‘You Can Legally Bribe a Government Official’
... When Eric Holder first joined law firm Covington & Burling in 2001, he was coming from a stint as deputy attorney general under Bill Clinton. So it’s no wonder that when Holder went to the Obama administration as attorney general, the folks at Covington kept his seat warm.
And indeed, for many, Holder’s seamless slide from theoretically prosecuting big banks to defending big banks from prosecution is a common-sense phenomenon only the hopelessly naïve would bother to decry. He’s a lawyer, what do you expect? was the substance of many a comment –of what comment there was, because, again, this latest glimpse of the porous tissue between regulator and regulated went down as no news at all for most of the press.
... I think this is not just a scandal for the Justice Department in that so many of the officials, not just Holder, but his top deputy Lanny Breuer also returned to Covington & Burling after serving for a few years in the Obama administration—this is a scandal for the media.
One of the perhaps most cynical and and most prevalent ways that you can legally bribe a government official or an elected official is to wait to give them a multi-million dollar check, not while they’re in office, but as soon as they retire....
But because this has become so routine, that this happens every day, whether it’s a member of Congress or a high level regulator, or in this case, the head of the Justice Department, this has become such a function of life in Washington, DC, it’s no longer a scandal in the eyes of many reporters....
... A top lobbyist for Chevron, Stephen Sayle is now a senior staff member for the House Committee on Science, which oversees science policy for the federal government. This is a lobbyist, Mr. Sayle, who has helped Chevron beat back regulatory efforts that rest on federal science, whether it’s on the ozone or on climate change....
But that isn’t a unique dynamic. In the last two Congresses, we’ve seen an unprecedented wholesale change in the senior staff positions in Congress, and I’m referring to the chief of staff, which reports directly to a member of Congress or senator, or the staff director position, and that’s the position that oversees either a committee or a subcommittee. In almost every single position for staff director, we’ve seen lobbyists for the relevant industry take those spots.
So for the Agricultural Committee, which oversees school lunches and nutrition guidelines, we now have a Pepsi lobbyist who is overseeing that committee. In the Senate Armed Services Committee, which oversees military spending, we have a lobbyist for the trade group that represents Lockheed Martin and Boeing now leading that committee. So from committee to committee, whether it’s on chemical safety, whether it’s on pollution or on school lunches, we have lobbyists for the industries affected now running the show from the inside....
