BigLaw

Jones Day, the Trump admin’s favorite law firm and home of its most notorious alums, is trying to kill the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Despite venture capitalists, investment pundits, and other crypto firms alike all acknowledging that the jig is up, regulatory revolvers remain undeterred in their willingness to lend their reputations, expertise, credibility, and relationships to keep the crypto con alive.

Implicit in the worldview of these revolvers is the idea that corporations should be free to operate and acquire competitors with near impunity, therefore antitrust enforcement should be as narrowly tailored as possible. This is obviously problematic — we need regulators that believe in the government’s ability to take on corporations with outsized market influence — but Cravath, Swaine & Moore’s Christine Varney recently took things many steps further in her representation of the biotech company Illumina in its case against the FTC. Varney doesn’t just attack specific enforcement actions as unwarranted, but calls into question the constitutionality of the FTC’s authority to issue enforcement actions in the first place. 

Attacks on aggressive antitrust enforcement from ‘fellow Democrats’ who work for monopolists should be seen for what they are.

In another notable swing through the revolving door between government and BigLaw, two top Securities and Exchange Commission enforcement officials recently joined Willkie Farr & Gallagher LLP as partners. They join former SEC general counsel Robert Stebbins and former CFTC commissioner Christopher Giancarlo as government alumni at the firm. 

Yi is the latest BigLaw revolver and corporate ally to join the Biden Administration.

Alumni of Gibson Dunn, the law firm that helped Chevron go after Steven Donziger, have influential executive branch jobs under Biden.

Earlier this month, Biden nominated Elizabeth Prelogar for the position of Solicitor General. Prelogar, who has served as Acting Solicitor General since January, was an expected choice – her nomination was met with little more than a shrug of acquiescence and lingering questions about why the position had gone unfilled for so long. Despite Prelogar’s long history of working within the Department of Justice, her recent stint at the corporate BigLaw firm Cooley LLP and many of the decisions she made as Acting Solicitor General raise troubling questions about conflicts of interest and her commitment to fighting hard for the public interest.  

Here at the Revolving Door Project, we’ve been very loud about the damaging impact of BigLaw on the executive branch and the myth of corporate BigLaw attorneys as neutral arbiters of laws involving their own clients and bottom lines. Recent revelations about former Assistant Attorney General Jeffrey Bossert Clark and his role in the attempts to undermine the 2020 election have further underscored the absurdity of these arguments, calling into question the continued influence of corporate BigLaw in the Biden Administration.

“As a private corporate attorney, MacBride defended fossil fuel companies, Wall Street giants, Big Tech monopolies, and a myriad of other corporate industries,” the groups wrote. “His past work fighting vigorously and successfully on behalf of corporations against the public interest disqualifies him from a role in the administration.”

Over the course of its decade-long partnership with Facebook, Latham has fought consumer data breach litigation, quashed federal investigations into corrupt practices by Facebook contractors, and advised on mergers and acquisitions that have cemented Facebook’s tech monopoly status (including its highly-controversial 2014 purchase of WhatsApp, a merger that is currently being challenged by the FTC).

There is no delicate way to put it: Biden’s Department of Justice (DOJ) has been a striking failure so far. More than 10 percent of the way through this presidential term, Attorney General Merrick Garland has failed to remove Trump holdovers; is treating Trump as a completely typical president and refusing to prosecute his many crimes; is not reversing dangerous Trump-era legal positions; and is freely allowing corporate capture of his department.

Garland’s disappointing tenure is detrimental to progressive plans for many issues — criminal justice, police violence, labor rights, immigration, antitrust, and white collar crime prosecution, among others — but his potential to wreak havoc on necessary climate action is most staggering considering the existential stakes.

New financial disclosure filings reveal that Elizabeth Rosenberg, Biden’s pick for Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Terrorist Financing, was a consultant for ExxonMobil and a Big Oil-aligned corporate law firm.

Leslie Caldwell, a top corporate criminal defense partner at BigLaw giant Latham & Watkins, is in the running for a U.S. Attorney job under Biden. Her record championing draconian anti-hacking laws and helping big corporations evade accountability for white-collar crimes should preclude her from any role in the Biden administration.