Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP Photo
As national security adviser, Susan Rice listens during a White House press briefing in March 2014.
One of these days, Joe Biden is going to announce his vice president. The latest turn of the rumor mill has Susan Rice as a favorite for the position. Whether or not she’s chosen as Biden’s second-in-command ultimately may not matter much; her mere consideration ensures that she’ll have a major role in the administration.
Rice differs from the other members of Congress and governors on the short list. For one, she’s never held elected office. Elevating her to the second-highest executive post in the country, and making her (like it or not) the most likely post-Biden presidential candidate, sends a strange message for that reason alone. If the Democratic Party is in the business of winning elections, and can pick anyone from its supposedly deep talent pool to put on the fast track, why is someone who’s never won a race its best bet?
Here’s what we know about Rice: She’s the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and national security adviser under Barack Obama. In the Clinton administration, she served at the National Security Council and as the assistant secretary of state for African affairs. At 55 years old, that’s the entirety of her political career.
Her résumé from the corporate and government-adjacent world, however, is much lengthier. In the praiseworthy words of The Wall Street Journal, Rice “has more corporate experience than others on Biden running mate list.” Indeed, she currently sits on the board of directors of Netflix, where she’s racked up stock options on more than 5,200 shares of the company, currently worth $2 million alone (according to an August 5 filing, she’s divested about one-quarter of those holdings, netting some $300,000). That, along with a stint at American University as a visiting research fellow, makes up the bulk of her post-Obama professional activity.
Much less is known about her pre-Obama career, starting with her time at the infamous consultancy McKinsey & Company. After earning her doctorate at the age of 25, Rice served as a management consultant at the firm from 1990 to 1992, working out of the Toronto office. That’s the same corporate consultancy that got presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg in hot water during the primary, and his initial refusal to disclose the work he did for them helped stymie his rise. Political rival Elizabeth Warren demanded that Buttigieg provide a list of past clients and what he did for them, eventually resulting in him asking for a release from his nondisclosure agreement with the firm.
When he finally published that information, Buttigieg’s work for the Canadian supermarket chain Loblaws, which was known to be engaged in price fixing during that same time, gave way to a heated exchange with New York Times editorial board member Binyamin Appelbaum over whether or not he was involved in fixing bread prices, a viral clip that may have ultimately hastened his demise. McKinsey has been involved in a number of major scandals in recent years beyond just bread prices: helping elevate authoritarianism in places like Russia and China; advising OxyContin producer Purdue Pharma on how to “turbocharge” opioid sales; even hosting a summit in Kashgar, where thousands of Uighur minorities are currently locked up. If Buttigieg had to disclose his work at McKinsey to be considered for Democratic president, so, too, should Rice.
While Rice’s stint with McKinsey may not have been focused particularly on authoritarian governments, she’s been no stranger to strongmen at other points in her career. After her time in the Clinton White House, Rice went into private consulting, spending 2001 and 2002 as a managing director and principal at Intellibridge, a geopolitical strategy shop, which eventually became Eurasia Group. Again, we know next to nothing about who Rice was working for during that time, because she has largely concealed who her clients were. But, wrote Akbar Shahid Ahmed in HuffPost, “her closeness to one client whose identity is publicly known―Rwandan strongman Paul Kagame, the country’s president since 2000―has previously raised concerns among human rights groups and fellow officials.”
The lack of transparency in Rice’s work at Intellibridge may be standard for that particular foreign-consulting industry, but that’s not a sufficient explanation for someone striving to be vice president. And given that the one client of hers from that time that we know is someone widely referred to as a “benevolent dictator” and “darling tyrant” who’s been in power since the mid-1990s, there’s plenty of cause for alarm. If Rice was indeed trading off her proximity to policymakers after her White House stint with open opponents of democracy, that would make her an uneasy fit as a leader of the Democratic Party. It’s incumbent upon her, now, to disclose those relationships.
After Intellibridge, Rice moved on to the Brookings Institution, serving as a senior fellow, where “she focused on U.S. foreign policy, weak and failing states, the implications of global poverty, and transnational threats to security,” before moving on to the Obama White House, where she was dogged by subsequent disclosure problems, this time owing not to her work, but her finances.
The lack of transparency in Rice’s work at Intellibridge may be standard for that particular foreign-consulting industry, but that’s not a sufficient explanation for someone striving to be vice president.
At 44 years old, Rice was the wealthiest person in the entire Obama Cabinet upon her appointment in 2009. Her net worth clocked in between $23.5 million and $43.5 million, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. That made her richer even than Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Two years at McKinsey and two years at Intellibridge wouldn’t net that kind of cash. Rice appears to be the beneficiary of substantial family money. While her parents were scholars (her mother helped design the Pell grant system and her father was the second African American on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors), her husband Ian Cameron, a former producer for ABC’s This Week, is the scion of a Canadian lumber company.
In 2012, when Rice, then considered a rising star and Obama favorite, was up to replace Clinton as secretary of state, her personal finances proved controversial. Rice was a major stockholder in TransCanada, the company behind the recently shut down Keystone XL pipeline, which transported particularly dirty oil from tar sands in Canada to refineries in the United States. In fact, according to financial disclosures at the time, about a third of Rice’s net worth was tied up in oil producers, pipeline operators, and energy industry affiliates. She and her husband were also invested in Enbridge, the company behind the discharge of more than a million gallons of toxic tar sands oil into Michigan’s Kalamazoo River in 2010 , the largest inland oil spill in American history, and BP, of 2010’s Deepwater Horizon spill, the largest offshore oil spill in history, period.
Coziness between TransCanada and the State Department, which was elucidated in a cable obtained by WikiLeaks, and then by leaked emails, and finally by a New York Times report that revealed that the State Department contractor tasked with producing an environmental assessment of Keystone XL had close ties the pipeline’s developer, added to outrage from environmental groups. Eventually, Rice was passed over for the job, and became a national-security adviser instead.
This didn’t lead her to rethink those investment choices, however. A 2015 disclosure report obtained by TMI, our last look into even some percentage of her holdings, shows a continued stake in TransCanada of between $50,000 and $100,000, and over $1 million in Enbridge. Between $1 million and $2 million in additional investments are split between three other Canadian fossil fuel companies developing the tar sands in Alberta. Overall, the 2015 disclosure shows holdings of between $15 million and $32.5 million in investments alone. And that’s before the Netflix board seat and whatever other income has been gained in the Trump years.
Rice is almost certainly richer now than she was in 2009, though we don’t know where that wealth is coming from.
Rice is almost certainly richer now than she was in 2009, though we don’t know where that wealth is coming from. But if that money was enough to functionally disqualify her from secretary of state in 2012, it should certainly have an impact upon deciding her fitness for a higher role. Democratic voters have a right to know who’s being put on their ticket. Certainly, a lack of transparency, financial and otherwise, has been one of the most consistent indictments of Donald Trump from the Democratic side of the aisle.
The financial-disclosure issue has little to do with Rice’s record on foreign policy, which very much merits its own consideration. Rice has coasted on progressive proximity, but has been hawkish enough throughout her career—in particular her record on the wars in Iraq, Libya, and Yemen—to merit objections from the DNC Muslim Delegates and Allies and other parts of the party. Her elevation would also allow Republicans to dust off their Benghazi hysteria for the next 12 weeks.
Some detractors of Karen Bass, the California representative who was floated as a VP favorite last week, have claimed she’s too much of a liability after not having been thoroughly vetted by a national election cycle. That logic also applies to Susan Rice, who has never been vetted in any election cycle. If she’s going to be Biden’s number two, she needs to start with a transparency campaign quickly: not just her tax returns but her client list, as well.
