The following blog post is part of a series on corporate revolvers who diminished the Biden administration’s effectiveness when it came to helping working people. Click here and here to read our full rebuttals to Matt Yglesias’ error-filled celebrations of the revolving door (which he published in Bloomberg on August 4 and on his Substack on August 12). Long story short: Joe Biden appointees with extensive ties to big business did real damage to his agenda; Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris should not make the same mistake.
Acting Associate Attorney General Benjamin Mizer shares responsibility for the DOJ’s lackluster prosecution of corporate wrongdoing. Like Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, Mizer has an extensive record of defending white-collar criminals in his private sector work.
From 2006 to 2007, years before he joined Obama’s DOJ, Mizer was an associate for a brief period at the BigLaw firm WilmerHale. While there, he worked alongside future Trump Attorney General Bill Barr to defend Verizon and several subsidiaries in litigation that combined multiple class-action lawsuits, all of which sought damages over the telecom giant’s participation in the Bush administration’s warrantless surveillance of Americans.
From 2017 to 2022, Mizer amassed a multimillion-dollar fortune (and a $280,000-per-year pension starting at age 65) while working as a partner at Jones Day—the BigLaw firm that provided outside counsel to Trump’s 2016 and 2020 campaigns and helped defend Trump officials and allies as they faced scrutiny over their efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
While his colleagues at Jones Day worked to defend Trump, Mizer kept the firm’s corporate clients happy. In February 2020, he defended Sanofi in an antitrust case accusing the pharmaceutical giant of abusing the patent system to block generic competition and gouge people with diabetes, who were forced to pay 420% more for Lantus, Sanofi’s injectable insulin product, in 2022 compared with 2000. Sanofi lost the case, which led Lina Khan’s Federal Trade Commission to crack down on improper “Orange Book” listings in November 2023.
On August 1, Mizer delivered remarks at the first-ever meeting of the Biden administration’s Public Strike Force on Unfair and Illegal Pricing. While that endeavor is a genuinely progressive development, Mizer’s involvement falls flat when considering that he and other BigLaw alumni now in the federal government previously defended predatory pricing shenanigans. Contrary to what Yglesias says, it would be best for Harris to avoid that kind of hypocrisy, which sends mixed signals about an administration’s commitments and priorities. She can provide clarity by nominating people with less sordid pasts. There are plenty of highly qualified candidates to choose from; better to pick dedicated public servants and disregard the myth that the best “talent” is always found in the private sector.
During his time at Jones Day, Mizer went to bat for Walmart in multiple cases regarding the retail giant’s role in fueling the opioid epidemic. Ironically, Mizer defended Walmart against the DOJ in an ongoing federal lawsuit filed in December 2020. Two months before the DOJ submitted its civil complaint, Mizer preemptively sued his previous (and future) employer in a bid to prevent the federal government from trying to hold Walmart accountable for “knowingly” filing thousands of illegitimate opioid prescriptions. Even the far-right Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a District Court judge’s decision to dismiss Mizer’s suit.
In another federal case, Mizer defended Walmart in a lawsuit filed by the Cherokee Nation, which has been hit especially hard by the opioid crisis. The suit accused Walmart of profiting by “flooding” Cherokee communities in Oklahoma with prescription painkillers. In an attempt to delegitimize the Cherokee Nation’s claims, the Walmart legal team on which Mizer worked went so far as to request the names and birth dates of all of its roughly 400,000 citizens—a move that was decried as an attack on tribal sovereignty. In 2022, the Cherokee Nation settled with Walmart for an undisclosed amount.
Mizer was able to secure his lucrative position at Jones Day in 2017 after a particularly timid tenure at Obama’s DOJ. As the head of the department’s Civil Division, Mizer helped negotiate weak settlements that gave big banks such as Goldman Sachs, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, and HSBC—along with their executives—a proverbial slap on the wrist for their roles in causing the 2007-08 financial crisis. He also reached settlements that let Lockheed Martin and a nuclear weapons contractor off the hook for lobbying violations and misuse of taxpayer dollars.
Mizer’s numerous corporate ties and associated fecklessness should have preempted him from serving in the Biden administration. It didn’t. Now, Harris should ignore Yglesias and commit to not putting people who embody the revolving door in positions of power in her administration.