Wilson Center
Elizabeth Baltzan speaking at the Wilson Center in December 2022
The Wall Street Journal editorial page is the communications arm of corporate America and their allies in the conservative movement. Their editorials are de facto press releases for industry, arguing their preferences and attacking their allies. You know where you stand in taking on corporate power by how many times you’re attacked in the WSJ. So far, Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan has racked up 82 editorials, about one for every 11 days of her tenure.
But a hit piece last week brought a new and unusual enemy to the Journal’s upscale readers: a staff adviser in U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai’s office.
The editorial, claiming to reveal “the story behind Biden’s trade failure,” conjured up a grand conspiracy whereby Khan and anti-monopoly advocates like Rethink Trade, the Open Markets Institute, and Public Citizen have manipulated Tai into acting against the country’s trade interests, which coincidentally align with corporate America’s interests.
The behind-the-scenes story is that Big Tech platforms are angry that Tai withdrew U.S. support for so-called “digital trade,” a concept the industry basically invented and sold to public officials as a means to prevent additional legal liability against them or restrictions on personal data flows. Now that they can’t win in trade deals the immunity they sought to circumvent national legislatures, the platforms and their lobbyists (many of whom once worked at USTR) are lashing out at the people they hold responsible.
That includes Tai, but also senior adviser Elizabeth Baltzan, caught up in this apparently because she was once a fellow at Open Markets. The point is to highlight Baltzan as a conduit between anti-monopoly groups and Tai, and to use that to besmirch Tai as a left-wing cat’s-paw.
In the past week, Baltzan has had her name cited in the WSJ editorial, had her emails posted on a U.S. Chamber of Commerce mini-site, and been harassed for financial records, calendar entries, and other documents by Republican lawmakers and opposition research specialists.
The ferocity of the witch hunt against a staff member is unusual. But while taking aim at the administrative state is a hallmark of Trump’s America, this effort is being carried out on behalf of the conservative business interests that once controlled the Republican Party.
“Monopolists are bullies and we’re seeing that right now,” said Tai in an interview with the Prospect. “And if you’re a bully, you should be coming after me. The fact these attacks are coming after non-Senate-confirmed members of our team is pathetic.”
THE JOURNAL EDITORIAL BROADCASTS EMAILS obtained by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, showing communications between anti-monopoly groups and USTR officials, including Baltzan and Tai. The Chamber posted these emails on a mini-site last week, just before the editorial was published.
You have to strain pretty hard to find much incriminating in these emails. They include invitations for USTR officials to speak at conferences, meeting requests, and notifications about publicly available research papers, speeches, or letters sent from the groups to the administration. It’s the normal business of advocates putting their views in front of policymakers. The worst you can say is that some of the emails were maybe a little too cordial.
The WSJ editorial builds most of its argument about Tai being co-opted from four words in an email from Rethink Trade’s Lori Wallach—“maximize domestic policy space”—that also came up in Tai’s rationale for pulling digital trade language from World Trade Organization negotiations. This is hardly damning evidence of a symbiotic relationship: a common turn of phrase used in a public advocacy document.
“Monopolists are bullies and we’re seeing that right now.”
What Tai and others have said is that, after removing the digital trade language from the Indo-Pacific agreement, it was internally consistent to withdraw the proposal from the WTO, which was written by the Trump administration. The idea was to not hamstring legislative action while Congress actively considered policy on data privacy and Big Tech liability.
To the extent that these emails represent a break from the past with regard to USTR, it’s that civil society groups actually have the ability to get heard by top officials, rather than just industry. “I think [industry’s] critique of capture is really rich,” said Ambassador Tai. “The fact that they’re making it is a vindication of what we’re trying to do, that USTR is setting the table more broadly and that corporate America is not only at the table.”
A good comparison is a different set of documents obtained through a FOIA request of communications between USTR and Amazon and Google lobbyists—nearly all of them former USTR staffers. Rather than solely exchanging pleasantries, several of the emails show direct requests for USTR to intervene with other countries about legislation that would harm Big Tech profits. In one case, USTR staff sent photos from inside the ministerial room of embargoed WTO negotiation text to Mary Thornton, a former USTR official who now works for Amazon. Even members of Congress cannot receive text from inside these negotiation rooms.
When asked about these information exchanges, Adam Kovacevich of Chamber of Progress, who has been critical of anti-monopoly groups’ emails with USTR officials, pivoted back to them. “Instead of sticking up for American workers against foreign discrimination, Ambassador Tai has unfortunately and inexplicably decided to root against America’s most significant export,” Kovacevich said over email. “The activities of former USTR officials are irrelevant, but our current USTR has embraced the far left’s campaign to end-run Congress and existing U.S. law.”
The “former USTR officials” that Kovacevich is referring to are now lobbyists for Amazon and Google, which are corporate partners with the Chamber of Progress, which Kovacevich runs.
BALTZAN IS PROMINENTLY FEATURED in both the emails and in the Journal’s editorial, which quotes a speech she gave in December 2022 at the Wilson Center. “The focus on ‘efficiency’—which is really a euphemism for the lowest possible cost—is precisely what facilitates the kind of arbitrage that puts downward pressure on labor and environmental regulation and enforcement,” the Journal quotes Baltzan saying in that speech.
The Journal makes much of the fact that Baltzan forwarded a speech transcript to Barry Lynn at Open Markets, one of the groups lobbying to withdraw the digital trade provisions. But the speech was fully public and video of it has been on the Wilson Center’s website since it was given, and Baltzan’s email was sent two months after the speech.
The inclusion of Baltzan in the editorial and the FOIA emails was supplemented last week by additional FOIA requests for Baltzan’s financial and calendar entries. The requests were made by Allan Blutstein, an attorney who works at an organization called FOIA Advisor. Blutstein spent eight years running FOIA queries for America Rising, a pro-Trump political action committee. (The committee raised no money last year and appears to be defunct.) During the Trump administration, Blutstein received a contract to dig up research on Environmental Protection Agency staffers who were deemed insufficiently loyal to then-EPA administrator Scott Pruitt. Blutstein’s employer at FOIA Advisor did not return a request for comment.
In addition, Baltzan received a request last week from 11 Republican members of the House Judiciary Committee to provide communications and documents related to a waiver from an intellectual-property agreement (known as TRIPS) for COVID vaccines to developing countries. While the committee is conducting a broad investigation of the TRIPS waiver involving everyone at USTR involved in the issue, the request only cited Baltzan’s name specifically, and coming on the heels of the Journal editorial, the Chamber of Commerce emails, and the opposition researcher’s FOIA requests, the image of a coordinated attack looks pretty apparent.
“I think with the direction of change that we’re moving in, toward inclusive prosperity and economic opportunity, the fact that champions of big business are coming after us means we’re succeeding,” said Tai.
Interestingly, the corporate and conservative attacks on Baltzan emanate from the same side of the argument espoused by the Democratic chair of the Senate Finance Committee. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) has publicly opposed USTR’s decision to pull out of the WTO digital trade negotiations. According to sources familiar with the situation, Wyden’s office has mentioned Baltzan in discussions with top USTR officials. Last month, when Tai attended a conference on trade and competition policy in Brussels, Wyden’s office questioned the agency on who was attending with her.
There is a role for oversight committees to ask questions about the activities of officials in the agencies they oversee. And Wyden himself is carrying legislation that could restrict Americans’ personal data from being sold abroad. Yet he has aligned with the claim that withdrawing the trade language enables the Chinese government and damages American businesses and consumer privacy. The USTR view is that locking in prohibitions on regulating data flows is the bigger problem, as it makes it difficult to sanction Big Tech for irresponsible data practices later.
Wyden’s office distanced itself from the tactics being undertaken against Baltzan. “Senator Wyden has pushed for greater transparency regarding trade negotiations and policies for more than a decade, and he remains committed to vigorous oversight of all of the federal agencies within Finance Committee jurisdiction,” Wyden aide Keith Chu said in a statement. “While he strongly disagrees with the USTR’s misguided decision to cede international digital trade leadership to China, he does not condone efforts to unfairly target or bully USTR staff.”
