Jacquelyn Martin/AP Photo
As acting associate attorney general, Tony West gestures during a news conference at the Justice Department in Washington, February 5, 2013.
Jay Carney, the former Obama White House press secretary who decamped to Amazon and then Airbnb, decided to speak up this week in defense of Kamala Harris advisers and backers who “work for large, successful companies.” Who would have imagined? Carney’s point was that questioning Harris for her associations was a case of “guilt-by-insinuation,” and if people are talented and capable, then where they choose to work shouldn’t matter.
To the extent that people are paying attention to Harris’s aides and donors, it’s because we don’t have a lot of information to go on from the candidate herself. But Carney, while claiming that critics are leaving out relevant information, is guilty of the same thing. The fact that Carney went to Amazon is not in itself a problem; you’d have to add that during his tenure as senior vice president of global corporate affairs, Amazon used a pricing algorithm that artificially raised prices on products while monitoring whether this triggered concurrent price rises among competitors.
Then again, Dana Mattioli’s book about Amazon, The Everything War, depicted Carney as absent from key decision-making and often unable to be located—many colleagues said they “have no idea what Jay Carney does.” So maybe I’m being too harsh attributing Amazon’s actual practices to him.
But there are clearer examples of questionable careers among Harris’s advisers. To wit, she is leaning on Tony West, her brother-in-law, for advice and counsel in the campaign. West is “a major force behind Ms. Harris’s campaign and its record-setting fund-raising,” serving as a “critical point of contact for business leaders and major donors,” according to The New York Times. He was also part of the vetting team that questioned vice-presidential candidates.
West took a leave of absence from being the chief legal officer of Uber to take a role as an unpaid adviser to the campaign. Uber is part of a coalition currently suing the Department of Labor over its independent contractor rule. That makes one of Harris’s top aides a key part of a lawsuit against the Biden-Harris administration. West also was a major part of the $200 million effort to purchase a special labor law in California at the ballot, after lawmakers attempted to make rideshare drivers and other gig-economy workers employees. (Harris opposed that ballot measure, for what it’s worth.)
That’s not great—but it’s not the only reason why people should be concerned about Tony West’s role, not just in this campaign but in a potential Harris administration, as has been rumored. West’s experience in government should be the concerning factor.
The experience of Tony West doesn’t match Harris’s commitment. It suggests accommodations with power, and shrinking from the task of accountability.
West was the number three official at the Justice Department during the Obama administration. And one of his major projects in that time was dealing with the fallout from the epidemic of banking and mortgage fraud that led to the global financial crisis. West was a lead negotiator on several financial settlements over foreclosure, mortgage servicing, and securitization fraud, and he was a co-chair of the so-called RMBS Working Group, a task force that was supposed to follow those settlements with actual investigations of financial industry misconduct, and bring cases against the perpetrators.
In fact, none of that investigation ever happened. The task force, months after its establishment, had “no office, no phones, no staff and no executive director.” In a congressional hearing, one of the other co-chairs admitted that the working group was mainly a repository for existing cases, and a vehicle for issuing press releases. No subpoenas were ever issued, and leading figures at the banks, like then-Citigroup chair Robert Rubin, were never brought in for an interview.
And needless to say, nobody went to jail.
I have described the settlements in the past as “pathetic.” The National Mortgage Settlement, the one that Harris briefly backed out of before returning to, was barely on the other side of a disgrace. Foreclosure victims got monetary awards that were so tiny that some people didn’t even bother to cash the checks. Funding made available to states to mitigate foreclosures was not required to go toward housing, and several states simply took the money and used it to fill budget holes.
Most of the penalties to the banks did not require them to pay hard dollars to homeowners. Instead, the banks merely issued “consumer relief” on mortgages that they serviced and did not themselves own; in other words, they “paid” their penalties with other people’s money. The relief itself was wanting; close to half of it involved forgiving balances on short sales, which resulted in borrowers having to give up their homes, when the entire settlement was premised on saving homes for families. Then-Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan said publicly that one million homeowners would get first-lien principal reductions, the most sustainable and equitable relief, as a result of the settlement. The final figure was 83,000.
The other settlements West engineered were arguably even worse. These involved allegations that banks violated the law in how mortgages were packaged into bonds and sold to investors. Once again, the settlements involved a big headline number, though only some of it involved hard cash. (In the case of a JPMorgan settlement, the headline number included a prior settlement announced a month earlier.) Banks got “credit” to handle the rest of their obligation for routine operations like donating loans, or even things that make banks money, like collecting incentive payments from making loan modifications, or lending money in low-income areas. As I said at the time, this was like sentencing a bank robber to opening a lemonade stand.
There were three major settlements—against JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Citigroup—totaling $36.65 billion. If you weed out these noncash elements, you get $19.15 billion. But the settlements were also tax-deductible, cutting another $7.66 billion from the deal. Ultimately, the real penalty for $36.65 billion in settlements was $11.5 billion, almost none of which went to the investors in mortgage-backed securities who were the victims of the crime. In fact, by Justice directing the banks to “pay” some of the penalty by modifying mortgages, the investors paid for the banks’ misconduct.
West executed this strategy: to ignore the critical need for accountability for the conduct that precipitated the financial crisis, and to put the desire to protect banks above protecting homeowners. It’s that tendency on policy, not his revolving-door exploits or associations, that comes immediately to mind when I hear that West is back to advising a presidential candidate at the highest levels. It’s this mindset about how to handle crises involving corporate malfeasance that’s the problem.
The Harris campaign has foregrounded the candidate’s past performance as a law enforcement official. “When I was attorney general, I went after price-fixing schemes,” Harris said this week in Michigan, promising to “take on the big corporations that engage in illegal price gouging; take on corporate landlords that unfairly raise rents on working families; to take on Big Pharma and cap the cost of prescription drugs for all Americans.” On a donor call this week, former Harris economic adviser Deanne Millison said that the vice president won’t shy away from going after “bad actors.”
The experience of Tony West, to be perfectly honest, doesn’t match that commitment. It suggests accommodations with power, and shrinking from the task of accountability. That’s what those of us who were reporting in that era are saying when we talk about worrisome signs. Some of the people involved in the Harris campaign represent a bad period in politics that should be buried in the past. It wounds the core image of a crusader against bad actors that Harris is trying to present.
I don’t think Harris is going to be able to skate by for the entire campaign without deeper considerations of her positions and beliefs. For now, we have signals in the decisions the campaign has made. Tim Walz as vice president was a good and important one, in my opinion. Tony West is less than that, and it’s not just because of where he’s gone in his career. It’s because of what he’s done.
