[ Current and former government officials, now lobbyists, among
the most glorified and vilified characters of these tumultuous years
have forged a peace—working together to ensure the world’s
wealthiest and most powerful players thrive amid the turmoil]
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WHERE ARE THEY NOW? TRUMP ADMINISTRATION EDITION.  
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Megan K. Stack
October 5, 2022
New York Times
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_ Current and former government officials, now lobbyists, among the
most glorified and vilified characters of these tumultuous years have
forged a peace—working together to ensure the world’s wealthiest
and most powerful players thrive amid the turmoil _

"The boss spent years in business and government. His door isn't just
open, it's revolving!", Chris Wildt, Septembber 13, 2015

 

America, you have probably heard, is on the edge of collapse. In the
ideological death match described by President Biden as a “battle
for the soul of this nation,” the forces of MAGA square off against
the self-declared Resistance. One side will conquer; the other will be
crushed.

Given these doomsday politics, it may surprise you to learn that some
of the most glorified and vilified characters of these tumultuous
years have quietly forged a peace — working together to ensure the
world’s wealthiest and most powerful players thrive amid the
turmoil.

The “government matters” practice at the law firm of King &
Spalding is a telling example.

On this team you will find Gina Haspel, whose supervision of
torture 
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a secret C.I.A. detention site proved no obstacle to her becoming the
agency’s director under Donald Trump nor to her eventual recruitment
by corporate law. (While she is not a lawyer, the firm has hired her
as a senior adviser on national security.)

Ms. Haspel has joined forces with Sally Yates, who was enshrined as a
paragon of principle when Mr. Trump fired her as acting attorney
general for rejecting his notorious “Muslim ban.” The pairing of
the spy chief nicknamed “Bloody Gina
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by some C.I.A. colleagues with a breakout star of the #Resistance was
peculiar enough, but consider that Ms. Yates’s eventual successor as
deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, is also on the King &
Spalding team.

It was Mr. Rosenstein who enforced the Trump administration’s
zero-tolerance policy, telling prosecutors that migrant children’s
ages should not exempt their parents from prosecution
[[link removed]].
Infants were yanked from the arms of their parents at the southern
border in a separation policy that one human rights group called
torture
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that even Mr. Rosenstein eventually denounced
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How to explain this convergence?

“At the end of the day, elites take care of other elites, with very
few exceptions,” said Christopher Sprigman, a former partner at King
& Spalding who now teaches at the New York University School of Law.
When it comes to family separation, he said: “Those kids are water
under the bridge. There’s money to be made.”

Mr. Sprigman was deeply troubled by his former firm’s decision to
hire Mr. Rosenstein, who he feels “took part in a crime” by
snatching children from their parents. “I called some friends at
King & Spalding and I was like, ‘Are you serious? Is this who
you’re hiring?’” Mr. Sprigman recalled. “I had a phone call
with current firm leadership and they were like, ‘Noted.’ They
couldn’t care less.”

None of this is particularly remarkable here in Washington, where
government officials have long been traipsing over the crumbled walls
separating them from the industries they regulate and investigate, and
the foreign governments they face across negotiating tables. The city
is crowded with bureaucrats who are desensitized by ambition and quick
to dismiss it all as no big deal. To point out the unseemly
suggestions of conflicted interest is to be waved off as
unsophisticated.

Ms. Haspel, Ms. Yates and Mr. Rosenstein (who did not respond to
emails or calls requesting comment) are a particularly striking trio
of colleagues, all veterans of crises that shocked the public and
tested our national character. That they can shrug off their varied
baggage and come together in private law suggests an enormous
disconnect between how we think and talk about our politics and the
way power is gathered and spent in the capital.

One could argue — and many here do — that all this is perfectly
fine. People and companies are entitled to hire the most knowledgeable
and talented individuals they can find, after all, and the insight of
former government employees is prized. Selling out doesn’t break any
laws.

But there’s a glaring downside to this culture: It seeds distaste of
public officers, lending credence to widespread suspicion of elite
malfeasance at a precarious political moment.

Groundswells of enthusiasm for Mr. Trump, Bernie Sanders and the Tea
Party movement all suggested a populist surge with unpredictable (in
the case of Mr. Trump, even nonsensical) heroes and enemies. A vague
but fierce anti-elite outrage runs through presidential scandals as
varied as Barack Obama’s and the Clintons’ princely Wall Street
speaking fees, Hunter Biden’s lobbying or, most spectacularly, the
flagrant self-dealing of the Trump administration. Against this
backdrop, it’s worth considering the corrosive effect of officials
who spend much of their careers catering to private interests.

And for all the talk of “cancel culture,” it seems nearly
impossible for political figures, once they achieve name recognition,
to commit an offense grave enough to disqualify them from splashy
corporate jobs.

Ms. Haspel oversaw a secret “black site” in Thailand where at
least one suspect endured waterboarding. She personally observed at
least one such torture session, according to the testimony of a
psychologist who helped abuse the detainees, and later drafted a memo
used to authorize the destruction of videotapes of the interrogations.

These days, Ms. Haspel counsels those who manage the funds of the
world’s wealthiest families on regulations, cryptocurrencies and
other threats to their assets, the law firm says
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This former C.I.A. chief appears to have become an adviser to money
managers for the world’s scions.

Ms. Yates is a more predictable hire. The daughter of a Georgia legal
family, she was born in Atlanta, where King & Spalding was founded in
the late 19th century, and started her career at the firm before
joining the Justice Department over 30 years ago.

When she was getting flooded with fan mail and lionized on MSNBC after
her dismissal in 2017, Ms. Yates didn’t seem eager to return to her
legal roots. Back then, she spoke dismissively of her earlier time at
King & Spalding, telling a New Yorker reporter that it mostly boiled
down to “two companies fighting over money.”

Standing up so publicly to Mr. Trump, she said then, had given her
“a voice that I didn’t have before.” She planned to “use that
voice in a way to impact things that I think really matter.”

“I know all of this sounds so holier-than-thou and corny and all of
that,” she said. “But that’s the case.”

Last year, at King & Spalding’s annual conference for drug
companies, known as Pharmaceutical University, Ms. Yates coached
in-house drug company lawyers on dealing with corporate monitors.
Monitors can be sent by government prosecutors to keep an eye on
companies that have been charged with or convicted of fraud, kickback
schemes or, one might imagine, the mishandling of opioids and other
prescription drugs. “An Inside Counsel’s Primer on Monitorships:
How to Avoid Them When Possible … and How to Live With Them When
Not,” her panel was called.

Ms. Yates also represented King & Spalding this year for a discussion
called “When Congress Calls,” focusing on the “daunting
challenges” of “guiding your client through the unique world of
congressional investigations.”

Preparing clients to face the threat of testimony has become a cottage
industry of its own. To compete, law firms recruit a strong bench of
former bureaucrats and officials, with star power if possible, hiring
both Democrats and Republicans to maximize influence. All the better
if those lawyers eventually cycle back into government, where they may
prove even more helpful.

Law firms aren’t alone in recruiting from the ranks of government
and then celebrating their employees’ return to public service,
drafting fresh news releases for every spin of the revolving door —
the same trends run through consultancies, public relations firms,
defense contractors, financial offices, and all manner of wealthy
corporations.

“We call it legalized corruption,” said Danielle Brian, executive
director of the Project on Government Oversight. “And it permeates
every aspect of federal government.”

King & Spalding is hardly unique. A new book by David Enrich, business
investigations editor at The New York Times, details the deeply
enmeshed relationship
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the Jones Day firm and the Trump administration. Even that, however,
is just a small part of the double take-inducing legal entanglements
on display throughout Washington.

At Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, for example, the partner Jose Fernandez
provided legal services for both the Saudi sovereign wealth fund and
Chevron until, last summer, he was confirmed as the State
Department’s under secretary for economic growth, energy and the
environment. Before that, Gibson Dunn welcomed back David Fotouhi, who
once helped weaken environmental regulations as part of Mr. Trump’s
Environmental Protection Agency and is now a member of the firm’s
environmental litigation and mass tort practice group.

There’s Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, where the former
partner Gregory Craig — White House counsel under Mr. Obama and
special counsel to Bill Clinton during his impeachment hearing —
helped get a job for Paul Manafort’s daughter in what his lawyers
described as an entirely normal bid to attract more of Mr.
Manafort’s shadowy business. At the time, Mr. Craig and Mr. Manafort
had been working together on a $4.6 million deal on behalf of the
former Ukrainian president Viktor F. Yanukovych, who was known as
Vladimir Putin’s man in Kyiv. (Mr. Craig was later tried and
acquitted on charges that he lied to the Justice Department about his
work for the Ukrainian government.)

The white-shoe firm Covington & Burling famously kept an office empty
for Eric Holder, waiting for him while he served as attorney general
under Mr. Obama. We may surmise that Mr. Holder returned to a hero’s
welcome: The firm has represented several banks that his Justice
Department investigated for their role in the subprime mortgage crash.
Mr. Holder chose not to prosecute any executives, suggesting the
financial catastrophe was the fault of corporate culture rather than
specific individuals. Today Mr. Holder is promoting his new book on
voting and voting rights, “Our Unfinished March.”

Then there was Mary Jo White, the Securities and Exchange Commission
chair under Mr. Obama, who also worked at Debevoise & Plimpton, a law
firm with deep ties to Wall Street. Ms. White was harshly criticized
by Senator Elizabeth Warren for going soft on financial firms, and for
repeatedly having to recuse herself due to the many conflicts of
interest created by her corporate work. In the end, Ms. Warren tried
but failed to persuade Mr. Obama to oust Ms. White.

Washington is full of operators who exert their influence and patch up
political schisms so effectively that they create a sort of corporate
shadow government that, arguably, functions more efficiently than the
real thing.

Nor is any of this activity slowed by the bitter partisan divide and
existential threat feverishly broadcast to ordinary people. After the
tumult of the Trump years, more Americans see civil war as a real
possibility. Social scientists have noted that a cerebral distaste for
contrary ideas has been supplanted among many American voters by a
hatred for the people who hold those ideas. Things seem to be falling
apart — and yet, in the corporate sphere, the center holds just
fine.

Besides, our national crises create business opportunities. King &
Spalding represented the Trump re-election campaign in a lawsuit that
sought to prevent North Carolina election officials from honoring the
state’s new rules on mail-in ballots.

For this work, King & Spalding faced protests organized by the
People’s Parity Project, a national organization of law students and
attorneys critical of corporate law practice that, in their view,
damages the public interest.

“Protecting the integrity of the legal profession is tied up with
protecting the integrity of our government,” said Molly Coleman, the
group’s executive director. “We had law students approaching us
saying, ‘We don’t think it’s right to go and work for a firm
that’s trying to undermine our democracy in this way.’”

A spokeswoman for the firm declined to respond to questions for this
essay.

It’s not that the government has utterly ignored the problem; it’s
just that these attempts haven’t made much of a dent.
Presidents Obama
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Trump each introduced restrictions seeking to curtail revolving-door
career advancement. But, somehow, those efforts haven’t made much of
a dent. In the tradition of President Bill Clinton
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Mr. Trump ended his term by reversing his own revolving- door
executive order
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Both the former national intelligence director Dan Coats and the
former F.B.I. chief of staff Zack Harmon work at King & Spalding.
Christopher Wray worked at King & Spalding before becoming F.B.I.
director.

The concentration of big-name law enforcement and intelligence
officials raises intriguing questions given the firm’s work with the
Saudi government. King & Spalding has represented the kingdom in
negotiations with the United States that would allow Saudi Arabia to
develop a civilian nuclear program. The law firm declined to comment
on whether Ms. Haspel works with Saudi clients, but for the past year,
she has been on the board of BAE Systems, a British company that has
sold billions of dollars’ worth 
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weapons to Saudi Arabia during its war in Yemen.

But firms like King & Spalding also hire plenty of former government
experts with limited name recognition: People like Shaswat Das, whom I
selected randomly from the ranks of the government matters team. He
worked for years at the Securities and Exchange Commission, the
Federal Reserve Board and the Public Company Accounting Oversight
Board. As part of his work on the accounting oversight board, a
nonprofit overseen by the S.E.C., Mr. Das was involved in talks with
foreign regulators, including Chinese representatives. It was, for a
time, his job to figure out how the government should respond to
financial institutions that violate sanctions rules.

At King & Spalding, Mr. Das, who did not reply to an email requesting
comment, represents financial and fintech companies, among others, as
they navigate sanctions, anti-money laundering rules and export
control regulations.

A friend of mine — a midlevel bureaucrat you’ve never heard of —
recently rattled off an inventory of private job opportunities he’s
gotten. Eventually, he’ll take one, he said, as his dwindling
idealism succumbs to midlife pragmatism — it’s not easy supporting
a family on a government salary.

When I mentioned this to Ms. Brian, of the Project on Government
Oversight, she erupted in disgust.

“I’ve spent my entire career in the nonprofit sector,” she said,
“and I’ve been very fortunate to get two kids through college.
They all say that to each other to make themselves feel better about
selling out.”

_[MEGAN K. STACK, a contributing Opinion writer and fellow at the
George Washington University School of Media and Public Affairs, has
been a correspondent in China, Russia, Egypt, Israel, Afghanistan,
Pakistan, Mexico and Texas. @Megankstack
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* government
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* Trump Administration
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* Biden Administration
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* lobbyists
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* big business
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* Washington politics
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* Corruption in politics
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* law firms
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