Last week, Eric Lipton of The New York Times exposed the hell out the latest way corporate America evades accountability.
In a deeply researched piece, the reporter explained how state attorneys general are influenced by friendly lobbyists and lawyers, often in one-on-one encounters during lavish getaways on the premier conference circuit. There, highly paid emissaries from big companies have wooed state prosecutors away from bringing or continuing litigation against the companies they represent.
From the front-page investigative report, “Lobbyists, Bearing Gifts, Pursue Attorneys General”:
A result is that the routine lobbying and deal-making occur largely out of view. But the extent of the cause and effect is laid bare in The Times’s review of more than 6,000 emails obtained through open records laws in more than two dozen states, interviews with dozens of participants in cases and attendance at several conferences where corporate representatives had easy access to attorneys general.
Often, the corporate representative is a former colleague.
Lipton names names and details specific instances in which an attorney general reversed course on litigation after being personally lobbied, from Missouri’s Democratic attorney general Chris Koster to Florida’s Republican AG Pam Bondi, both of whom came off looking pretty dinged up by the piece. As AGs in 30 other states investigated 5-Hour Energy for allegations of deceptive advertising, Kostner halted his state’s inquiry after company lobbyists “courted the attorney general at dinners and conferences and with thousands of dollars in campaign contributions.” A law firm called Dickstein Shapiro successfully urged Bondi not to pursue investigations against several companies; Lipton reports that the firm’s lawyers also “helped arrange a cover article for Ms. Bondi in a magazine called InsideCounsel, which is distributed to corporate lawyers, and invited her, as it did Mr. Koster, to appear at an event in Washington that included the firm’s clients.”
The story hasn’t stopped there. Since the bombshell dropped on Oct. 28, media outlets around the country from public radio to TV to print have picked up on the Times’ article. Much of the coverage has been aggregation linking back to the Times, but some local outlets have advanced the story, gotten relative principals on the record about it, or added more local context. Here’s a sampling from coast to coast:
Missouri
St. Louis Public Radio bit a chunk off the story to examine the political ramifications for Koster, a former-Republican-turned-Democrat, who is “seen as the state’s strongest 2016 candidate for governor.” Despite a statement from the AG disputing how the Times characterized him, Republicans there are now seeing “a chink in what’s supposed to be the invincible armor of Chris Koster,” said a local political science professor. St. Louis Public Radio’s Jo Mannies also puts the controversy in the context of Missouri’s campaign finance laws, which allow unlimited donations. Koster, Mannies points out, cast early votes for knocking down limits. Meanwhile, the state’s House Speaker is setting up a committee to investigate the AG.
Florida
At the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting, Ashley Lopez synthesized the Times investigation with some prior reporting by the Tampa Bay Times/Miami Herald on Bondi’s work with the Republican Attorneys General Association. That group plays a star role in the Times piece as an entity that facilitates direct access to state attorneys general, and receives heavy financial support from corporate interests. Bondi herself, the Times reported, recently took “nearly $25,000 worth of airfare, hotels and meals” from the RAGA, and “That money came indirectly from corporate donors.”
Meanwhile the Tampa Bay Times/Miami Herald itself followed up on the NYT, writing:
Cases involving Dickstein Shapiro clients that fizzled in Florida include Accretive Health, a Chicago-based hospital bill collection company shut down in Minnesota for six years because of abusive collection practices; Bridgepoint Education, a for-profit online school that Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller said had engaged in “unconscionable” sales practices; Herbalife, which had been investigated by federal and state authorities; and online reservation companies, including Travelocity and Priceline, on allegations that they were improperly withholding taxes on hotel rooms booked in the state.
Since 2011, Dickstein Shapiro has contributed $122,060 to the Republican Attorneys General Association, a super PAC that contributed $750,000 to Bondi’s re-election bid. She sits on RAGA’s executive committee.
Dickstein’s partners and a client, ETC Capital, have also directly given $24,750 to Bondi’s campaign.
Notably, Michael Van Sickler of the papers’ joint bureau also looked into whether any of the law firm’s partners were registered to lobby in Florida. They weren’t, he reported, “meaning their advocacy may have violated state law.” But no one would be prosecuted unless someone were to file a sworn complaint.
Two days later, Van Sickler reported that someone had done just that.
Washington
A day after the NYT piece dropped, Seattle’s CBS affiliate KIRO-TV reached out to Democratic AG Bob Ferguson, who was featured in the story. The politician came down to the studio to defend himself on camera. The AG told reporter Essex Porter that he solicited $1,000 in campaign contributions from an entity that’s an investor in 5-Hour Energy, a company his office was investigating. When his office sued 5-Hour Energy and he learned his donor was an investor, Ferguson said, he returned the money. And he added he wasn’t going to apologize for having to raise boatloads of cash in order to get elected. The reporter used the opportunity to talk to an advocate for publicly financed campaigns who offered a brief statement about public policy and the common good being at risk when AGs are too cozy with special interests.
But according to an article in The Seattle Times the following day, Ferguson didn’t seem prepared to keep up the no apologies tour. In fact, he’d “asked his staff to research legislation adding new restrictions on lobbying by former employees in his office,” the paper reported, and also “acknowledged he should not have solicited a campaign donation from a firm his office was investigating,” saying, “That is something I don’t want to be doing.”
The New York Times story had also pointed out how former Washington State AG Rob McKenna and a former deputy had joined a firm where they lobbied the current office holder on behalf of companies like Microsoft and T-Mobile.
More from the Seattle Times:
As attorney general, McKenna had sued T-Mobile to block its proposed merger with AT&T. But since joining the private firm, he has lobbied on T-Mobile’s behalf.
In one instance cited by the paper, McKenna used his clout to set up meetings with Ferguson, who agreed to send a letter initially drafted by T-Mobile to federal officials, protesting what the company believed was an attempt by its competitors to acquire more of the available federal wireless spectrum.
In the interview Thursday, Ferguson said that letter had been thoroughly vetted and edited by his staff. He said his office receives suggestions from many people on issues of importance to Washington consumers, and that he agreed with T-Mobile’s position in this instance.
Emails obtained by The New York Times under public-disclosure laws revealed similar work by McKenna on behalf of Microsoft. “I know that Microsoft was very pleased that you made yourself available,” McKenna wrote to Ferguson last October. “Thank you again.”
I caught up with Lipton over e-mail yesterday to see what he thought about some of the local media response to his blockbuster, and whether he had any advice for accountability-minded reporters at the state level looking for pieces of it to chew on.
“As I worked on the story, I was very aware that there would be great opportunities for local coverage of this issue,” he told me. “It is part of the reason I spent more than two weeks assembling the extensive DocViewers, so that local reporters would have the primary documents themselves to write their own pieces. Turns out there was even more coverage than I anticipated.”
And there’s likely even more to be done. Local reporters, to the DocViewer!
Corey Hutchins is CJR’s correspondent based in Colorado, where he teaches journalism at Colorado College. A former alt-weekly reporter in South Carolina, he was twice named journalist of the year in the weekly division by the SC Press Association. Hutchins writes about politics and media for the Colorado Independent and worked on the State Integrity Investigation at the Center for Public Integrity; he has contributed to Slate, The Nation, the Washington Post, and others. Follow him on Twitter @coreyhutchins or email him at coreyhutchins@gmail.com.