknowledge the existence of investigations, it is worth noting that Pro Publica’s reporting in this piece is misleading and contains numerous inaccuracies and erroneous conclusions. As just one example, the meeting with Attorney General Barr that is cited was with eight former US Attorneys from the National Association of Former US Attorneys (NAFUSA) all acting in their capacities as NAFUSA officers, where no particular matters were discussed.”

Still, the prosecutors felt like the Walmart side attempted multiple end runs. For example, Cox’s predecessor, Rachel Brand, had left the DOJ in February 2018 to take a top job in Walmart’s legal department. About a year later, Brand’s attorney inquired as to whether she could appear before the DOJ. The Eastern District team got wind of the request and raised concerns. Walmart says Brand had no interactions with top DOJ or White House officials about the investigation.

On the criminal side, now that the corporate indictment was dead, the Texas prosecutors pursued the directive to focus on individuals. Rattan prepared an indictment of Brad Nelson, the former compliance manager who had told an executive that the company should focus on “driving sales.”

Walmart lawyers objected. Nelson was no criminal, they contended. Jones Day kept up its pressure. In another letter to Trump officials on Sept. 27, 2019, this time addressed to Gus Eyler, who was now the co-head of the national Walmart Working Group with Russ, Hewitt objected to the threat of a Nelson indictment and once again accused the prosecutors of trying to embarrass the company. Hewitt wrote: “We are concerned that either of the following may be true: the threat of an indictment of Mr. Nelson is being made to pressure Walmart in a civil proceeding in violation of DOJ procedures and the rules of legal ethics, or, just as concerning, EDTX actually intends to prosecute an individual not because the facts support it but in an effort to embarrass Walmart in retaliation for the previous declination of a criminal case against the Company.”

She added, “We also intend to suspend further production of documents under the Omnibus Subpoena until these issues relating to the status of this investigation are resolved.”

The government had issued a lawful subpoena. Walmart was treating it as optional.

Under other circumstances, the DOJ might have raced into a court to force a defiant company to comply with the subpoena. Instead, soon after receiving Hewitt’s letter, Washington informed the Texas prosecutors that they could not indict Nelson.

The civil investigation was still muddling on, however. In midsummer, as the six-month deadline approached, Russ told DOJ officials that Walmart was still not cooperating fully. Trump officials decided to give Walmart three more months. When the next deadline came up on Oct. 25, Washington wanted to extend the negotiations again.

Russ resigned that day. Walmart, he said in his resignation letter, “abused the Department’s fairness, largely ignored our subpoena, and scoffed at our larger work on behalf of all Americans.”

He added, “When I took my oath of office, I invoked God’s judgment and swore that I would support and defend the Constitution.”

The news reverberated throughout the office. “Josh was Captain America, well-respected, well thought of. It came as a big blow,” said a person familiar with the investigation, adding, “It seemed that maybe the country’s best interests were not at heart.”

On Nov. 7, the new deputy attorney general, Jeffrey Rosen, summoned the Texas prosecutorial team again to Washington for another meeting, gauging the progress of the Working Group’s negotiations with Walmart. The team reprised its presentation of the evidence that it had delivered to Rosenstein about a year earlier. Joe Brown, the U.S. attorney, asked Rosen: “Can you point out what’s wrong with our evidence?” Rosen did not respond.

In recent weeks, the DOJ’s inaction has begun to raise concerns on Capitol Hill. Jerrold Nadler, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, sent a letter to Dhillon and Barr expressing “concern regarding the Department’s inability to hold prescription opioid distributors and chain pharmacies accountable.” A hearing may follow.

Meanwhile, four years after the investigation first began, negotiations on a civil settlement between the government and Walmart continue.

Do you have information about the Trump Department of Justice or corporate malfeasance? Jesse Eisinger can be reached at jesse.eisinger@propublica.org or on Signal: 718-496-5233.

===

... Donald Trump 2020 campaign appears to largely exist as a way for Donald Trump to get his dimwitted supporters to pay his team's legal bills.

So far this year, the campaign has spent about $1.2 million on those legal fees.

Eight law firms and the Trump Corporation were paid by the campaign for legal consulting. The bulk of the Trump campaign's legal spending, or about $180,000, went to the law firm Jones Day. Two others firms — Harder LLP and Larocca, Hornik, Rosen, Greenberg & Blaha, which are involved in the legal fight with [Stormy] Daniels — were paid a combined nearly $54,000.

desmog COI

Ethics officials at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) — the agency responsible for approving energy infrastructure such as interstate oil and gas pipelines and overseeing utilities — recently gave the OK for its new chairman, Kevin McIntyre, to be involved in decisions concerning two of his former clients and previous firm, DeSmog has found.

According to a document filed with the Office of Government Ethics, in December 2017 and January 2018 FERC provided McIntyre with a special authorization to participate in discussions and rulings related to two large utility companies, Ameren and American Electric Power (AEP), as well as his former legal and lobbying firm, Jones Day.

The document does not specify which matters McIntyre participated in for these utilities, and whether he was involved with specific Jones Day clients. A search of current FERC dockets reveals that Jones Day represents several clients before FERC.

https://www.alternet.org/economy/who-owns-puerto-ricos-debt-exactly-weve-tracked-down-10-biggest-vulture-firms

mcgahn trump:

McGahn defended the huge contribution and denied that it had any ties to Russia when Public Campaign ran political ads in 2006 attacking DeLay for the scandal.

MCGAHN’S ROLE IN NATIONAL REPUBLICAN CAMPAIGN COMMITTEE CONTROVERSIES

McGahn served as in-house counsel to the NRCC from 1999 to 2008, during which time the political committee was roiled by scandal. Between 2000 and 2008, the NRCC raised and spent $630 million with little or no oversight. Under McGahn’s tenure, the committee waived its rules concerning expenditures over $10,000,eliminated a ban on committee staff earning income from outside corporations, and borrowed $9 million from Wachovia. Finally, Rep. Mike Conaway (R-TX) demanded an internal audit, and revelations of falsified reports spurred an FBI investigation. The NRCC’s treasurer admitted forging audit reports and was ultimately convicted of embezzlement.

McGahn also oversaw an NRCC scheme in 2002 to circumvent the McCain-Feingold soft money ban by transferring $1 million to the Leadership Forum, a front group set up by House Republican leaders. An FEC complaint was filed, and the money was returned.

MCGAHN’S ROLE IN STALLING ENFORCEMENT BY THE FEDERAL ELECTIONS COMMISSION

President George W. Bush appointed McGahn to the FEC in 2008 over the strenuous objections of the reform community.

As an FEC commissioner, McGahn played a major role in opening the floodgates to political spending, taking controversial positions at odds with laws as passed by Congress, particularly the BCRA (Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, known as McCain-Feingold), which reined in soft money spending by the parties.

As Craig Holman, a campaign finance and ethics expert at Public Citizen, put it: “McGahn’s role was to bring the FEC into dysfunction so that the campaign finance laws could easily be sidestepped.”

In 2011, McGahn stated that “I’m not enforcing the law as Congress passed it. I plead guilty as charged.” A letterfrom reform groups calling on Congress to investigate the FEC’s dysfunction countered that:

FEC Commissioners may not simply refuse to enforce laws based on their disagreement with the laws, or their predictions of how a court might rule if a law were challenged. It is unacceptable that the only agency charged with enforcing campaign financing rules on our nation’s highest elected officials is largely AWOL.

McGahn ushered in an era of agency gridlock, where Republican nominees to the FEC effectively eliminated enforcement of campaign finance laws by deadlocking on an unprecedented number of commission votes, including routine matters and cases where in-house counsel recommended penalties.

FEC Commissioner Ellen Weintraub was sharply critical of McGahn’s performance at the FEC, saying, “He was consequential like a sledgehammer was consequential. He did his best to undermine the law.”

MCGAHN’S EFFORTS TO AID THE KOCH BROTHERS’ FREEDOM PARTNERS

McGahn testified on behalf of Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce and Freedom Partners Action Fund at an FEC hearing on rulemaking in light of the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down aggregate contribution limits in McCutcheon v. FEC.

Freedom Partners Action Fund began making payments to Jones Day in July 2014, a month after McGahn joined the law firm as a partner, according to FEC reports. The PAC paid McGahn’s firm $130,822 in 2014, and has continued making smaller payments in 2015 and 2016.

Freedom Partners is closely tied to Charles and David Koch, and has been referred to as “the Koch Brothers secret bank.” Freedom Partners spent more than $25 million on five U.S. Senate races in the 2016 elections.

MCGAHN’S ROLE IN THE INCREASINGLY CONTROVERSIAL TRUMP TRANSITION

Jones, Day, Reavis & Pogue is a major international law firm and a major tobacco industry agent. Also, according to the website, their Antitrust & Competition Law Practice is "recognized in professional publications and rankings as one of the leading antitrust/competition practices in the world." Jones Day readily touts their antitrust lawyers previous positions with enforcement agencies worldwide. [1]

During the fall of 2004, Jones Day co-sponsored, along with the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies, "a series of two luncheons on the modernization of antitrust law." Acknowledging the establishment of the Antitrust Modernization Commission, with a three-year mission to examine the need to modernize the antitrust laws, the panel was to "discuss the current state of antitrust law and practice and what, if anything requires 'modernization'." [2] [3]

Contents[hide]

Tobacco

Jones, Day, Reavis & Pogue - Corporate Activity Project. A 449 pages long document prepared for tobacco client, describes in detail any imaginable fraud done by the tobacco industry in USA in the past half a century. Cites numerous other secret documents by court "bates number". Type these sets of digits here to see entire documents: http://www.legacy.library.ucsf.edu/cgi/b/bib/bib-idx?g=tob

Jones Day document discusses legal aspects of each line of defence. Document was made public only once, during the Washington State lawsuit against tobacco companies.

Clients

The Jones Day law firm "represents some of the biggest media (and media-related) companies in the country, including: DIRECTV, General Electric Company, The Goldman Sachs Group, Halliburton Company, Kellogg Brown and Root, Knight Ridder, Lehman Brothers Holdings, Liberty Media Group, Merrill Lynch & Co., Procter & Gamble, R.R. Donnelley & Sons, Thomson Multimedia S.A., Time Warner, the Tribune Company, and the Washington Post Company. The firm also represents ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers)." [4]

Contact Information

Jones, Day, Reavis & Pogue

North Point

901 Lakeside Avenue

Cleveland, Ohio 44114-1190

Tel: 1.216.586.3939

Fax: 1.216.579.0212

Website: http://www.jonesday.com/

SourceWatch Resources

External links

The NLJ Client List: Who Represents Corporate America?, National Law Journal, Law.com, 2003

Category: Tobaccowiki

silverberg hubby?

08-24-2012 | 05:19 PM
Author: Michael Lefkowitz

Graphic Warnings Violate Tobacco Companies’ Rights, Federal Appeals Court Rules

WASHINGTON, D.C. - (Mealey's) Graphic cigarette pack warnings proposed by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration violate tobacco companies' First Amendment right against compelled speech, a federal appeals court ruled Aug. 24, setting up a split between circuits on the issue (R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, et al. v. United States Food and Drug Administration, et al., No. 11-5332, D.C. Cir.) [enhanced version available to lexis.com subscribers].

(Opinion available. Document #04-120919-006Z.)

"The First Amendment requires the government not only to state a substantial interest justifying a regulation on commercial speech, but also to show that its regulation directly advances that goal," the panel of the District of Columbia Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals said, citing Central Hudson Gas & Elec. Corp., v. Pub. Serv. Comm'n (447 U.S. 557, 566 [1980]). "FDA has not provided a shred of evidence-much less the 'substantial evidence' required by the APA [Administrative Procedure Act]-showing that the graphic warnings will 'directly advance' its interest in reducing the number of Americans who smoke."

Unlike in Warner-Lambert Co. v. FTC, 562 F.2d 749 (D.C. Cir. 1977), the panel said, the FDA has not shown that the graphic warnings were designed to correct past false or misleading claims or that, absent disclosure, consumers would likely be deceived by the packaging in the future.

General Disclosures

"Rather, FDA framed the warnings as general disclosures about the negative health effects of smoking," the panel said. "The warnings thus represent an ongoing effort to discourage consumers from buying the Companies' products, rather than, as in Warner-Lambert, a measure designed to combat specific deceptive claims."

"In fact, many of the images do not convey any warning information at all, much less make an 'accurate statement' about cigarettes," the panel said. "For example, the images of a woman crying, a small child, and the man wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the words 'I QUIT' do not offer any information about the health effects of smoking."

The opinion is by Circuit Judge Janice Rogers Brown, with Senior Circuit Judge A. Raymond Randolph concurring.

Circuit Judge Judith W. Rogers dissented, saying that in light of decades of tobacco industry deception about the risks of smoking, the court should have applied the less-stringent, rational-basis review of Zauderer v. Office of Disciplinary Council of the Supreme Court of Ohio (471 U.S. 626, 650-51 [1985]), not the intermediate scrutiny of Central Hudson.

"Because the warning labels present factually accurate information and address misleading commercial speech, as defined in Supreme Court precedent, Zauderer scrutiny applies, and the government need show only that the warning label requirement is reasonably related to its stated and substantial interest in effectively conveying this information to consumers," Judge Rogers said.

Appeal

The case is on appeal from the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, where Judge Richard J. Leon on March 1 ruled against the government (R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, et al. v. United States Food and Drug Administration, et al., No. 1:11-1482, D. D.C.; 2012 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 26257). A similar case in the Sixth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals went in the government's favor, albeit with a dissent (Discount Tobacco City & Lottery Inc., et al. v. United States of America, et al., No. 10-5234 and 10-5235, 6th Cir.; 2012 U.S. App. LEXIS 5614).

R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. and Santa Fe Natural Tobacco Co. are represented by Geoffrey K. Beach of Womble, Carlyle, Sandridge & Rice in Winston-Salem, N.C., and Noel J. Francisco and Warren Postman of Jones Day in Washington. Lorillard Inc. is represented by Floyd Abrams, Joel L. Kurtzberg and Kayvan Sadeghi of Cahill, Gordon & Reindel in New York and Scott D. Danzis of Covington & Burling in Washington. Commonwealth Brands Inc. is represented by Philip J. Perry of Latham & Watkins in Washington. Liggett Vector Brands LLC is represented by Jonathan D. Hacker of O'Melveny & Myers in Washington. The government is represented by Drake S. Cutini and Daniel K. Crane-Hirsch of the U.S. Justice Department in Washington.

[Editor's Note: Lexis subscribers may download the document using the link above. The document(s) are also available at http://www.mealeysonline.com/ or by calling the Customer Support Department at 1-800-833-9844.]