Alex Brandon/AP Photo
TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew testifies during a hearing of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, on the platform’s consumer privacy and data security practices and impact on children, March 23, 2023, on Capitol Hill in Washington.
Earlier this month, the White House called on ByteDance, the Chinese parent company of social media site TikTok, to sell the platform or risk facing an outright ban from Congress.
Momentum is building in Washington from members of both parties for a crackdown on Beijing’s tech juggernaut because of national-security concerns. On Thursday, the head of TikTok testified before Congress and got grilled by lawmakers about the site’s data harvesting practices on American citizens.
The White House primarily encouraged a voluntary sale of the company, though that’s unlikely to happen. The Chinese Communist Party gets a final say in the company’s business decisions and would be resistant to caving under U.S. pressure. That means the company’s fate will be up to Congress, where Republicans are more keen than Democrats on a ban and already passed a bill through the House this February. In response, TikTok’s hired lobbying guns have snapped into action and will target the key Democratic lawmakers still on the fence. Many Senate Democrats oppose the ban, pointing to the platform’s cultural purchase with young people, a more potent voting bloc for the party than they are for Republicans. Democratic officials honed campaign ads on the social media platform more effectively than Republicans in the 2022 midterms.
What’s even more telling about the recent techlash against TikTok is the K Street firm that ByteDance hired to steer the company through the storm: SKDK, a powerhouse communications and consulting shop with deep ties to both the Obama and Biden administrations as well as the Democratic National Committee.
SKDK is now the first major consultancy that works with U.S. Big Tech companies to also take on TikTok as a client. This breaks a tacit agreement formed among K Street shops. Both the Chamber of Progress and TechNet, top lobbying firms for Silicon Valley, believed it would risk their deals with Google, Amazon, and Facebook, direct competitors to the Chinese platform.
SKDK’s co-founder Anita Dunn has been at the center of Joe Biden’s inner circle for many years. Credited for turning around Biden’s 2020 campaign, she then served, initially, as a pivotal White House adviser occupying the role that Karl Rove held under the Bush administration and David Axelrod under Obama. After briefly leaving to go back to SKDK, she soon returned to the White House in an advisory role where she now helps the administration weigh tactical decisions that directly involve many of her past corporate clients. At first, Dunn flouted public disclosures, but after outside pressure mounted, she released them and had to recuse herself from allegedly working on such a breadth of issues that some questioned what she would even be allowed to do.
Her firm has developed a reputation as the go-to consulting shop for monopolists—from Amazon to Comcast and the railroad industry—whenever these firms need to curry favor with Democratic lawmakers. The firm helped secure the American Airlines merger in 2013 and more recently operated a front group to back legislation in New York that would proactively gut unionization drives by Uber and Lyft gig workers.
It’s no surprise then that TikTok turned to SKDK in the midst of ongoing talks with the White House just before Biden’s recent announcement urging a voluntary sale. The hire is a clear play not only to soften the administration’s stance in the months to come but also to tap SKDK’s extensive network of Democratic insiders to gear up for the legislative fracas on the ban. The communications firm is packed with former DNC officials and Hill staffers, including the former top spokesperson for Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), who will be the most crucial decision-maker on the TikTok ban. One of SKDK’s partners, Josh Isay, previously served as Schumer’s chief of staff.
EVEN BEFORE TIKTOK’S RECENT PR HIRE, progressive organizations would frequently cite SKDK when pressed about their worst fears about the direction of the Biden administration over the next two years. By and large, the left flank of the party has been pleasantly surprised with President Biden’s embrace of their proposals on climate, student debt, and antitrust enforcement. They expressed concerns, though, that these advances would be undermined by personnel changes. Recent hires indicate that the administration may snap back to the corporate wing of the party. Those include ex-corporate manager Jeffrey Zients as chief of staff and Wall Street–friendly Lael Brainard as director of the National Economic Council. In these decisions, Jeff Hauser of the Revolving Door Project saw foreboding signs of yet another Democratic administration falling into the same traps that hamstrung the Obama administration, especially during its second term.
“SKDK is high up there among the consulting class in terms of people we’re concerned about,” said Hauser.
After serving as a senior adviser and communications director to Obama, Anita Dunn made herself a bȇte noire to many on the left by immediately cashing in on her political connections to woo corporate clients. The firm epitomizes the revolving door between the Democratic establishment and the C-suite level of its corporate clients. Even Obama administration insiders found Dunn’s conduct unsavory at the time.
“Dunn did remarkable work while serving in government … it’s unfortunate that she also personifies the revolving door, using her influence, while at her SKDK firm, to undermine progressive policies on behalf of corporate clients,” a former White House official under President Obama told the Prospect.
Once out of the White House, Dunn leveraged her connections for food producers PepsiCo and General Mills to oppose food nutrition standards, as well as helping for-profit college Kaplan to nix education reforms. SKDK also ran cover for TransCanada during the protests over the Keystone XL Pipeline in 2012 by “countering misinformation,” as a TransCanada spokesperson put it. During this period, Dunn visited the White House over 100 times as an unregistered lobbyist consultant before getting hired as an adviser to the DNC.
SKDK has long avoided registering as a traditional lobbying firm. The only lobbying they’ve done on the books was a half-million-dollar contract to defend former Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn, later indicted on corruption charges. Instead, executives pay SKDK millions of dollars to shape the narrative around their companies through ad spots and PR campaigns. But the firm also engages in more direct influence-peddling through junkets and events, tapping their political connections, which the firm routinely publicizes.
“The off-the-books lobbying is in many ways more insidious because it all takes place in the shadows, and people don’t see it for what it is,” said Hauser.
In recent years, this integrated lobbying strategy has made a splash within the tech world. SKDK ingratiated itself with Silicon Valley during the Obama administration after working with Google to keep tax loopholes in place for foreign profits. During Amazon’s HQ2 hunt in 2018, the tech giant tapped the K Street group to manage local opposition to the deal and convince wary New York Democrats to offer billions in tax subsidies.
Then, in 2019, SKDK took on Israeli spyware company the NSO Group as a client, at a time when it faced lawsuits for spying on journalists. The terms of the deal entailed resuscitating the company’s public image.
On its political team, the firm routinely picks up multimillion-dollar contracts with both the DNC and its DCCC campaign arm. In both 2020 and 2022, the DNC handed out these consulting contracts to work with affiliated PACs at a time when Democratic party officials were throwing their weight behind moderate candidates to stymie progressive challengers.
Early in Biden’s presidency, the White House put in place new revolving-door ethics standards—but with glaring loopholes allowing the president to waive the limited restrictions when deemed necessary. Still, this put Anita Dunn’s appointment as top adviser into question. Many groups pushed back against her appointment given her track record, though Biden ultimately ushered her through.
Even with a powerhouse firm like SKDK, TikTok only has so much room to maneuver in the Senate to kill a ban. Republicans are eager to both look tough on China and signal a newfound anti-tech posture, especially since GOP leadership has entirely dropped any pretense of getting serious about antitrust enforcement against U.S. tech companies. That leaves the remaining Democrats, many of whom worry about the political ramifications of a ban among the many millions of its young users. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) mused last month that he’s open to the ban but hasn’t joined the White House in an outright endorsement of the legislation.
As pressure mounts on Democrats to take a stand on the ban, SKDK is the firm to watch behind the scenes.
