Carolyn Kaster/AP Photo
Then–Vice President Joe Biden speaks during a photo opportunity with others including former staffer Ricki Seidman, far left, December 2013, at the White House.
Ricki Seidman is one of those people toiling in the background of American history who inevitably has to be depicted in movies. As an associate to Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA), she helped fight the Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas nominations. She prepped Anita Hill for her Senate Judiciary testimony (Grace Gummer played her in the HBO film about the Hill hearings, Confirmation). She worked on the Mondale, Dukakis, and Clinton campaigns, served as an assistant to President Clinton and in his Justice Department, and shepherded the failed nominations of Lani Guinier and Webb Hubbell. She was Joe Biden’s communications director when he was on the Obama ticket in 2008, and she helped get Sonia Sotomayor through the Senate in 2009. She even advised Christine Blasey Ford during the Kavanaugh hearings.
So it was no surprise that Seidman ended up getting a job in Joe Biden’s Justice Department. According to DOJ spokesperson Marc Raimondi, Seidman is serving as a deputy associate attorney general in the office of the associate attorney general (Biden has nominated Vanita Gupta of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights to take that position, the number three in the Justice Department, but she has not been confirmed yet.)
A longtime Democratic operative obtaining a role in a Democratic administration seems like the normal course of events. But in this case, that person has spent five years consulting for Google, a company currently being sued by the Justice Department for antitrust violations.
According to Seidman’s LinkedIn page, she advised Google from 2006 to 2011. And her firm TSD Communications, where she served as senior principal for 20 years prior to re-entering government, counts as clients not only Google but Facebook, Bechtel, Tom Steyer’s hedge fund Farallon Capital Management, venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, and Democratic economic official Robert Rubin.
In his confirmation hearing, Attorney General Merrick Garland has expressed a comfort level for colleagues of this type. “Fortunately or unfortunately, the best antitrust lawyers in the country have some involvement, one way or another” with Big Tech platforms, Garland said, and “we can’t exclude every single good lawyer from being able to be in the division.” The Seidman appointment certainly speaks to that.
But it speaks to another dynamic: a disconnect between the old way of doing business in the Democratic Party, where the same trusted hands are sought out again and again, and the emerging skepticism toward those who rotate between corporate clients and the government. Seidman’s partisan credentials are impeccable, and that allowed DOJ officials to overlook her service for a large monopoly corporation. Elsewhere, traditional Democratic policymakers like Larry Summers have seen their counsel fall out of step with the stance of the party on domestic policy, sidelining him from the administration. Primarily at Justice has this tradition lived on.
That may not end up working out for Jonathan Sallet, one of two leading candidates to take over DOJ’s Antitrust Division. Sallet’s supporters have focused on his prior work in antitrust and his counseling at the Federal Communications Commission under Obama. But well before that, he was in the private sector, as a top official in a company that had a cozy relationship with the Democratic Party—until it blew up.
That company was WorldCom, and Sallet worked there as its chief policy counsel from 1996 to 2000. Sallet began at MCI Communications, and then stayed on when WorldCom merged with MCI. It makes sense that Sallet would have experience inside a telecom, since telecom policy is his forte; his experience in antitrust policy circles only really began when he left the FCC for the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department in 2016.
WorldCom would later become notorious for accounting fraud. The company illegally inflated its balance sheet and, once caught in 2002, filed for one of the largest bankruptcies in U.S. history at the time. Both CEO Bernie Ebbers and CFO Scott Sullivan went to prison for their role in the fraud.
Chief policy counsel is a lobbying/consulting position; they manage public-policy outcomes that affect a particular business. Sallet’s responsibilities, according to his CV, included “regulatory advocacy, including to the FCC,” after the Telecommunications Act of 1996, and “regulatory review of merger approvals at the Department of Justice.” The job, then, of someone aiming to oversee mergers at DOJ was once to get mergers through DOJ.
Sallet openly lobbied for a proposed merger between WorldCom and Sprint in 2000, reassuring regulators that a tie-up between what was then the number two and number three long-distance carriers would not disrupt either the long-distance or the emerging internet service provider markets. “There’s no basis that the merger will jeopardize vibrant competition in either sector,” Sallet told reporters. Before the accounting fraud emerged, WorldCom and Sprint called off the merger.
More important than late-’90s telecom industry chronicles is the fact that WorldCom was closely tied to Democrats. Unusual for a large firm, the company steered a majority of its donations to Democrats, particularly to members on the key subcommittee overseeing telecommunications. Jack Grubman, a telecom analyst who had sat in on WorldCom board meetings, delivered $100,000 to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) two days before the WorldCom scandal broke.
Sallet also spent time during the Bush and Obama administrations at the Glover Park Group, a Democratic consulting and lobbying firm where former officials like Joe Lockhart and Carter Eskew have landed. Sallet worked for semiconductor companies AMD and Intel while at Glover Park. He also, as the Prospect has reported, helped Joe Lieberman get vetted as the vice-presidential nominee under Al Gore in 2000.
In prior administrations, someone with such trusted partisan credentials would be a lock for a high-level seat in government. And Sallet has been saying the right things of late about the need for stronger merger enforcement. His chief rival to run the Antitrust Division, Jonathan Kanter, is a career antitrust lawyer who helped develop many of the legal theories being used in cases against Google and other tech companies. (Sallet has worked on a Google case for the past couple of years with Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser, though he urged Democratic AGs not to join a Republican-led case against the company.)
But Sallet is vying for the Antitrust Division’s top slot at a time when skepticism about nominating officials with corporate-heavy résumés, as well as those who reflect an insider network within the party, is at an all-time high. That’s particularly acute at the Justice Department, where Seidman and a number of other refugees from corporate law and corporate counsel offices are now working. Emily Loeb, who represented Apple in the recent congressional investigation of Big Tech, is now an associate deputy attorney general, and Brian Boynton, who counseled for-profit colleges, is acting head of the Civil Division. Advocates have told the Biden administration repeatedly that they would not tolerate a continuation of this trend.
It used to be that there was a long bench of Democratic operatives/experts who would get plugged in during new administrations. Their web of connections and past associations was a selling point, not a hindrance. The progressive focus on personnel has upended that tendency, and though DOJ has bucked the trend, with antitrust such a hot-button issue now, Sallet may be the right man at the wrong time.
