Matt Rourke/AP Photo
Former Vice President Joe Biden at the University of Pennsylvania, April 2019
Joe Biden continued his “Elizabeth Warren is an elitist” tour last night with three separate high-dollar fundraisers, including one that could have been held inside a revolving door. The location was actually the home of former Obama administration National Economic Council director Jeffrey Zients. The home was described in the pool report as “large,” and that stands to reason: Zients is the CEO of conglomerate Cranemere, a buyer and seller of companies that he hopes to be the next Berkshire Hathaway. He was known as “the businessman’s businessman in the Obama White House,” someone whom industry considered “one of their own.” Last year he joined the board of directors of Facebook. I’m sorry, FACEBOOK.
The rest of the gathering included over 50 alumni from the Obama administration, many of them now in high-level jobs working for and with concentrated economic power. Seen in the assembly, “past the pool and the fire pit” according to the pool reporter, were such anti-elitist luminaries as:
• Kathy Ruemmler: White House counsel from 2011 to 2014, Ruemmler is now the global chair of the white-collar defense group at Latham and Watkins, flipping to the more profitable side of the litigation table after prosecuting Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling on the Enron task force. Today, Ruemmler’s law firm defends defense contractors, oil and gas companies, Big Media, big banks, healthcare firms, and power companies, among others. It’s the second-highest grossing law firm in the world.
• Bill Daley: Obama’s former chief of staff in 2011-2012, Daley came from the big banks and went back to them. After serving President Clinton as Commerce Secretary and special advisor for NAFTA, Daley held several roles at JPMorgan Chase from 2004 to 2010, and joined the boards of Boeing, Abbott Labs, and Merck. Then, after his White House service ended, helped manage a Swiss investment firm called Argentiere Capital. He recently did a six-month stint as vice chairman of the Bank of New York Mellon, leaving after CEO Charles Scharf, who brought him in, became the CEO of Wells Fargo. Keep checking the headlines to see when he moves over to Wells.
UPDATE: Within hours of this posting, Daley joined Wells Fargo as its PR chief.
• Tom Daschle: An administration adviser and briefly Obama’s Health and Human Services Secretary nominee before being felled by a tax scandal, the former Senate Majority Leader is a top lobbyist with a boutique shop inside K Street stalwart Baker Donelson. For many years, he worked at other lobbying firms as an unregistered “shadow lobbyist,” becoming the poster child for under-the-radar influence peddling. In his lobbying career, he’s worked for numerous clients, including CVS Caremark, the National Association for Home Care and Hospice, Abbott Labs, HealthSouth, Aetna, 3M, Chimerix, Republic Metropolitan, and the High Octane Low Carbon Alliance.
• Michael Froman: A Clinton veteran (he was chief of staff to Robert Rubin at Treasury), Froman eventually became U.S. Trade Representative for Obama, negotiating the ill-fated Trans-Pacific Partnership. But his most critical role was before Obama’s election, when he was still an executive at Citigroup. He wrote an email in October 2008 with a list of cabinet positions and who would fill them; almost all of them proved accurate. He personally did the key economic hiring for the Obama administration during the transition, which he simultaneously worked on while at Citigroup. After Obama’s second term, Froman became a vice chairman for MasterCard and a board member at monopolist entertainment firm Disney.
• Anthony Foxx: The former Charlotte mayor became Secretary of Transportation in Obama’s second term, and then decamped to disrupt: He’s now the chief policy officer at Lyft.
• Pete Rouse: The low-key former chief of staff to Obama as senator and president left the White House in 2014, and joined white-shoe law firm Perkins Coie as a corporate adviser. At Perkins Coie, Rouse “counsels senior level executives,” while providing “policy analysis and offers strategic advice on navigating Congress and the executive branch.” These are carefully worded phrases meaning that Rouse is a lobbyist without registering as a lobbyist.
• Anita Dunn: Dunn was a communications director and senior adviser in the Obama campaign and briefly worked as White House communications director in 2009. She was at corporate PR firm SKDKnickerbocker before her Obama service and went right back afterward, visiting the White House in her PR capacity over 100 times during Obama’s two terms (The “D” in SKD stands for Dunn). SKDKnickerbocker became a way station for dozens of Obama veterans, and its clients included for-profit educational institution Kaplan University and TransCanada, developer of the KeystoneXL pipeline. Dunn reportedly helped Harvey Weinstein strategize before the initial exposé on his history of sexual assault appeared in The New York Times. Her husband, former White House counsel Bob Bauer, was also on hand last night.
• Steve Ricchetti: Ricchetti is on the Biden campaign as a chairman, so his presence was no surprise. He did briefly serve as Biden’s chief of staff when he was vice president. Ricchetti is better known as a longtime Washington lobbyist who co-founded his own firm with his brother, personally representing Novartis, Eli Lilly, Sanofi, and the American Hospital Association. Ricchetti’s brother still lobbies in the healthcare space while Ricchetti serves as chairman of a Democratic front-runner’s campaign. The firm has also represented AT&T, General Motors, defense contractor United Technologies, the American Council of Life Insurers, and the American Bankers Association.
This is the crew behind Joe Biden, who is trying to paint his opponents as out of touch with the concerns of ordinary Americans: a collection of lobbyists, corporate executives, and white-collar defense lawyers who traded on their status and proximity to the last Democratic standard-bearer. Set aside Biden’s long advocacy for banks, his troubling record on criminal justice, his cave-ins to Republicans that damaged the economy in Obama’s second term. You will know a man by who sides with him, by who gravitates to him. I think we know plenty about Joe Biden.
