Carolyn Kaster/AP Photo, File
Then-Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA) speaks during a Senate Judiciary Committee meeting on June 11, 2020.
Since President Biden formally ended his re-election bid, the Democratic Party’s new presumptive nominee Kamala Harris has publicly praised his achievements, calling his record “unmatched” compared to even two-term presidents. The legacy spans from full employment policies to climate and infrastructure investments, from bolstering unions to cracking down on monopolies.
However, throughout her political career, Harris has surrounded herself with staffers and close advisors who have gone on to actively fight against the core pillars of her own administration’s agenda to regulate corporations.
As the Prospect previously reported, Harris’ debate prep is being conducted by Karen Dunn, a white-collar defense attorney at Paul, Weiss who currently is the lead trial counsel for Google in the Department of Justice’s antitrust lawsuit, which will start in September. Vice-presidential hopefuls for her ticket are reportedly being screened by Eric Holder’s law firm Covington & Burling, which is part of the nucleus for Amazon’s legal defense against the Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust case.
Another key figure that exemplifies the revolving door from Harris’ office is Lartease Tiffith, who served as senior counsel for Harris when she was in the Senate, and then went on to work for Amazon. Tiffith is now playing a leading role opposing Biden administration regulatory policies, particularly by the FTC.
The extensive revolving door of former Harris staffers is mainly a function of the fact that she’s suffered from unusually high staff turnover over the years. It doesn’t mean that she’d necessarily cave to outside pressure from financial interests, but her lack of a consistent core inner circle of advisors is exactly the issue. It leaves a void that can be easily corrupted by the company she keeps and raises questions about how she’d govern, about which we know little so far.
HARRIS SERVED ON THE SENATE JUDICIARY COMMITTEE, which oversees antitrust issues, at a time when public ire at Big Tech was fueling a resurgence in antimonopoly policy. The focus at this time was mostly Facebook, over its role in allowing Cambridge Analytica to extract and use millions of pieces of personal data during the 2016 elections. During a Judiciary Committee hearing in 2018, Harris sparred with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg over facilitating misinformation in the run-up to the election. Scrutiny of Facebook spread to a broader reconsideration of the power of online platforms, resulting in a major House investigation into Big Tech released in 2020.
Tiffith worked for Harris in 2017 and 2018, leaving initially to become an in-house lobbyist for Amazon, where his portfolio specifically included privacy and security. Then in 2021, he moved over to lobby for Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), a trade association for the online advertising industry which represents a wide range of actors forming the financial lifeblood of tech platform’s core business. Companies on the IAB’s board include Amazon and Google.
In this new role, Tiffith has been working to thwart the crackdown by the Federal Trade Commission under chair Lina Khan on various deceptive practices harming consumers.
He’s currently waging an offensive campaign to beat back the FTC’s “click to cancel” rule proposed last year. The rule would make it easier for consumers to end digital subscriptions or memberships, which companies try to make as hard as possible with all kinds of excessive impediments and auto-renewals. Along with being an aggravating nuisance to just about everyone, these barriers to terminating subscriptions are also a concerted strategy by platforms to try to lock in users, sometimes accompanied by termination fees. It applies to anything from digital subscriptions to basic gym memberships.
But helping consumers get out of unwanted subscriptions would hurt the bottom line for IAB’s clients. Tiffith attacked the rule for adding cumbersome compliance costs onto companies, which he claims will be passed off to consumers in the form of higher subscription prices. By compliance, he means making it as easy for consumers to end a subscription as it is to sign up (which apparently is not a costly burden).
For much of the Biden administration, the IAB has been fighting against a major overhaul of online advertising practices being considered by the FTC. In 2022, the commission announced it was investigating “commercial advertising” with the intention of determining what information can and can’t be collected by companies. The commission concluded a public comment period last year, and reporting indicates that the rule could arrive within the next few months.
Tiffith submitted a public comment on behalf of IAB opposing the rule, arguing that it would violate the FTC’s congressional authority, essentially threatening to sue if the agency moves forward with it.
Relatedly, the IAB launched a lobbying campaign in 2022 when a related bill called the Banning Surveillance Advertising Act started to pick up traction.
Harris’ connections in the corporate world matter because it’s hard to make out from her record how exactly she thinks about an issue like restricting surveillance advertising.
The Federal Trade Commission, of course, is ostensibly an independent agency and not part of the President’s direct cabinet. But President Biden appointed Lina Khan as chair. And in defending the interests of IAB, Tiffith has also denounced the President’s direct policies. During Biden’s 2022 State of the Union address, the President condemned tech companies collecting data for targeted advertising on children and teenagers and called on Congress to ban the activity. Tiffith pushed back on this speech to Politico, saying that “Punishing bad actors is a must, and IAB supports stronger laws to protect kids, but blaming data and technology for complex problems, and restricting or eliminating digital advertising, could severely diminish the benefits of the internet for everyone.”
This week, the Senate is voting on the Children and Teens Online Privacy Protection Act (known as COPPA 2.0), which would ban targeted advertising to children under the age of 16, along the lines of what President Biden has endorsed.
Tiffith is just one of many former Harris staffers who’ve used their connections to secure high-powered positions at companies and lobbying shops on K Street. Her former spokesperson as VP Meaghan Lynch now runs federal affairs for Airbnb, and Michael Collins, her former director of public engagement and intergovernmental affairs, lobbies for Starbucks.
Andy Vargs was one of her longstanding advisors from her time in the Senate through her vice presidency. In 2022, he left and is now Senior Vice President at the powerhouse D.C. lobbying firm Mercury Public Affairs, which represents all sorts of corporate clients, from Exxon to Archer Daniels Midland, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
Harris’ connections in the corporate world matter because it’s hard to make out from her record how exactly she thinks about an issue like restricting surveillance advertising. During her career as California attorney general and then Senator, she’s often said the right things publicly but then disappointed tech reformers behind the scenes.
In 2013, as attorney general, she supported a weaker privacy protection law than what reformers wanted, which ended up merely requiring companies to inform consumers about how they were being surveilled without an option to not be tracked. In the Senate, she decided to work on combating online companies facilitating noxious content like revenge porn or sex trafficking. But when a problem arose about the language eroding legal immunity for websites, she then favored a watered-down version with weaker protections that got the support from industry.
“She presided over this era of great consolidation and power in the hands of these tech giants and she didn’t do a thing,” Jamie Court, president of the California-based Consumer Watchdog told The New York Times in 2020. Court would not comment further on her record since assuming office as Vice President.
The arc of her relationship with tech mirrors that of the Democratic party writ large. In the early 2010s when she first ran for statewide office, Democrats viewed Silicon Valley as partners in progress, not to mention a huge boon for fundraising. After the 2016 election, that perception dramatically changed, and Harris along with it, even if she pursued the safest tech issues in the Senate. In addition, as a Senator from California, she represented tech as a home-state industry, in the way Joe Biden did the credit card industry while serving as Senator from Delaware. How Harris would handle tech without those ties is open to question.
The Biden administration has now moved even further to actually break up each of the Big Tech goliaths, and Harris could very well shift along with the party once again. That would entail Harris standing up to powerful companies with ties to her social network of former staffers and donors.
