Covington & Burling

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7 red, 9 green

ledeen?

west va v epa

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see chs ferg

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nyt

Law firms

Mr. Trump targeted a number of law firms with executive orders that would strip their lawyers of security clearances, a move that would cripple the firms’ business. Some of the targeted firms employ lawyers who have worked on investigations into Mr. Trump or on causes that his supporters object to. Many of the firms have reached agreements with the Trump administration to avert the order, and top partners have closed ranks in support of the agreements.

Covington

& Burling

Perkins

Coie

Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison

Jenner

& Block

Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom

Willkie Farr & Gallagher

Milbank

WilmerHale

Other firms and lawyers

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sent letters to 20 law firms requesting information about their diversity, equity and inclusion-related employment practices. The letters suggested that the firms may have discriminated against white candidates and violated civil rights laws.

Mr. Trump issued an order directing the Justice and Homeland Security Departments to “seek sanctions against attorneys and law firms who engage in frivolous, unreasonable and vexatious litigation against the United States.”

https://www.eenews.net/articles/meet-the-lawyers-teeing-up-the-supreme-court-climate-showdown/

1/22

as arguments approach in the most significant Supreme Court environment battle of the decade, teams of lawyers are already making their case for how the justices should view EPA’s climate authority.

When the justices take the bench on Feb. 28 to hear arguments in West Virginia v. EPA,they will arrive armed with information from reams of briefs prepared by some of the nation’s leading environmental lawyers.

Those attorneys’ arguments will lay the groundwork in a high-stakes case that has the potential to upend EPA’s ability to regulate greenhouse gases from power plants — one of the nation’s largest sources of carbon dioxide emissions.

the challenge — brought by Republican-led states and coal companies — asks the Supreme Court to overturn a ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit that struck down a Trump-era EPA rule gutting the Obama-era Clean Power Plan.

The 2015 Obama rule invoked EPA’s authority under the Clean Air Act to set systemwide requirements for power plant emissions reductions.

After the D.C. Circuit ruling, President Biden’s EPA had a clean slate to craft its own rule. The agency had said it would not return to the Clean Power Plan, whose goals have already been met by the power sector, even though the regulation never took effect.

The justices then took the unusual step of agreeing to hear a dispute over a regulation that does not technically exist.

Their ruling in the case, which is expected by next summer, could not only constrain EPA from issuing a comprehensive new carbon rule but also prevent Congress from handing off broad regulatory authority to federal agencies.

Here are some of the lawyers to know in this year’s high court climate slugfest:

Lindsay See

Leading the briefs for West Virginia is Lindsay See, the state’s solicitor general.

The coal-rich state, joined by 18 others, filed the first plea for the Supreme Court to weigh in on EPA’s climate authority. It was followed by three other petitions, which are now consolidated in one massive case.

See has served as West Virginia’s leading litigator since 2017 and previously worked as an associate atGibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP, a firm with a prominent Supreme Court practice.

She has appeared once before the nation’s highest bench, in a 2018 case related to a discrimination challenge against an exemption in West Virginia tax law that protected state and local — but not federal — employees from having their pension benefits taxed. West Virginia lost the case.

West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey (R) and other state lawyers said the D.C. Circuit should not have allowed EPA to regulate power plant emissions under a “rarely used, ancillary provision of the Clean Air Act.” They referred to Section 111(d) of the statute, which served as the basis for the carbon rule.

“Save for a few general factors EPA was to take into account, the lower court told EPA it has ‘no limits’ on the emission-related measures it can impose — on any economic sector or almost any actor,” says the states’ most recent brief, which was signed off on by See.

See is a Harvard Law School graduate and clerked for former D.C. Circuit Judge Thomas Griffith.

Paul Seby

One other state has echoed West Virginia’s arguments in a petition and brief led by a lawyer who has been involved in the EPA carbon rule battle since the Clean Power Plan days.

Paul Seby, a shareholder at the firm Greenberg Traurig LLP and special assistant to North Dakota Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem (R), signed off on a brief that said the D.C. Circuit ruling “undermines the cooperative federalism framework carefully crafted by Congress” by finding that EPA — rather than states — can set power plant performance standards.

North Dakota v. EPA is one of the four petitions in the consolidated Supreme Court case.

Seby has argued against EPA carbon regulations before, back when the Clean Power Plan was before the D.C. Circuit. The court held a marathon argument over the regulation in 2016 but never reached a ruling.

Earlier that year, the Supreme Court had blocked the rule from taking effect, which allowed the Trump administration to dismantle it.

Seby holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of San Diego and a law degree from Lewis & Clark College.

Andrew Grossman

One of the other lead petitioners in the climate case, Westmoreland Mining Holdings LLC, hired Andrew Grossman to make its case to the high court.

Grossman leads BakerHostetler’s appellate practice and is a frequent conservative commentator on wide range of administrative and constitutional issues.

Grossman is an adjunct scholar at the libertarian Cato Institute and a former legal analyst at the Heritage Foundation. He’s also a familiar face on Capitol Hill, having testified several times before the House and Senate Judiciary committees.

In Westmoreland’s petition, Grossman raised what some environmental advocates referred to as a killer question: whether EPA may use Section 111(d) to create performance standards for existing stationary sources under the provision’s “hazardous air pollutants” program.

The justices granted the petition alongside others, but they said they would only consider the second question posed by Westmoreland’s petition: whether EPA’s carbon rule violated the major questions doctrine, which restricts federal agencies from deciding issues of “vast economic and political significance.”

Grossman attended Dartmouth College and theGeorge Mason University’s  SCALIA School of Law.

Yaakow Roth

The fourth petition in the consolidated case comes from North American Coal Corp., represented byJones Daypartner Yaakov Roth.

Like the other challengers, the coal company argues that EPA and the D.C. Circuit have taken far too broad a view of federal climate authority under the Clean Air Act.

Roth comes to the EPA climate case with lots of experience before the Supreme Court. He was the brainchild behind an argument that led the Supreme Court to overturn convictions in the New Jersey “Bridgegate” scandal.

He has also fought to preserve restrictive voting laws in Arizona and to dismantle the Obama-era Affordable Care Act.

Roth has clerked for the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and a federal appeals court judge.

He is a graduate of Harvard University and York University.

Elizabeth Prelogar

Before the Supreme Court agreed to hear West Virginia v. EPA, Elizabeth Prelogar had argued on behalf of the federal agency that it was too early for the justices to get involved.

The solicitor general noted in a brief filed in August that Biden’s EPA has not yet written a new carbon rule and has no plans to revive the Obama plan.

EPA instead intends to issue a new rule “after taking into account all relevant considerations, including changes to the electricity sector that have occurred during the last several years,” she wrote.

Prelogar, who was confirmed in late October, has already made several appearances before the Supreme Court, including in one case in which she argued on behalf of the federal government against abortion laws in Mississippi and Texas.

Since her appointment as acting solicitor general in January, Prelogar has also led Supreme Court briefs in several environmental cases, including one in which the Biden administration backed efforts by the developer of the PennEast natural gas pipeline to acquire state-owned land in New Jersey (Energywire, March 10, 2021). The pipeline company won its case, but the project was eventually canceled.

Prelogar, a Harvard Law School graduate, has previously served as assistant to the solicitor general and has worked in private practice. During a prior stint at the Justice Department, she served on the special counsel’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election.

She clerked for Attorney General Merrick Garland when he was a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and for Supreme Court Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan.

Prelogar is the second woman to be confirmed as solicitor general. Kagan was the first.

Sean Donahue

Environmental groups that support broad EPA regulatory authority have turned to an experienced Supreme Court litigator to represent them in the case: Sean Donahue.

Donahue has been a go-to lawyer for environmental groups and public health advocates in some of the most high-profile litigation of the last decade, including Clean Air Act and climate cases.

He’s also represented environmentalists in key cases on the social cost of carbon for fuel economy and vehicle emissions standards.

Donahue and his team, including the Environmental Defense Fund’s Vickie Patton, will have a challenging task ahead of them. Several conservative justices have signaled skepticism of doctrines requiring them to defer to agency expertise, and the current case appears to be a coordinated effort to curtail EPA’s regulatory authority broadly.

In an interview, Donahue said once again it may be an environmental case that set an important precedent for administrative law.

"Statutes like the Clean Air Act," he said, "necessarily depend upon expert agencies to apply Congress’ health and environmental directives to complex factual records, developing technologies, about particular industries and pollutants."

Donahue, who works for Donahue, Goldberg & Littleton, clerked for former Supreme Court Justices Ginsburg and John Paul Stevens. He’s also a veteran of the Justice Department. He attended Columbia University and University of Chicago’s Law School.

Beth Brinkmann

Another attorney with Supreme Court experience is making the case for electric utilities that want to preserve the D.C. Circuit decision striking down the Trump-era carbon rule.

Before the justices granted the case, Covington & Burling LLP partner Beth Brinkmann led a brief on behalf of Consolidated Edison Inc. and other companies that said Supreme Court review of a nonexistent regulation would run the risk of a “ruling untethered to actual circumstances.”

Moreover, she wrote, the red states and coal companies are seeking relief from the justices even as the power industry has achieved the Clean Power Plan’s 2030 emissions reductions targets more than a decade in advance —even though the rule never officially took effect.

“Those changes, which include reductions in the cost of emission-reduction technologies and increasing consumer preferences for clean power, have only accelerated since adoption of the ACE Rule,” she wrote.

Brinkmann has argued more than two dozen times before the Supreme Court. As former deputy assistant attorney general at the Justice Department’s civil rights division, for example, she defended the Obama administration’s Affordable Care Act.

She has also worked in the appellate practice at the firm Morrison & Foerster and as an assistant federal public defender representing indigent criminal defendants.

Brinkmann is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, and Yale Law School. She clerked for the late Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun.

Elbert Lin

A utility industry group that opposes EPA’s ability to craft rules like the Clean Power Plan has staffed its legal team with an attorney who, at only 43 years old, has already made a significant impact on environmental law at the Supreme Court.

Elbert Lin was the lawyer who secured the unprecedented stay of President Obama’s climate regulatory regime, the Clean Power Plan, in 2016 while he was West Virginia’s solicitor general.

Lin said in an interview that his interest in environmental and administrative law was born out of necessity when he was West Virginia’s solicitor general. It was during Obama’s second term, and the administration was promulgating many major environmental rules, including the Clean Power Plan.

"Environmental regulations were of significant importance of the state," he said.

Now in private practice at the firm Hunton Andrews Kurth LLP, Lin is back in the EPA carbon rule litigation, representing America’s Power, a trade association of companies that produce electricity from coal.

Lin, who is the son of Taiwanese immigrants, has also argued key Clean Water Act cases at the high court. He argued on behalf of Maui, Hawaii, in a case over whether a federal permit is required for pollution that is pumped underground but eventually reaches the ocean.

The Supreme Court delivered a new test for determining whether a permit was needed, and a federal judge in Hawaii later sided with environmental groups arguing that Maui should have secured a Clean Water Act approval (Greenwire, Oct. 21, 2021). Legal experts say they are watching to see how other courts apply the Supreme Court’s test.

Lin attended Yale for undergrad and law school, and heclerked for a federal appeals court judge and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

Reporters Lesley Clark and Niina H. Farah contributed.

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kyl rev door

https://theintercept.com/2018/05/17/ftc-bureau-of-consumer-protection-director-andrew-smith/

In A RARE party-line vote, the Federal Trade Commission appointed a corporate lawyer who has represented Uber, Equifax, Facebook, and a jailed payday lender to run its Bureau of Consumer Protection. The appointment was one of the first moves of the new five-member panel, all of whom were confirmed by the Senate last month.

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“I am delighted to appoint such a stellar group of leaders to continue the FTC’s work on behalf of American consumers,” said FTC Chair Joseph Simons in a statement. The commission appointed heads for the bureaus of Competition and Economics and a General Counsel unanimously, as is typical for these positions.

Only the appointment of Andrew Smith to the Bureau of Consumer Protection was controversial, with a 3-2 vote along party lines. Democratic appointees Rohit Chopra and Becca Kelly Slaughter opposed Smith, and each laid out their concerns in written dissents.

No commission meeting was held in conjunction with the appointment; commissioners merely turned in their votes.

As the New York Times explained last week, while Smith once worked at the FTC, he was most recently a partner with the financial services practice atCovington & Burling,a leading white-collar defense firm. His clients included dozens of financial institutions, credit-reporting agencies, and tech firms, including players in some of the most notorious corporate scandals of the past several years. For example, Smith represented convicted**payday lender Scott Tucker**, from whom the FTC won a$1.3 billion judgment for deceiving and exploiting consumers. Tucker faces 16 years in prison.

Three other Smith-repped companies have active investigations at the FTC: Facebook, for potentially violating a 2011 consent decree over safeguarding user privacy; and Uber and Equifax, over separate data breaches that exposed the personal information of hundreds of millions of Americans. Smith even testified on Equifax’s behalf in the Senate last year.

Smith has said he would recuse himself from any investigations or enforcement involving companies with whom he has worked. But as Chopra writes in his dissent, “The Director should be our quarterback on the agency’s top priorities. But, I fear our quarterback will be spending too much time on the sidelines.”...

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https://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/lookup2.php?strID=C00462630

2018 6/18 150K so far

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2016 house

House

Total to Democrats: $87,500

Total to Republicans: $127,250| Recipient | Total |

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expenditures 2016

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interview with Democracy Now!, Rolling Stone journalist Matt Taibbi talked about former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder rejoining his old law firm whose clients include many of the banks linked to the finanicial crisis. Taibbi described the move as probably the biggest single example of the revolving door. "He spent six years essentially guiding all of these Wall Street firms," he said, "which many of them are clients of this company that he’s now working for—he guided them all back to profitability. He allowed bankers to escape prosecution. And now he’s going right back to that firm, where he’s going to enjoy a very lucrative partnership, whether he ever works again, you know, for the rest of his life."

Below is an interview with Taibbi, followed by a transcript:

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We turn now to the latest sign of the revolving door between Wall Street and Washington. Recently retired U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder is returning home—to the corporate law firm Covington & Burling, where he worked for eight years before becoming head of the Justice Department. During his time at Covington, Holder’s clients included UBS and the fruit giant Chiquita. The law firm’s client list has included many of the big banks that the Justice Department under Holder’s leadership failed to criminally prosecute for their role in the financial crisis, including Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo and Citigroup.

AMY GOODMAN: In a new interview with The National Law Journal, Eric Holder said his, quote, "appropriately aggressive," unquote, challenges to financial and corporate fraud could mean certain institutions "might not want to work with me," he said, "and ... that’s fine," unquote. However, in 2013, Holder testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee and suggested some banks are too big to jail.

ATTORNEY GENERAL ERIC HOLDER: I am concerned that the size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them when we are hit with indications that if you do prosecute, if you do bring a criminal charge, it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy. And I think that is a function of the fact that some of these institutions have become too large. Again, I’m not talking about HSBC; this is just a more general comment. I think it has an inhibiting influence—impact on our ability to bring resolutions that I think would be more appropriate.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, for more, we’re joined by Matt Taibbi, award-winning journalist with Rolling Stone magazine, who writes about Eric Holder’s time at Covington & Burling and much more in his book, The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap, which is now out in paperback.

AMY GOODMAN: So you were tweeting up a storm yesterday as this news came of the former attorney general, Eric Holder, going back to Covington & Burling. Talk about the significance of this.

MATT TAIBBI: Yeah, I mean, I think this is probably the single biggest example of the revolving door that we’ve ever had. And we’ve had some whoppers in our past. I think previously the worst one was probably Louisiana Congressman Billy Tauzin leaving Congress and taking a $2-million-a-year job with PhRMA, right after he helped pass the prescription drug benefit bill. But what Holder just did just blows Tauzin away. I mean, he spent six years essentially guiding all of these Wall Street firms, which many of them are clients of this company that he’s now working for—he guided them all back to profitability. He allowed bankers to escape prosecution. And now he’s going right back to that firm, where he’s going to enjoy a very lucrative partnership, whether he ever works again, you know, for the rest of his life.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Holder also sort of became a point person for these, quote, "extrajudicial settlements."

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Could you explain what those are and how they worked?

MATT TAIBBI: Yeah, Holder, in general, pioneered a number of different ways that essentially a lot of these too-big-to-fail companies were allowed to buy their way out of trouble. And one of the most notorious, I think, was that he concluded a number of the biggest settlement deals with banks like JPMorgan Chase in ways that were not reviewed by a judge. Because we did have some instances during this time period where pesky judges—I think one of the most infamous, in the eyes of Wall Street, was Jed Rakoff, who threw out a settlement with Citigroup because he thought it wasn’t harsh enough—well, to fix that problem, Holder just started striking deals and not submitting them for judicial review. So he did a $13 billion settlement with JPMorgan Chase where no judge signed off on the deal. The whole thing was done in secret. He essentially institutionalized the back room. This was just a deal where a bunch of bankers got together with a bunch of Justice Department officials, money changed hands, and that was it. The whole—all of their criminal problems went away. This is a very different way of doing business than what we’ve ever seen before, and it’s very dangerous, I think.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And he also took the term "collateral damage" into the financial world out of the military world, didn’t he, as well?

MATT TAIBBI: Right, yeah. He actually predated the collateral damage idea back when he was a lawyer in the Clinton Justice Department. He wrote a memo that—you know, it’s now known as the Holder Memo, where he outlined a policy that is called "collateral consequences," and basically all this says is that if you’re a prosecutor and you’re worried about prosecuting a company that employs a lot of people and you’re concerned that innocent people might suffer as the result of a prosecution, you may pursue noncriminal remedies when you go after this company.

The problem was that when—by the time he became attorney general, the economic landscape was dotted all over with these enormous, too-big-to-fail companies, and there was a real threat that if you prosecuted these firms, that it might cause serious damage to the overall economy. Obviously we saw what happened with Lehman Brothers, for instance. So this became sort of the unofficial policy of the United States. We started taking companies that had done very bad things—you know, HSBC is probably the biggest example, laundering money for drug dealers—and instead of throwing people in jail and extracting huge individual penalties from the guilty parties, we just got the banks to pony up a big fine that shareholders paid, and they got to stay in business.

AMY GOODMAN: As you were tweeting your criticism yesterday, a lot of Obama supporters were also on social media pushing the line that Holder did not send anyone to jail because there were no laws broken.

MATT TAIBBI: Right, yeah, and this is—this comes, I think, directly from something that Barack Obama himself said on 60 Minutes once. He said some of the worst behavior on Wall Street was not illegal, some of the least ethical behavior was not illegal. But he crafted that phrase very carefully. He didn’t say all of it was not illegal. He said some of the worst behavior, and that’s true. But some of it was very illegal.

And again, just to go back to some of the worst cases, HSBC admitted to laundering $880 million for a pair of Central and South American drug cartels, including the Sinaloa drug cartel, which is infamous all over the world for these torture videos. So, we have HSBC, Europe’s largest bank, is washing hundreds of millions of dollars for people who chop people’s heads off with chainsaws. That’s a crime. I mean, there’s no—that’s the worst crime that a bank can possibly commit. And anybody who thinks that Holder didn’t send people to jail because they didn’t commit crimes is not really paying attention to what went on during this time.

AMY GOODMAN: Also at Covington & Burling, Eric Holder will be reunited with Lanny Breuer. Explain who he was and the significance of them together.

MATT TAIBBI: Well, Lanny Breuerworked at Covington & Burling along with Eric Holder. He went to Holder to become his deputy for the early part of his tenure as attorney general. He was the head of the Criminal Division. Lanny, from the sources that I spoke to while I was researching all this material, was terrified of going to court when he didn’t have an absolute, guaranteed, sure victory. And so, what happened very early in their tenure together was that they did take one case to trial. They went to trial against a pair of guys from Bear Stearns who were accused of defrauding their clients. And they lost. It ended in an acquittal, even though they had very solid documentary evidence. From that point forward, they didn’t take anybody to court. And all of these cases involving all of these banks, they went the settlement route instead, presumably because they were afraid of going into a courtroom. They were worried that juries didn’t understand this material. They were worried that it was too complicated. And so, rather than risk losing and getting a bad headline, they let off all of these people who had done very, very bad things, and so we have this legacy of cash instead of punishment.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Can you talk also about how the Justice Department and other regulatory groups have changed the composition of the staffing, the high-level staffing, of these agencies during this period when Holder has been there?

MATT TAIBBI: Yeah. This is something that I heard over and over again over the years, which is that a certain kind of person who used to work in the regulatory agencies, you know, who was a kind of a career civil servant, particularly the law enforcement types, the people who grew up through the ranks, you know, just trying to get the criminal at all costs—they’re primarily motivated by trying to extract justice from wrongdoers—that kind of person is gradually disappearing from the ranks of the regulatory bodies, and they are being replaced, increasingly, particularly at the higher levels, by people from the corporate defense community. And Holder was very profoundly a symbol of that kind of person.

And the difference was, when you have people who come from the corporate defense world, like Holder, like Lanny Breuer, they tend to approach these settlements not to get a pound of flesh out of the wrongdoers, but instead they want to emerge with a settlement that leaves everybody happy when they walk out of the room. But that’s really not a good approach to fighting crime. That’s not the kind of attitude you want in your top crime fighter in the country. And as a result, that’s how we got so many of these settlements, which, again, were concluded in secret, in the back room. And people like Jamie Dimon were walking out of these settlements, saying, "Well, this wasn’t so bad." And their share price would go up the day after these settlements were concluded. That’s really not what we want from the top cop in the country.

AMY GOODMAN: And this goes to the central theme of your book, Matt Taibbi, The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap. I mean, Attorney General Eric Holder was hailed as a great civil rights hero. After Ferguson, he actually went to Ferguson. I was in the Selma church on the 50th anniversary of the Selma march just a few months ago, when he gave a powerful speech about young black men—his own son, Eric Holder III, in the front row—being killed, and kept repeating that. It reminds me of Reverend Barber in North Carolina, head of the NAACP, who, after Dylann Roof was arrested, the alleged shooter in the Charleston church, said, "The perpetrator has been arrested, but the killer is still at large." And he was talking, overall, about the system, beyond the Confederate flag, what it represents—for example, mass incarceration—and how these things have to change.

AMY GOODMAN: So talk about what this means—on the one hand, a civil rights crusader, but when it comes to issues of who gets put in prison and who remains free, where Eric Holder has stood.

MATT TAIBBI: Yeah, I mean, to be fair, Eric Holder, you know, has talked a lot about reform of prison sentencing, and according to their statistics, incarceration has actually declined under the Obama administration for the first time in I don’t know how many years—forever. But still we have these enormous problems, like the story that you reported on in the beginning of this show. You have people who are in jail for not just for months, but years at a time, awaiting trial because they can’t afford bail. We have millions of people behind bars for crimes that are far less serious than what HSBC, for instance, was doing. And there’s this enormous dichotomy.

I think, you know, this is the—the chief problem with what Holder did is that there are all of these people who are in jail for crimes because it’s easy to put away people who don’t have enough money to defend themselves, who can’t pay enormous fines. Those are the people who end up going behind bars for crimes like money laundering or drug dealing or whatever it is. But we have this rationale for companies like HSBC or JPMorgan Chase or Credit Suisse or BNP Paribas, that are caught with doing tax evasion or money laundering or fraud or whatever it is, that somehow this class of defendants, we can allow them to pay their way out of trouble, while this other group of people has to go behind bars. And we just can’t have that. I mean, that system is totally inappropriate. And as much as Holder wants to hold himself out as a civil rights leader, and has done some good things, this dichotomy is really his legacy, and that’s an enormous problem.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And the issue of him returning to Covington & Burling, could you talk about that particular law firm, its role in the Washington scene? And also, what are the limitations on appointed officials, in terms of once they leave office what they can or can’t do, or did the Obama administration institute particular restrictions on their appointees?

MATT TAIBBI: They did. There is a two-year cooling-off period, they call it, where, you know, someone who leaves the Justice Department has to wait for two years before they can interact with the Justice Department again. This means that even though Eric Holder has gone back to work, he has to sit for 19 months during this cooling-off period and do I don’t know what. I’m sure he’s going to be compensated very handsomely during that time.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: But he can advise the lawyers that do the direct interaction.

MATT TAIBBI: Exactly, yeah. They’ll figure out some way to do it so that it’s, you know, superficially legal. But there is this cooling-off period. Covington & Burling, what its significance is, it’s one of the biggest white-collar defense firms in America. It is notable because it has such a lengthy list of too-big-to-fail banks among its clientele. It also, very interestingly, played a very important role in helping to create the subprime mortgage crisis, because it represented a company called MERS, which was the electronic mortgage registry system, which helped create a lot of the confusion and chaos in the paperwork area of the mortgage system. All these people who were trying to find out who owns their home and can’t find the note, a lot of that is chalked up to the work that MERS did to eliminate paper mortgages. So they had an enormous role in helping create this subprime mortgage market. And then, of course, Eric Holder goes, and he’s the regulator for all that activity, you know, as the attorney general. It was a little weird, to say the least.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about Keir Gumbs?

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AMY GOODMAN: —the man that Senator Warren has been protesting, would be put—

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MATT TAIBBI: Right, who’s going to be—who’s going to be on the SEC now, yeah. I mean, this is a—they’re putting him—he’s going to be an SEC commissioner, presumably. Covington & Burling is becoming essentially a kind of shadow Justice Department now. We have six alums from the Justice Department who have just returned to Covington & Burling, and now Covington & Burling is sending another person to occupy a very high-ranking seat in the SEC. You know, it’s problematic, clearly, when you have so many people from the same firm who are all going to be talking to each other. It’s kind of this secondary club. And what happens when all these people have this congenial relationship, they end up making deals that are much more favorable to their clients than they would be otherwise.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, they can all regulate all of the Goldman Sachs alums that are in other agencies in the federal government.

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, the significance of Gumbs, yes, coming from Covington & Burling, but also representing American Petroleum, he and colleagues at the firm writing a guide advising corporations on how to avoid disclosing their political spending to shareholders, Senator Warren wanting the SEC to require companies to disclose that kind of spending. And the question is: Will President Obama respond to Senator Warren’s pressure?

MATT TAIBBI: Probably not, I’m guessing. You know, I mean, but this—it says a lot that this is the kind of person that they’re going to be bringing in to the SEC. And I think, you know, again, people want a different kind of person occupying these regulatory positions. They don’t want a corporate defense attorney who’s just spent however many years telling companies how to avoid punishment, how to avoid taxes, how to avoid all these problems. You know, I personally would much prefer to have a career investigator, career law enforcement official in that job.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we want to thank you, Matt Taibbi, award-winning journalist with Rolling Stone magazine. His most recent book, The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap, now out in paperback.

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   Another casualty of the 2012 elections has joined the influence industry, as former Rep. Howard L. Berman (D-CA) has accepted a position as senior advisor at high profile K Street firm Covington & Burling. A former chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and member of the House Judiciary Committee, Berman is joining the firm’s public policy and global affairs office. Read more...

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Tobacco Dole

What do Bob Dole's telemarketer, his chief California strategist, and one of his national co-chairs have in common? Big Tobacco.

—By Sheila Kaplan

| May/June 1996 Issue

Texas Attorney General Dan Morales broadcast a clear message last fall: If tobacco companies were making millions in Texas, then they could help contribute to the billions in Medicaid costs spent in Texas for smoking-related illnesses. Several other attorneys general already had filed lawsuits against the tobacco industry to recover such health care costs. But before Morales could follow their lead, half a dozen tobacco industry lobbyists visited him and delivered a private poll from the political consulting firm Public Opinion Strategies.

The poll, commissioned in January by the Covington & Burling law firm on behalf of the four largest tobacco firms and the industry's advocacy group, The Tobacco Institute, claimed the people of Texas wouldn't support Morales if he filed the suit. The proof? Two-thirds of the more than 800 Texans polled had said they wouldn't favor the proposed lawsuit.

But then Morales took a closer look at the poll. He discovered it was actually a "push-poll," designed not to gauge public opinion but sway it. The poll's telemarketing script began with basic, unobtrusive political questions--then quickly zeroed in on Morales. "Elected officials are held to high standards in public life," the script read. "Here are some reasons people are giving to vote against Dan Morales."

Among the reasons: Morales was "pro-affirmative action"; he "supports gun control"; and his 1994 campaign contributed money to Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam. (Morales' staffers had purchased two tickets to a dinner thrown by a local chapter of the Nation of Islam.) Those polled were also told that Morales' proposed lawsuit could cost thousands of jobs, prevent the attorney general from fighting crime, and reward only a few wealthy personal injury lawyers. Finally--the spin complete--those polled were asked what they thought of the suit. It's hardly surprising that they overwhelmingly opposed it.

Despite its bias, the poll served its purpose: to deliver a not-so-veiled threat that, on a moment's notice, the tobacco companies could make many more such calls throughout Texas and, through strategies such as push-polling, mobilize an untold number of voters against the suit--and against Morales.

Still, Morales proceeded with the suit.

And the man who runs the polling firm, William McInturff, went back to his day job--as chief pollster for Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole.  Mojo 96

Tobacco Dole (cont'd)

—By Sheila Kaplan

| May/June 1996 Issue

This particular tie between tobacco and the Dole campaign ended in February when Dole fired McInturff because of his failure to predict the majority leader's embarrassing loss to Steve Forbes in the Delaware primary--not because of his tobacco connections.

Dole and the tobacco industry share the need to win at all costs, which has forged a mutually beneficial relationship. By March, nearly every major media outlet reported the increase in Big Tobacco's contributions to the Republican Party: from $546,224 in "soft" donations in 1993 to $2.4 million in 1995. But few have investigated Dole's current ties to the industry. As one of tobacco's top congressional allies, the powerful Kansas senator has helped the industry broaden its overseas markets and battle domestic foes, such as Food and Drug Administration Commissioner David Kessler.

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Now, as Dole wages his campaign for the presidency, many of the tobacco industry's biggest hitters are whispering in his ear.

Lobbyists for businesses, trade groups, and other special interests often attach themselves to presidential campaigns, seeking future jobs and political chits. Tobacco operatives are no exception. But the sheer number of tobacco lobbyists, lawyers, and pollsters working for the Dole team sets a new standard. For example:

• Roderick DeArment, a former Dole chief of staff, is chairman of Lawyers for Dole, a group of about 700 lawyers raising funds for Dole's campaign. DeArment is a law partner at Covington & Burling, which represents the major tobacco companies (Philip Morris, R.J. Reynolds, Lorillard, and Brown & Williamson), as well as The Tobacco Institute. Covington & Burling spent more than $1 million in Philip Morris money to fund Healthy Buildings, an international magazine using phony science to promote the tobacco industry's idea that indoor smoking bans are unnecessary. Covington & Burling also commissioned a dubious 1996 study purporting federal tobacco restrictions could cost the nation 92,000 jobs and $7.9 billion in lost output. Another Covington & Burling partner, Keith Teel, commissioned the push-poll used to threaten Morales, and is traveling the country trying to strong-arm other attorneys general . (see "Our Good Friend, the Governor")
• Paul Manafort, Dole's convention manager, was co-founder of the Washington lobbying firm Black, Manafort, Stone, and Kelly, which represents Philip Morris. Black, Manafort is a subsidiary of Burson-Marsteller, the public relations firm for Philip Morris and the headquarters for the National Smokers Alliance. Last year, Manafort launched DMS, a consulting firm in Virginia, with Rick Davis, also from Black, Manafort and a Dole convention official.
• Tom Collamore, a Dole campaign fundraiser and assistant secretary of commerce during the Bush presidency, is vice president of corporate affairs for Philip Morris. "Mr. Collamore," confirms Philip Morris spokeswoman Darienne Dennis, "is an avid supporter of Sen. Dole, and I know that on his personal time he has done work with the Dole campaign."
• Jeanie Austin, one of Dole's national co-chairs, is an active member of the National Smokers Alliance advisory board.

Others working for Dole are less well-known within the Beltway, but play important roles in the tobacco industry's emerging national strategy. Steve Merksamer, for example, joined the Dole campaign last fall as a senior adviser and California strategist. His Sacramento law firm, Nielson, Merksamer, Parrinello, Mueller & Naylor, has collected $1.9 million from the industry since 1988, more than any other California firm.

In 1994, Nielson, Merksamer was paid an additional $350,000 to write Proposition 188, called the Tobacco Control Act. The proposition promised tough statewide restrictions, but its language actually weakened state law by acting as a "pre-emption law" to kill dozens of tougher local restrictions throughout the state. When the media exposed Proposition 188 as a tobacco industry ploy, voters defeated it.

But the tobacco industry's behind-the-scenes maneuvers in California may well be the model for a national strategy under a Dole presidency and a Republican Congress: Defeat popular grassroots anti-smoking measures with secret legislative and executive overrides, pre-emptions, and subversions. For example, the tobacco industry is using California Gov. Pete Wilson and the Republican California Assembly to gut anti-smoking education efforts financed by the state's 25-cent-per-pack cigarette tax. Tobacco companies, in a convenient alliance with the California Medical Association, lobbied legislators to divert money out of California's anti-smoking efforts (which activists call the single greatest threat to the tobacco industry) and into low-income health care programs--effectively using financially needy programs as a cover to derail anti-smoking campaigns.

Other operatives link Dole to the tobacco industry's secretive grassroots campaign, specifically, Midwest strategist Tom Synhorst and Alaska campaign coordinator Frank Bickford, who were both field coordinators for RJR's "grassroots" efforts in the states.

Synhorst has particularly close ties to Dole. A star in the majority leader's 1988 presidential campaign, Synhorst masterminded Dole's primary win in Iowa. In between stints for Dole's two presidential campaigns, Synhorst has been a grassroots organizer for RJR. He co-founded his telemarketing firm, Direct Connect, with top RJR lobbyist Read deButts.

Direct Connect is the Dole campaign's telemarketing firm of choice, with monthly billings exceeding $60,000. Dole's former leadership PAC, Campaign America, also paid Direct Connect more than $20,000 a month last year.

Synhorst and Bickford illustrate an important aspect of the tobacco industry's survival plan: Create grassroots front groups to make pro-tobacco legislation handed down by state and national politicians appear to be the public's will. These groups, many posing as "anti-tax" organizations, are key to the tobacco industry's efforts to win over the anti-big government segment of the electorate. This is also a crucial audience for Dole, who writes in his campaign brochure's "personal message": "My mandate as President would be to rein in the Federal government in order to set free the spirit of the American people."

Tobacco doesn't seem an obvious benefactor for a senator from Kansas, where there are plenty of wheat fields but few tobacco farms. Still, Dole has received more than $330,000 directly from RJR, Philip Morris, and U.S. Tobacco during his career, in addition to untold tobacco soft money through the Republican National Committee. Meanwhile, Dole has consistently fought tobacco tax increases--even when proposed by fellow Republicans.

During this presidential campaign, Dole has gone after FDA Commissioner David Kessler, promising an audience of pharmaceutical giants at a GOP fundraiser last September that Kessler would be out of a job if Dole were elected. Three months later, Dole was one of 32 senators who signed a letter to the FDA protesting its proposed crackdown on tobacco advertising. Dole also spoke out against Kessler's plans to limit cigarette advertising at sporting events. Before an appreciative crowd at a NASCAR auto race in Darlington, S.C., he waved a T-shirt that read, "Let Winston Cup make the rules for NASCAR, not the FDA."

In less dramatic fashion, Elizabeth Dole has also earned Big Tobacco's appreciation. In 1987, while serving as secretary of transportation, she refused to ban smoking on airplanes, ignoring recommendations from Surgeon General C. Everett Koop and the National Academy of Sciences. Perhaps coincidentally, tobacco contributions to the American Red Cross, which she heads, have escalated. Philip Morris, Brown & Williamson, and RJR gave the charity a combined $265,530 in 1995, compared to a total over the previous five years of $231,427.

But Bob Dole's friendship with the tobacco companies is not limited to the industry's domestic battles. With tobacco's popularity dying in the United States, companies must hook foreign populations. For this, the industry needs unfettered access to large global markets. Dole has been crucial in helping them get it.

In 1985, Reagan trade representatives focused their attention on Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand, threatening retaliatory tariffs on their exports if they declined to open their tobacco markets. Tobacco lobbyists actually sat in on the official trade negotiations.

During talks with South Korea in 1987, Brown & Williamson's lobbyist, Thomas Humber (now the chief of Philip Morris' National Smokers Alliance), wrote the office of the U.S. trade representative corporate liaison Sandy Kristoff to inform her of a favorable meeting between South Korea's U.S. ambassador, Dole, Sen. Jesse Helms, and senators from four other tobacco states. According to the letter, the senators expressed "their support for fair market conditions in Korea" during the meeting. The ambassador, in return, thanked Dole and Helms for voting against threatened trade sanctions against Korea. Then, Humber wrote, "[The ambassador] assured the Senators of Ôbest efforts' toward market expansion" for U.S. tobacco companies.

Trade agreements on tobacco have shifted under Clinton. Last year, U.S. trade representatives allowed South Korea to enact tobacco advertising restrictions after approval from the Department of Health and Human Services and the Environmental Protection Agency. Officials from both agencies now sit in on trade proceedings to decide whether tobacco restrictions reflect health and environmental concerns.

Under a Dole presidency, this would probably change. Helms would play a dominant role in foreign trade policy, as would Robert Lighthizer, a former top Dole aide and Dole's rumored choice for his chief of staff or U.S. trade representative. Lighthizer, currently an attorney with Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, used to work for Covington & Burling and served as deputy U.S. trade representative from 1983 to 1985. During that period, the United States began bullying countries to open their tobacco markets. Should Lighthizer have a prominent trade role, he might turn back the clock to a time when tobacco lobbyists, not health officials, sat in on trade negotiations.

The GOP convention in San Diego this August promises to be even more of a tobacco-fest than the 1992 convention. Ken Rietz, president and CEO of the Washington, D.C., office of the public relations firm Burson-Marsteller, is a vice chairman of this year's convention host committee. Rietz oversaw the California chapter of the National Smokers Alliance, which worked against tobacco control ordinances in Los Angeles and San Diego.

Rietz candidly admits convention sponsors get opportunities for private meetings with political bigwigs. But he calls the high number of tobacco lobbyists involved with the convention and the Dole campaign pure coincidence. "If you look at Burson-Marsteller, [tobacco is] only one of thousands of clients," Rietz says. But of those thousands, Philip Morris and NSA sit comfortably among the firm's top five Washington clients.

As Mother Jones went to press, GOP convention plans were still being negotiated, but Philip Morris had already scored one coup, signing a letter of intent to rent the sought-after space at the San Diego Museum of Art, and was reportedly trying to book the San Diego Zoo for another event. The company has yet to decide on specific receptions but is likely to sponsor the high-profile reception for the GOP's Team 100 (party contributors who give $100,000 or more) and the reception for the Republican Governors Association.

But ultimately, if the tobacco industry achieves what it wants, these festivities will be only a warm-up. The real tobacco party will come in January, at Bob Dole's inauguration.

Sheila Kaplan is a Washington, D.C.-based journalist.

==

This critical unifying factor is the total number of criminal prosecutions of major firms and senior executives as a result of all of these crimes combined.

And what is that number?

Zero.

Literally zero. A number that neither President Obama nor Mitt Romney shows the slightest interest in changing.

Consider the Obama administration's choices for the four most important positions in financial sector law enforcement. The attorney general (Eric Holder) and the head of the Justice Department's criminal division (Lanny Breuer) both come to us :{from **Covington & Burling**:(style="background-color:#fff200"):}:, a law firm that represents and lobbies for most of the major banks and their industry associations; indeed Breuer was co-head of its white collar criminal defense practice, and represented the Moody's rating agency in the Enron case. Mary Schapiro, the head of the SEC, spent the housing bubble in charge of FINRA, the investment banking industry's "self-regulator," which gave her a :{$9 million severance:(style="background-color:#fff200"):}: for a job well done. And her head of enforcement, perhaps most stunningly of all, is Robert Khuzami,:{ who was general counsel:(style="background-color:#fff200"):}: for Deutsche Bank's North American business during the entire bubble. So zero prosecutions isn't much of a surprise, really.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/charles-ferguson/bank-crimes_b_1675714.html?view=print&comm_ref=false

---

By Scot J. Paltrow  huffpo

Jan 19 (Reuters) - U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and Lanny Breuer, head of the Justice Department's criminal division, were partners for years at a Washington law firm that represented a Who's Who of big banks and other companies at the center of alleged foreclosure fraud, a Reuters inquiry shows.

The firm, Covington & Burling, is one of Washington's biggest white shoe law firms. Law professors and other federal ethics experts said that federal conflict of interest rules required Holder and Breuer to recuse themselves from any Justice Department decisions relating to law firm clients they personally had done work for.

Both the Justice Department and Covington declined to say if either official had personally worked on matters for the big mortgage industry clients. Justice Department spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler said Holder and Breuer had complied fully with conflict of interest regulations, but she declined to say if they had recused themselves from any matters related to the former clients.

Reuters reported in December that under Holder and Breuer, the Justice Department hasn't brought any criminal cases against big banks or other companies involved in mortgage servicing, even though copious evidence has surfaced of apparent criminal violations in foreclosure cases.

The evidence, including records from federal and state courts and local clerks' offices around the country, shows widespread forgery, perjury, obstruction of justice, and illegal foreclosures on the homes of thousands of active-duty military personnel.

In recent weeks the Justice Department has come under renewed pressure from members of Congress, state and local officials and homeowners' lawyers to open a wide-ranging criminal investigation of mortgage servicers, the biggest of which have been Covington clients. So far Justice officials haven't responded publicly to any of the requests.

While Holder and Breuer were partners at Covington, the firm's clients included the four largest U.S. banks - Bank of America, Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase and Wells Fargo & Co - as well as at least one other bank that is among the 10 largest mortgage servicers.

DEFENDER OF FREDDIE

Servicers perform routine mortgage maintenance tasks, including filing foreclosures, on behalf of mortgage owners, usually groups of investors who bought mortgage-backed securities.

Covington represented Freddie Mac, one of the nation's biggest issuers of mortgage backed securities, in enforcement investigations by federal financial regulators.

A particular concern by those pressing for an investigation is Covington's involvement with Virginia-based MERS Corp, which runs a vast computerized registry of mortgages. Little known before the mortgage crisis hit, MERS, which stands for Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, has been at the center of complaints about false or erroneous mortgage documents.

Court records show that Covington, in the late 1990s, provided legal opinion letters needed to create MERS on behalf of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase and several other large banks. It was meant to speed up registration and transfers of mortgages. By 2010, MERS claimed to own about half of all mortgages in the U.S. -- roughly 60 million loans.

But evidence in numerous state and federal court cases around the country has shown that MERS authorized thousands of bank employees to sign their names as MERS officials. The banks allegedly drew up fake mortgage assignments, making it appear falsely that they had standing to file foreclosures, and then had their own employees sign the documents as MERS "vice presidents" or "assistant secretaries."

Covington in 2004 also wrote a crucial opinion letter commissioned by MERS, providing legal justification for its electronic registry. MERS spokeswoman Karmela Lejarde declined to comment on Covington legal work done for MERS.

It isn't known to what extent if any Covington has continued to represent the banks and other mortgage firms since Holder and Breuer left. Covington declined to respond to questions from Reuters. A Covington spokeswoman said the firm had no comment.

Several lawyers for homeowners have said that even if Holder and Breuer haven't violated any ethics rules, their ties to Covington create an impression of bias toward the firms' clients, especially in the absence of any prosecutions by the Justice Department.

O. Max Gardner III, a lawyer who trains other attorneys to represent homeowners in bankruptcy court foreclosure actions, said he attributes the Justice Department's reluctance to prosecute the banks or their executives to the Obama White House's view that it might harm the economy.

But he said that the background of Holder and Breuer at Covington -- and their failure to act on foreclosure fraud or publicly recuse themselves -- "doesn't pass the smell test."

Federal ethics regulations generally require new government officials to recuse themselves for one year from involvement in matters involving clients they personally had represented at their former law firms.

President Obama imposed additional restrictions on appointees that essentially extended the ban to two years. For Holder, that ban would have expired in February 2011, and in April for Breuer. Rules also require officials to avoid creating the appearance of a conflict.

Schmaler, the Justice Department spokeswoman, said in an e-mail that "The Attorney General and Assistant Attorney General Breuer have conformed with all financial, legal and ethical obligations under law as well as additional ethical standards set by the Obama Administration."

She said they "routinely consult" the department's ethics officials for guidance. Without offering specifics, Schmaler said they "have recused themselves from matters as required by the law."

Senior government officials often move to big Washington law firms, and lawyers from those firms often move into government posts. But records show that in recent years the traffic between the Justice Department and Covington & Burling has been particularly heavy. In 2010, Holder's deputy chief of staff, John Garland, returned to Covington, as did Steven Fagell, who was Breuer's deputy chief of staff in the criminal division.

The firm has on its web site a page listing its attorneys who are former federal government officials. Covington lists 22 from the Justice Department, and 12 from U.S. Attorneys offices, the Justice Department's local federal prosecutors' offices around the country.

As Reuters reported in 2011, public records show large numbers of mortgage promissory notes with apparently forged endorsements that were submitted as evidence to courts.

There also is evidence of almost routine manufacturing of false mortgage assignments, documents that transfer ownership of mortgages between banks or to groups of investors. In foreclosure actions in courts mortgage assignments are required to show that a bank has the legal right to foreclose.

In an interview in late 2011, Raymond Brescia, a visiting professor at Yale Law School who has written about foreclosure practices said, "I think it's difficult to find a fraud of this size on the U.S. court system in U.S. history."

Holder has resisted calls for a criminal investigation since October 2010, when evidence of widespread "robo-signing" first surfaced. That involved mortgage servicer employees falsely signing and swearing to massive numbers of affidavits and other foreclosure documents that they had never read or checked for accuracy.

Recent calls for a wide-ranging criminal investigation of the mortgage servicing industry have come from members of Congress, including Senator Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., state officials, and county clerks. In recent months clerks from around the country have examined mortgage and foreclosure records filed with them and reported finding high percentages of apparently fraudulent documents.

On Wednesday, John O'Brien Jr., register of deeds in Salem, Mass., announced that he had sent 31,897 allegedly fraudulent foreclosure-related documents to Holder. O'Brien said he asked for a criminal investigation of servicers and their law firms that had filed the documents because they "show a pattern of fraud," forgery and false notarizations.

---

corp not ppl:

Monsanto called in Covington and B: led drive to avoid oversight of corps b/c of new theories of "speech" (supported these for tobacco co)

Judge Kessler said stained the prof/hist 42-3.  C&B said corp sp gave Monsanto right to ignore right to law; info will cause "fear and uncertainty"; so organic milk can't be labelled gmo free.

intimidated stores and stores that tried to see "rbst free"  also maine.  so corps have the right NOT to speak (footnote 29 Amestoy 1996)

Cov and B filed briefs for exxon, MS, Morgan Stanley, Glaxo-SK to support "corp speakers" 1st amend right for disinfo

if corp can't say anything it can't prove to be true, it's muzzled.

Wa Legal Fdn argued corp vulnerable shareholder suit for drop in stock proce b/c failed to defend itslef in ct of public opinion.  138

---

Covington & Burling is a major legal and lobbying firm focused on "industry and regulatory" and "corporate, tax and benefits" issues, and litigation.[1] They have U.S. offices in Washington D.C., New York City and San Francisco, and European offices in London and Brussels.[2]

Stuart Eizenstat is a partner of Covington & Burling. [3]

Mad cows and toxic smoke

In April 2004, the Washington DC newspaper The Hill reported: "Creekstone Farms Quality Beef, which has been battling the U.S. Department of Agriculture to get permission to test its cattle for "mad cow" disease, has hired Covington & Burling to help it make its case."[4] At the time, Creekstone was one of two U.S. beef producers who were seeking to resume exports to Japan, South Korea and other countries by testing every head of cattle they processed for mad cow disease.

According to a September 2003 press release from the firm, Covington & Burling successfully argued on behalf of the Southern Peru Copper Corporation to drop a lawsuit brought against it under the Alien Tort Claims Act (ATCA) by Peruvian citizens charging the copper company with polluting communities and causing health problems. ATCA has been used to address serious human rights violations in places like Burma and East Timor. In their release, Covington & Burling decried the "aggressive, expansionist plaintiffs' litigation" under ATCA.[5]

Tobacco industry

Covington & Burling also served as "corporate affairs consultants" to the Philip Morris group of companies, according to a 1993 internal budget review document which indicated the firm was paid $280,000 to "serve as general counsel to the Consumer Products Company Tort Coalition, agree the legal objectives with member company litigators, draft legislation and amendments, prepare lobby papers and testimony for legislative committees and administer the coalition's budget". [6]

Covington & Burling was involved in organizing Philip Morris' Whitecoat Project, designed to help obscure the health effects of exposure to secondhand tobacco smoke.

During the $280 billion U.S. federal lawsuit against Big Tobacco, Covington & Burling partner John Rupp, a former lawyer with the industry-funded Tobacco Institute, testified that "the industry sought out scientists and paid them to make an 'objective appraisal' of whether secondhand smoke was harmful to non-smokers, a move they hoped would dispel the 'extreme views' of some anti-smoking activists." He said "the scientists, who came from prestigious institutions such as Georgetown University and the University of Massachusetts, did not consider themselves to be working 'on behalf' of cigarette makers even though they were being paid by the industry." Rupp said, "We were paying them to share their views in forums where they would be usefully presented," according to Reuters. [7]

Partners in Covington & Burling include, but are not limited to, Keith Teel, Allan Topol and John Rupp, who have knowledge of lobbying tactics employed in Texas by the tobacco industry. The "push poll" conducted January 20-25, 1996, regarding Attorney General Dan Morales, was commissioned by Covington & Burling, and funded by Brown & Williamson, Lorillard, Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company. Teel was a member of the tobacco industry delegation who met with Attorney General Dan Morales in February, 1996 in an attempt to prevent the filing of the state's lawsuit against the tobacco industry to recoup Medicaid costs for treating sick smokers. Teel has knowledge of the tobacco industry's tactics employed in Texas, including the use of "push polls" to intimidate or control public officials' actions.

Allan Topol of C&B attended a meeting of the Research Directors of Brown & Williamson, Philip Morris, and Liggett & Myers at Liggett & Myers Operations Center in Durham, NC on May 24, 1968. The objective of the meeting was to determine the variation and the amounts of Federal Trace Commission (FTC)-determined tar exposure which various groups of the population encounter when smoking various cigarettes. He attended the December 7, 1967, meeting at the Research Triangle Institute regarding individual's smoke exposure. He has knowledge of smokers' "compensation" techniques and the inaccuracies of the FTC method for measuring tar/nicotine exposure to smokers. Mr. Topol has knowledge regarding nicotine addiction, nicotine manipulation and disease/cancer causation. Covington & Burling were Counsel to the Tobacco Institute and Lorillard Counsel for Tobacco Sales. (PMI's Introduction to Privileged Log and Glossary of Names, Estate of Burl Butler v. PMI, et al, April 19, 1996)

TXU deal: 12 lobbyists per congressman

"Almost a dozen lobbyists registered last week to represent the investor groups involved in the $45 billion buyout of Texas electric utility TXU Corp.," reported The Hill in March 2007. Apparently the lobbyist hires were prompted in part by Representative Joe Barton's (R-Texas) criticism of the TXU buyout as "a bad deal for consumers." [[8]](http://thehill.com/business--lobby/lobbyists-hired-to-represent-investor-groups-in-45b-buyout-2007-03-27.html "http://thehill.com/business--lobby/lobbyists-hired-to-represent-investor-groups-in-45b-buyout-2007-03-27.html")

"The private equity groups involved, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. (KKR) and Texas Pacific Group (registered under TPG Capital LP), hired an experienced, bipartisan lobbying team from Covington & Burling LLP to keep an eye on Barton as well as those federal agencies that might need to sign off on the deal," added The Hill. [[9]](http://thehill.com/business--lobby/lobbyists-hired-to-represent-investor-groups-in-45b-buyout-2007-03-27.html "http://thehill.com/business--lobby/lobbyists-hired-to-represent-investor-groups-in-45b-buyout-2007-03-27.html")

Other clients

• Compete, a coalition of companies "promoting competitive electricity markets." The group, whose members include PPL Corp. and DPL Inc., paid the firm "$200,000 to lobby the federal government in the first half of 2007," reported AP. [10]
• Sepracor, which "is seeking to fight a decision by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to lower the reimbursement rate for its asthma drug Xopenex," according to Boston Business Journal. [11]

Contact information

1201 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW

Washington, DC 20004-2401

Phone: 202.662.6000

Fax: 202.662.6291

Web: http://www.cov.com/index.html

Noël Decker

Head of PR - U.S.

Covington & Burling

202.662.6361

Email: ndecker AT cov.com

SourceWatch Resources

• lobbying firms
• Mad cow disease
• Thomas O. Barnett
• Antonio Miguel
• Tobacco Institute
• TXU
• Whitecoat Project
• Latin American ETS Consultants Program (ETS stands for Environmental Tobacco Smoke)
• Patrick S. Davies

External links

• Peter Kaplan, "Tobacco Lawyer Denies Deception on Secondhand Smoke," Reuters, October 27, 2004.
• Philip Morris, "Corporate Affairs: corporate cost review, Bates No 2046996735, July 1993 (estimated), page 5.
• "The Bottom Line," The Hill, May 4, 2004.
• Kevin Bogardus, "Lobbyists hired to represent investor groups in $45B buyout," The Hill, March 28, 2007.

This article may include information from Tobacco Documents Online.

In 1983, Howard founded Howard, Darby & Levin (subsequently Howard, Smith & Levin). That firm merged with the Washington firm Covington & Burling in 1999, of which Howard became Vice-Chair. He remains a practicing partner in Covington’s New York office.

Restoring teachers’ authority to maintain order. Common Good’s education efforts are focused on decreasing bureaucracy in schools and restoring educators’ authority to maintain order in their schools and classrooms. Common Good believes these are essential preconditions for successful schools and that the national education debate has not adequately considered or addressed the impact that overregulation and disorder have had on school culture and academic performance. Common Good advocates giving public schools the same freedom, and accountability, as charter schools.^[19]

• ^ ,“Why Freer Schools Are Better Schools”, Philip K. Howard, Wall Street Journal, 25 March 2010

Clients

Major Companies

Major companies that have been represented by attorneys of the firm include: Apple, Bank of America, Bunge, Deere & Company, Eastman Kodak Company, Eli Lilly, General Electric Company, Giorgio Armani, IBM Corporation, Harley-Davidson, match.com, Microsoft Corporation, Morgan Stanley, NASCAR, National Basketball Association, National Football League, Procter & Gamble, and Verizon.^[5]

Controversial Clients

Controversial clients of the firm include: Office Chérifien des Phosphates,^[6] Creekstone Farms Quality Beef,^[6] Southern Peru Copper Corporation, Philip Morris, Halliburton, and Xe Services.^[7]

Creekstone Farms Quality Beef

In April 2004, the Washington DC newspaper The Hill reported: "Creekstone Farms Quality Beef, which has been battling the U.S. Department of Agriculture to get permission to test its cattle for mad cow disease, has hired Covington & Burling to help it make its case."^[6]

At the time, Creekstone was one of two U.S. beef producers who were seeking to resume exports to Japan, South Korea and other countries by testing every head of cattle they processed for mad cow disease.

Halliburton

In 2003 Halliburton hired the firm to lobby Washington on behalf of its KBR Government Operations division, the same division being pummeled by the media, the Pentagon and Congress for its handling of Iraq contracts. Covington & Burling was paid $520,000 to handle "inquiries concerning company's construction and service contracts in Iraq," the firm said in a filing.

According to the filing, Covington & Burling listed the following people as lobbyists for Halliburton/KBR: Roderick A. DeArment, who was chief of staff to now-retired Sen. Bob Dole (R-KS); Martin B. Gold, former counsel to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN); Stuart E. Eizenstat, U.S. ambassador to the European Union during the Clinton administration; Alan A. Pemberton, coordinator of the firm's government contracts practice; David M. Marchick, who served in various posts in the Clinton administration; Jack L. Schenendorf; Peter Flanagan; Jennifer Plitsch; Benjamin J. Razi; and Allegra Lane.

Halliburton's lobbying expenses are disclosed in documents submitted under the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995, which requires congressional and executive branch lobbyists to disclose their lobbying activities twice per year. Each year the information is disclosed at the Senate Office of Public Records.

Phillip Morris

Covington & Burling also served as corporate affairs consultants to the Philip Morris group of companies, according to a 1993 internal budget review document which indicated the firm was paid $280,000 to "serve as general counsel to the Consumer Products Company Tort Coalition, agree the legal objectives with member company litigators, draft legislation and amendments, prepare lobby papers and testimony for legislative committees and administer the coalition's budget".^[8]

During the $280 billion U.S. federal lawsuit against big tobacco, Covington & Burling partner John Rupp, a former lawyer with the industry-funded Tobacco Institute, testified that "the industry sought out scientists and paid them to make an 'objective appraisal' of whether secondhand smoke was harmful to non-smokers, a move they hoped would dispel the 'extreme views' of some anti-smoking activists." He "said the scientists, who came from prestigious institutions such as Georgetown University and the University of Massachusetts, did not consider themselves to be working 'on behalf' of cigarette makers even though they were being paid by the industry." Rupp said, "We were paying them to share their views in forums where they would be usefully presented," according to Reuters.^[9]

Southern Peru Copper Corporation

According to a September 2003 press release from the firm, Covington & Burling successfully argued on behalf of the Southern Peru Copper Corporation to drop a lawsuit brought against it under the Alien Tort Claims Act (ATCA) by Peruvian citizens charging the copper company with polluting communities and causing health problems. ATCA has been used to address serious human rights violations in places like Burma and East Timor. In their release, Covington & Burling decried the "aggressive, expansionist plaintiffs' litigation" under ATCA.^[10]

Chiquita International Brands

Partner Eric Holder in 2007 defended Chiquita International Brands against lawsuits brought by relatives of people slain by terrorists and paramilitia belonging to the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, which Chiquita paid for protection.^[11][12] Holder had previously helped Chiquita negotiate a felony plea bargain, accepted by U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth, in a criminal prosecution by the federal government for one count of supporting a designated terrorist organization. The plea involved a fine of $25 million USD, also entailing 5 years probation. Chiquita became the first major U.S. corporation to be convicted of financing terrorism. After the settlement, U.S. Assistant Attorney Jonathan Malis said the $1.7 million in payments "fueled violence" and "paid for weapons and ammunition to kill innocent people." Holder stressed that Chiquita had asked the Department of Justice in 2003 if the payments should be stopped.^[13]

Xe Services (formerly Blackwater Worldwide)

In April 2010, The Hill newspaper reported that Xe Services, formerly known as Blackwater Worldwide, hired Covington & Burling to lobby on “government contracts,” according to a lobbying disclosure filing. According to the Hill, "[t]his is the first lobbying contract Blackwater has had since early 2009, when it terminated contracts with several different firms." The lobbying report listed the following Covington personnel engaged by Xe: Stuart Eizenstat,^[14] a former Treasury deputy secretary during the Clinton administration; Brian Smith,^[15] an ex-Clinton White House aide; former Congressman Michael Barnes^[16] (D-Md.); Martin Gold,^[17] a former floor adviser to ex-Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.); and William Wichterman,^[18] a former White House aide in the George W. Bush administration.

Pro bono

Covington’s pro bono work focuses on providing legal services to economically disadvantaged individuals and families in local communities. Attorneys at the firm participate in a six-month rotation program and work at each of three DC-based legal service organizations: Neighborhood Legal Services Program, the Children’s Law Center^[19] and Bread for the City.^[20]

Covington's pro bono work includes representation in such landmark cases as Buckley v. Valeo, Griffin v. Illinois[7], and Korematsu v. United States. However, the firm's pro bono program encompasses a range of areas, including freedom of expression and religion; civil rights and civil liberties; gay rights; family law; education; landlord/tenant; homelessness; employment; criminal and court-appointed cases; police misconduct; environmental law; fairness in government procurements and grants; intellectual property; non-profit incorporation and tax.

The firm’s recent pro bono matters include:

• Preparing an amicus brief on behalf of a number of social scientists in the Cook v. Rumsfeld case challenging the military’s don't ask, don't tell policy

• Filing an amicus brief in the United States Supreme Court on behalf of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) in support of the Planned Parenthood challenge of the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003

• Supporting the District of Columbia in District of Columbia v. Heller which argues that the District's ban on the possession of handguns and its storage provisions for other firearms in the home is not implicated by the Second Amendment^[21]

• Primary pro bono counsel for TeachAIDS, a nonprofit which has developed a new method for global HIV/AIDS prevention education

Representation of Guantanamo Bay inmates

Attorneys at Covington & Burling have been Guantanamo Bay attorneys for Ahmed al-Ghailani^[22] fifteen Yemenis, one Pakistani, and one Algerian being held at Guantanamo Bay. The firm obtained favorable rulings that detainees have rights under the Fifth Amendment and the Geneva Conventions.^[23] The court ruled in March 2005 that the government could not transfer detainees from Guantanamo Bay to foreign custody without first giving the prisoners a chance to challenge the move in court.

According to The American Lawyer's annual pro bono survey, Covington lawyers spent 3,022 hours on Guantánamo litigation in 2007, "the firm's largest pro bono project that year". Lawyers from the firm who have become administration officials have been advised by ethics officials to recuse themselves in matters involving detainees represented by their former firms, but not from policy issues where they were not personally and substantially involved. Lanny Breuer is one of those who has had to recuse on from some matters since leaving the firm for a government position. Covington also co-authored one of three petitioners' briefs filed in Boumediene v. Bush, "and was responsible for several detainee victories" in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. "At least one high-ranking appointee played a key role in advancing detainees' rights," but they did not participate in litigation over the Guantanamo Bay prison itself.^[24]

Pro bono accolades

• The American Lawyer "Pro Bono Report", ranked No. 1 in its annual Pro Bono Survey (2006).
• The American Lawyer "Pro Bono Report", ranked No. 1 seven out of the last 12 years.
• DC Bar Association, Thurgood Marshall Award for commitment to excellence in the fields of civil rights and individual liberties (2006).[8]
• Human Rights Campaign, "Ally for Justice" award for providing outstanding legal guidance to the HRC (2006).

Current and former attorneys

• Dean Acheson
• Peter Bogaert
• John R. Bolton
• Kit Bond
• Michael Boudin
• Bobby Burchfield
• Edward B. Burling
• Abram Chayes
• Michael Chertoff
• W. Graham Claytor, Jr.
• J. Harry Covington
• Joan Donoghue
• Stuart E. Eizenstat
• Adrian S. Fisher
• Roger Fisher
• Jack L. Goldsmith
• Timothy C. Hester
• Donald Hiss
• Eric Holder
• Nicholas Johnson
• Michael Karlan
• Richard F. Kingham
• Harold Hongju Koh
• Eugene Ludwig
• Burke Marshall
• David E. McGiffert
• Alfred H. Moses
• Dawn Clark Netsch
• David Remes
• Clayton R. Roush
• Chuck Ruff
• Cameron Stracher
• Paul Tagliabue
• Paul Warnke
• Togo D. West, Jr.
• Robert Eric Wone

see predfator nation

Lanny Breuer currently serves as head of the Criminal Division at the U.S. Department of Justice under Attorney General Eric H. Holder, Jr. who served as a Covington & Burling partner during the period 2001-2009.

...

As Taibbi notes, "over the past decade, more than a dozen high-ranking SEC officials have gone on to lucrative jobs at Wall Street banks or white-shoe law firms, where partnerships are worth millions."

Attorney General Eric Holder and his top staff have spun through that revolving door too.

The Front Door at Justice Leads into Covington & Burling

Prior to becoming attorney general, Holder was a litigation partner at Covington & Burling in its D.C. office foreight years. In particular, his practice involved "high stakes civil litigation and white collar criminal defense." In 2008, Holder was one of six Covington attorneys rankedtop in the country in white collar criminal defense. Another awardee -- and co-chair of the white collar criminal defense department at Covington -- was Lanny Breuer, now the assistant attorney general in charge of the criminal division. The Best in America White Collar Criminal Defense award was oneboth attorneys had received multiple times. The firm as a whole was "recognized by Chambers USA (2010) as one of the nation'sleading firms in the field of Financial Services Enforcementand Investigations."

But the Justice-Covington connection reaches past Holder and Breuer. It includes Holder's recent deputy chief of staff, James Garland, who just rejoined Covington, where he defends white collar criminals. Until rejoining Covington, Garland

"advised Attorney General Eric Holder on a range of enforcement issues, with an emphasis on criminal...matters, and helped to spearhead the Department's response to the ongoing economic crisis. He was deeply involved in the creation of President Obama's Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force... He worked closely with senior officials at the White House, Main Justice, the U.S. Attorneys' Offices, and other federal, state, and local enforcement agencies." [Bold added]

Remember, folks: "President Obama established the Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force (FFETF) in November 2009 to hold accountable those who helped bring about the last financial crisis, and to prevent another crisis from happening."

Nor is Garland the only Covington connection to that task force. Partner Steve Fagell was

"amember of the Criminal Division's senior leadership team, [and] akey advisor to Assistant Attorney General Lanny A. Breuer ...[Fagell] was integrally involved, for example, in the formulation and communication of Division policy in connection with...corporate and securities fraud, and other forms of financial fraud. ...Mr. Fagell alsocoordinated the Division's work with the Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force and the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, and he routinely represented the Division in meetings with the SEC, the FBI, and other key regulators and law enforcement agencies." [Bold added]

Another notable player who recently rejoined Covington is John Dugan, the recent head of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. The OCC regulates the big banks. As Covington explains:

"During his five-year term, he led the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) through the financial crisis and ensuing recession that resulted in extraordinary regulatory and supervisory actions for national banks of all sizes, including government assistance provided under the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP)..."

Partner David Kornblau was the Chief Litigation Counselfor the SEC's Enforcement Division from 2000-05, and then went to Merrill Lynch for four years. At Merrill, Kornblau:

"oversaw the firm's responses to regulatory and law enforcement investigations by the SEC, DOJ, FINRA, New York Attorney General's Office, and other federal, state and foreign regulators. These matters concerned all of the firm's business areas, including subprime mortgage securities..."

Kornblau went from Merrill to Covington. One of his representative matters is "Defend[ing] Merrill Lynch in investigations concerning disclosure and valuation of the company's inventory of subprime mortgage securities."

The Credibility of the Revolving Door

...

http://www.dailyfinance.com/2011/02/23/countrywide-mozilo-fraud-no-prison-trial-sec-mortgage-meltdown-deal-crisis/

Go-To Guy Lanny Breuer Seems a Bargain

By Kim Eisler

Comments () | Published April 3, 2008

Covington & Burling’s Lanny Breuer is the newest go-to lawyer in a crisis, and he’s with a firm that seems to be remaking itself as one of the nation’s best after several decades of what might charitably be called “malaise.”

Breuer joined Covington after several years in the Bill Clinton White House working on impeachment issues. He got his first high-profile client when a friend from the White House, Sandy Berger, asked for representation after an investigation disclosed Berger’s theft of classified documents from the National Archives. Berger’s relative wrist slap made other potential clients take notice.

In Breuer’s bullpen now is former Citibank head Charles Prince, who recently appeared before a congressional committee. But no case is getting Breuer more front-page photo space than his relationship with major-league pitcher Roger Clemens.

Breuer accompanied Clemens to the congressional hearing on steroids and now is likely to guide his client through the Justice Department’s investigation into alleged perjury.

Clemens’s last contract with the New York Yankees awarded him $28,000,022 (the last two digits are Clemens’s uniform number). Breuer is said to charge about $800 an hour for his time.

In his 2007 season with the Yankees, Clemens worked 51 hours, based on 17 starts with each start about three hours of work, including clubhouse time and postgame rubdowns.

By those numbers, Clemens billed the Yankees $549,020 per hour in 2007. At the $800-to-$1,000-an-hour rate of top Washington lawyers, Breuer would have to bill 24 hours a day for 1,458 days just to catch up.

So maybe lawyers aren’t overpaid after all.

This article can be found in the April 2008 issue of The Washingtonian.

===

DeArment 

This particular tie between tobacco and the Dole campaign ended in February when Dole fired McInturff because of his failure to predict the majority leader's embarrassing loss to Steve Forbes in the Delaware primary--not because of his tobacco connections.

Dole and the tobacco industry share the need to win at all costs, which has forged a mutually beneficial relationship. By March, nearly every major media outlet reported the increase in Big Tobacco's contributions to the Republican Party: from $546,224 in "soft" donations in 1993 to $2.4 million in 1995. But few have investigated Dole's current ties to the industry. As one of tobacco's top congressional allies, the powerful Kansas senator has helped the industry broaden its overseas markets and battle domestic foes, such as Food and Drug Administration Commissioner David Kessler.

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Now, as Dole wages his campaign for the presidency, many of the tobacco industry's biggest hitters are whispering in his ear.

Lobbyists for businesses, trade groups, and other special interests often attach themselves to presidential campaigns, seeking future jobs and political chits. Tobacco operatives are no exception. But the sheer number of tobacco lobbyists, lawyers, and pollsters working for the Dole team sets a new standard. For example:

• Roderick DeArment, a former Dole chief of staff, is chairman of Lawyers for Dole, a group of about 700 lawyers raising funds for Dole's campaign. DeArment is a law partner at Covington & Burling, which represents the major tobacco companies (Philip Morris, R.J. Reynolds, Lorillard, and Brown & Williamson), as well as The Tobacco Institute. Covington & Burling spent more than $1 million in Philip Morris money to fund Healthy Buildings, an international magazine using phony science to promote the tobacco industry's idea that indoor smoking bans are unnecessary. Covington & Burling also commissioned a dubious 1996 study purporting federal tobacco restrictions could cost the nation 92,000 jobs and $7.9 billion in lost output. Another Covington & Burling partner, Keith Teel, commissioned the push-poll used to threaten Morales, and is traveling the country trying to strong-arm other attorneys general . (see "Our Good Friend, the Governor")
• Paul Manafort, Dole's convention manager, was co-founder of the Washington lobbying firm Black, Manafort, Stone, and Kelly, which represents Philip Morris. Black, Manafort is a subsidiary of Burson-Marsteller, the public relations firm for Philip Morris and the headquarters for the National Smokers Alliance. Last year, Manafort launched DMS, a consulting firm in Virginia, with Rick Davis, also from Black, Manafort and a Dole convention official.
• Tom Collamore, a Dole campaign fundraiser and assistant secretary of commerce during the Bush presidency, is vice president of corporate affairs for Philip Morris. "Mr. Collamore," confirms Philip Morris spokeswoman Darienne Dennis, "is an avid supporter of Sen. Dole, and I know that on his personal time he has done work with the Dole campaign."
• Jeanie Austin, one of Dole's national co-chairs, is an active member of the National Smokers Alliance advisory board.

Others working for Dole are less well-known within the Beltway, but play important roles in the tobacco industry's emerging national strategy. Steve Merksamer, for example, joined the Dole campaign last fall as a senior adviser and California strategist. His Sacramento law firm, Nielson, Merksamer, Parrinello, Mueller & Naylor, has collected $1.9 million from the industry since 1988, more than any other California firm.

In 1994, Nielson, Merksamer was paid an additional $350,000 to write Proposition 188, called the Tobacco Control Act. The proposition promised tough statewide restrictions, but its language actually weakened state law by acting as a "pre-emption law" to kill dozens of tougher local restrictions throughout the state. When the media exposed Proposition 188 as a tobacco industry ploy, voters defeated it.

But the tobacco industry's behind-the-scenes maneuvers in California may well be the model for a national strategy under a Dole presidency and a Republican Congress: Defeat popular grassroots anti-smoking measures with secret legislative and executive overrides, pre-emptions, and subversions. For example, the tobacco industry is using California Gov. Pete Wilson and the Republican California Assembly to gut anti-smoking education efforts financed by the state's 25-cent-per-pack cigarette tax. Tobacco companies, in a convenient alliance with the California Medical Association, lobbied legislators to divert money out of California's anti-smoking efforts (which activists call the single greatest threat to the tobacco industry) and into low-income health care programs--effectively using financially needy programs as a cover to derail anti-smoking campaigns.

Other operatives link Dole to the tobacco industry's secretive grassroots campaign, specifically, Midwest strategist Tom Synhorst and Alaska campaign coordinator Frank Bickford, who were both field coordinators for RJR's "grassroots" efforts in the states.

Synhorst has particularly close ties to Dole. A star in the majority leader's 1988 presidential campaign, Synhorst masterminded Dole's primary win in Iowa. In between stints for Dole's two presidential campaigns, Synhorst has been a grassroots organizer for RJR. He co-founded his telemarketing firm, Direct Connect, with top RJR lobbyist Read deButts.

Direct Connect is the Dole campaign's telemarketing firm of choice, with monthly billings exceeding $60,000. Dole's former leadership PAC, Campaign America, also paid Direct Connect more than $20,000 a month last year.

Synhorst and Bickford illustrate an important aspect of the tobacco industry's survival plan: Create grassroots front groups to make pro-tobacco legislation handed down by state and national politicians appear to be the public's will. These groups, many posing as "anti-tax" organizations, are key to the tobacco industry's efforts to win over the anti-big government segment of the electorate. This is also a crucial audience for Dole, who writes in his campaign brochure's "personal message": "My mandate as President would be to rein in the Federal government in order to set free the spirit of the American people."

Tobacco doesn't seem an obvious benefactor for a senator from Kansas, where there are plenty of wheat fields but few tobacco farms. Still, Dole has received more than $330,000 directly from RJR, Philip Morris, and U.S. Tobacco during his career, in addition to untold tobacco soft money through the Republican National Committee. Meanwhile, Dole has consistently fought tobacco tax increases--even when proposed by fellow Republicans.

During this presidential campaign, Dole has gone after FDA Commissioner David Kessler, promising an audience of pharmaceutical giants at a GOP fundraiser last September that Kessler would be out of a job if Dole were elected. Three months later, Dole was one of 32 senators who signed a letter to the FDA protesting its proposed crackdown on tobacco advertising. Dole also spoke out against Kessler's plans to limit cigarette advertising at sporting events. Before an appreciative crowd at a NASCAR auto race in Darlington, S.C., he waved a T-shirt that read, "Let Winston Cup make the rules for NASCAR, not the FDA."

In less dramatic fashion, Elizabeth Dole has also earned Big Tobacco's appreciation. In 1987, while serving as secretary of transportation, she refused to ban smoking on airplanes, ignoring recommendations from Surgeon General C. Everett Koop and the National Academy of Sciences. Perhaps coincidentally, tobacco contributions to the American Red Cross, which she heads, have escalated. Philip Morris, Brown & Williamson, and RJR gave the charity a combined $265,530 in 1995, compared to a total over the previous five years of $231,427.

But Bob Dole's friendship with the tobacco companies is not limited to the industry's domestic battles. With tobacco's popularity dying in the United States, companies must hook foreign populations. For this, the industry needs unfettered access to large global markets. Dole has been crucial in helping them get it.

In 1985, Reagan trade representatives focused their attention on Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand, threatening retaliatory tariffs on their exports if they declined to open their tobacco markets. Tobacco lobbyists actually sat in on the official trade negotiations.

During talks with South Korea in 1987, Brown & Williamson's lobbyist, Thomas Humber (now the chief of Philip Morris' National Smokers Alliance), wrote the office of the U.S. trade representative corporate liaison Sandy Kristoff to inform her of a favorable meeting between South Korea's U.S. ambassador, Dole, Sen. Jesse Helms, and senators from four other tobacco states. According to the letter, the senators expressed "their support for fair market conditions in Korea" during the meeting. The ambassador, in return, thanked Dole and Helms for voting against threatened trade sanctions against Korea. Then, Humber wrote, "[The ambassador] assured the Senators of Ôbest efforts' toward market expansion" for U.S. tobacco companies.

Trade agreements on tobacco have shifted under Clinton. Last year, U.S. trade representatives allowed South Korea to enact tobacco advertising restrictions after approval from the Department of Health and Human Services and the Environmental Protection Agency. Officials from both agencies now sit in on trade proceedings to decide whether tobacco restrictions reflect health and environmental concerns.

Under a Dole presidency, this would probably change. Helms would play a dominant role in foreign trade policy, as would Robert Lighthizer, a former top Dole aide and Dole's rumored choice for his chief of staff or U.S. trade representative. Lighthizer, currently an attorney with Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, used to work for Covington & Burling and served as deputy U.S. trade representative from 1983 to 1985. During that period, the United States began bullying countries to open their tobacco markets. Should Lighthizer have a prominent trade role, he might turn back the clock to a time when tobacco lobbyists, not health officials, sat in on trade negotiations.

The GOP convention in San Diego this August promises to be even more of a tobacco-fest than the 1992 convention. Ken Rietz, president and CEO of the Washington, D.C., office of the public relations firm Burson-Marsteller, is a vice chairman of this year's convention host committee. Rietz oversaw the California chapter of the National Smokers Alliance, which worked against tobacco control ordinances in Los Angeles and San Diego.

Rietz candidly admits convention sponsors get opportunities for private meetings with political bigwigs. But he calls the high number of tobacco lobbyists involved with the convention and the Dole campaign pure coincidence. "If you look at Burson-Marsteller, [tobacco is] only one of thousands of clients," Rietz says. But of those thousands, Philip Morris and NSA sit comfortably among the firm's top five Washington clients.

As Mother Jones went to press, GOP convention plans were still being negotiated, but Philip Morris had already scored one coup, signing a letter of intent to rent the sought-after space at the San Diego Museum of Art, and was reportedly trying to book the San Diego Zoo for another event. The company has yet to decide on specific receptions but is likely to sponsor the high-profile reception for the GOP's Team 100 (party contributors who give $100,000 or more) and the reception for the Republican Governors Association.

But ultimately, if the tobacco industry achieves what it wants, these festivities will be only a warm-up. The real tobacco party will come in January, at Bob Dole's inauguration.

Sheila Kaplan is a Washington, D.C.-based journalist.

susan bodine vitter inhofe

Chief Counsel

United States Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works

January 2015 – Present (1 year 3 months)Washington D.C. Metro Area

Barnes & Thornburg LLP

Partner

Barnes & Thornburg LLP

March 2009 – January 2015 (5 years 11 months)Washington D.C. Metro Area

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency

Assistant Administrator, Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency

January 2006 – January 2009 (3 years 1 month)Washington D.C. Metro Area

Staff Director

Subcommittee on Water Resources and Environment, House Committee on Transportation & Infrastructure

January 2001 – December 2005 (5 years)Washington D.C. Metro Area

Senior Counsel

Subcommittee on Water Resources and Environment, House Committee on Transportation & Infrastructure,

January 1995 – December 2000 (6 years)Washington D.C. Metro Area

Covington & Burling

Associate

Covington & Burling

August 1988 – January 1995 (6 years 6 months)Washington D.C. Metro Area

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