In late 2016, Booker cosponsored the “First Responder Anthrax Preparedness Act” to authorize anthrax vaccine purchases, which were produced by a firm called Emergent Biosolutions. The legislation passed and was a financial boon to the company. In total, the firm received orders of at least $900 million. The following year, the firm hired Mercury to represent their interests in Washington and paid them $190,000 over 2017–18.120
In 2017, the Morganza Action Coalition hired Mercury to lobby and paid them $170,000. They lobbied specifically on “water resource issues.” Booker sits on the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, which deals with water matters.121
In 2017, insurance giant Primerica hired Mercury and paid them $200,000 over the next two years to lobby the U.S. Senate. Booker sits on the subcommittee with oversight on consumer protection and insurance.122
In 2017, the pharmaceutical company Amerisource Bergen hired Mercury to represent their interests on Capitol Hill. They paid the firm $120,000 in 2017 and $170,000 in 2018.123 Booker had voted against an amendment that would allow for the importation of pharmaceuticals from outside the United States, which brought him a lot of heat from progressives.124 Pharmaceutical companies like Amerisource were obviously opposed to the idea. Booker also cosponsored two bills on which Amerisource lobbied. One was S.469, “The Affordable and Safe Prescription Drug Importation Act.”125 While the bill would allow for the possible importation of pharmaceuticals, it set up a labyrinth of regulatory requirements that would make it financially draining for many companies. Amerisource Bergen executives and its corporate PAC are major Booker donors.126
Another new client was the Spanish company Cosentino Group. They hired Mercury in 2017 and over the next two years paid them $320,000.127 Cosentino was dealing with issues involving tariffs and the Commerce Department. Booker at the time served on the Commerce Committee with oversight of that department.128 The Spanish firm had never hired a lobbyist before.129
Perhaps most startling is the rise in foreign clients that hired Mercury beginning in 2017. It was in December 2016 that Cory Booker joined the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.130 Those clients included the government of Qatar, a small monarchy in the Persian Gulf. The government of Qatar paid the firm $1.2 million in 2017 alone.131 Another client was the government of Turkey, which hired Mercury in 2017 for $100,000 and by the next year was paying the firm almost $1.2 million. Additionally, the Turkey-US Business Council paid Mercury close to $2 million in 2018.132 It is interesting to note that Booker’s foreign trips as a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee included visits to both Turkey and Qatar.133 During committee hearings in March 2018, Booker urged the United States to help mediate the dispute between Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates with Qatar.134 On another occasion, he favored Qatar by suggesting that the United States needed to “reexamine” its “entire relationship” with Saudi Arabia.135
In short, all of these were new clients for Mercury and all had direct ties to Booker’s responsibilities in the Senate. The Booker machine has leveraged his position in the Senate for more lobbying clients.
When the PennEast Pipeline, a consortium of five energy utilities, proposed to build a 120-mile pipeline through New Jersey, they realized quickly that they needed help in Washington, so they turned to Mercury. The pipeline was controversial, particularly to Booker’s base of progressive voters. PennEast was proposing to construct a pipeline to deliver fracked natural gas from Pennsylvania to Mercer County, New Jersey. The utility companies argued that the pipeline was necessary so they could meet the energy needs of their consumers. Critics argued that the pipeline would be harmful to the environment and was unnecessary.136
Michael Soliman was the registered lobbyist for the contract with PennEast. The pipeline company spent $740,000 on lobbying fees to Mercury over four years to secure approval for the pipeline.137 One might assume that given his credentials as a progressive supporter of environmental causes, Booker would oppose the deal, but he was initially quiet.138 It was only after public opposition mounted and the project’s approval came into question that Booker came out against the project.139 One might argue it was for show, not substance, too little, too late.
Mercury also did substantial lobbying work for the marijuana industry. By 2015, the firm represented multiple medical marijuana interests, including biopharmaceutical company KannaLife Sciences Inc.140 Later Mercury signed on PharmaCann, which paid the firm $10,000 per month.141 In 2018, Mercury had signed on two new clients as part of “the New Jersey weed lobby.”142
With his friends’ lobbying firm taking on a plethora of marijuana clients, Booker jumped in and introduced legislation pushing for the legalization of marijuana. His first attempt came in 2017. By 2019, he was at it again with the so-called Marijuana Justice Act, which would legalize marijuana nationwide.143 The Marijuana Justice Act would not allow for the free and unregulated production of marijuana. Instead, it would legalize the consumption of weed, but production would be by only certain government-approved manufacturers who obtained a federal license, which would presumably include those who were lobbying for the legislation in the first place.
Cory Booker represents the link between leveraging power for the financial benefit of friends and ambition for one’s own political career. As both an executive, while mayor, and as a legislator in the U.S. Senate, he has wielded power to secure donations for his political machine, including his nonprofits. In the U.S. Senate, he has offered his close aides a path to great wealth as lobbyists by using his position on Senate committees for their commercial benefit.
Cory Booker is not the only professed reformer in the Senate to function in this way. As we will see next, Elizabeth Warren used her position in the Washington, D.C., revolving door to make her family wealthy, and continues to do so today.
5
Elizabeth Warren
In the wreckage that was the 2008 financial crisis, there were plenty of people who got burned. One who rose from the financial ashes was Elizabeth Warren. The Harvard professor, despite her slender frame and academic demeanor, emerged as a booming and powerful proponent of reform. Fans such as Suzanna Andrews of Vanity Fair have likened her to Jimmy Stewart’s character in the movie Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, declaring, “She had become like a modern-day Mr. Smith, giving voice to regular citizens astonished at the failure of Washington to protect Main Street.”1 Others describe her as “perhaps the most recognizable leader of what has been called a resurgent progressive movement.”2 Her supporters see her greatest strength as her “outsider’s perspective.”3
Warren recounts an interesting story of when she had dinner with Obama economic advisor Larry Summers:
Late in the evening, Larry leaned back in his chair and offered some advice. . . . He teed it up this way: I had a choice. I could be an insider or I could be an outsider. Outsiders can say whatever they want. But people on the inside don’t listen to them. Insiders, however, get lots of access and a chance to push their ideas. People—powerful people—listen to what they have to say. But insiders also understand one unbreakable rule: They don’t criticize other insiders.4
Warren supporters place her in a category far removed from the typical politician. “What elevates her brand is that she is not a politician but a complete honest broker,” proclaimed Ari Rabin-Havt, who worked for Media Matters for America.5 In contrast to progressives like Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, and many other national political figures, she has spent far less time in elective office.
Warren’s legend grew when she appeared in Michael Moore’s film Capitalism: A Love Story. Moore proclaimed, “Capitalism is an evil and you cannot regulate evil,” and portrayed Warren as a heroine in the film, standing on the ramparts and shrewdly fighting powerful corporations.6
Warren directs her political message squarely at the middle class. She recalls a time when America was “big, solid, boring, hardworking” and the middle class could “play by the rules” and get ahead. Now, she argues, the
middle class is “chipped at, hacked at, squeezed and hammered.” America’s economic reality is that “booms and busts will come and millions of people will lose their homes, millions more will lose their jobs, and trillions of dollars in savings retirement accounts will be wiped out. The question is, do we have a different vision of what we can do?”7
Critics argue that she does poorly on style points. “I want her to sound like a human being,” one Democratic analyst told WBUR radio in Boston, “not read the script that makes her sound like some angry, hectoring schoolmarm.”8 But Warren has become a public figure to be reckoned with, slashing large corporations with razorlike criticism and taking Wall Street to task for their excesses.9
In 2011, the Occupy Wall Street movement was born and activists protested loudly in front of the homes and offices of Wall Street executives. The movement began in New York’s Zuccotti Park, just a couple of blocks from Wall Street, but quickly spread to cities across the country. Warren was an inspiration for the movement that sometimes became violent.10 “I created much of the intellectual foundation for what they do,” she said.11 It was fitting with her theme that the economic system in the United States was “rigged.” As she would write in her book A Fighting Chance, “Today the game is rigged—rigged to work for those who have money and power.” “Rigged” would become a catchword for much of her rhetoric about business.12 At the center of it is what some would call the “Wall Street–Washington nexus.”13
The American middle class was “the turkey at Thanksgiving dinner,” which large banks and corporations would feast on so they “could make a profit,” she would say.14
Fueled by such rhetoric and timing during the economic crisis, Elizabeth Warren’s trajectory to political prominence has been remarkable. While Bernie Sanders had spent decades slogging his way through the political jungle to claim his mantle as the leading social democrat in America, Elizabeth Warren, in the span of approximately two years rose from Harvard professor, to a major voice of the national progressive movement, to United States senator.15
Much of the booster fuel that has propelled Warren has been the sense that, like Jefferson Smith in that famous movie, she has been untainted by corrupt interests; that her motivation is idealistic. Warren claims that her message is part of a lifelong quest to fight corporate power. “This is not a change for me,” she told supporters in her first campaign. “This is what I’ve worked on all my life.”16
But Warren’s image as an outsider and progressive reformer is not matched by the realities surrounding her actions, interests, and commercial ties that have enriched her family. Her family’s accumulation of wealth, even while she has risen to power championing attacks on corporate America, has been deeply dependent on those same corporations. Indeed, in the 1990s she effectively leveraged her position working as a government consultant on bankruptcy issues to reap a rich financial harvest as a legal consultant for the biggest corporations in America. And her family has benefited from other corporate ties. The fundamental contradictions between what she presents herself to be and what she has done provide for remarkable contrasts.
Elizabeth Warren was born in Oklahoma, the daughter of Donald Herring and Pauline (Reed) Herring.17 Financial instability clouded her childhood, she recalls, and there was little encouragement to pursue academic achievement. She recounted vividly later in life the repossession of her family’s station wagon.18 She was not the best student, but excelled at speech and forensics. That led to a debate scholarship to attend George Washington University and a way out. Marriage to a high school sweetheart cut short her undergraduate studies at George Washington, and she moved with Jim Warren to Houston, where she finished her studies at the University of Houston. It was a traditional life. She did her studies and had two children, daughter Amelia and son Alex. She was interested in law, and when her husband took the family to New Jersey, she enrolled at Rutgers University Law School and graduated with a J.D.19
Growing up in the Warren household, her daughter Amelia recalls a tightly run ship, including a dinner table with “napkin rings with our names on them that made it clear who was supposed to sit where.”20
In 1978, Warren and her husband split up. She began seeing Professor Bruce Mann, who was teaching at the University of Connecticut. Warren and Mann taught law at the University of Houston and then moved to the University of Texas in 1983. She continued to move up the ladder of the university system. By 1987, both she and Bruce had moved to the University of Pennsylvania Law School. She was now in the Ivy League.21
The story of Elizabeth Warren’s academic success cannot be divorced from her claimed status as a Native American; they are deeply intertwined.
Barely one year before her appointment to the University of Pennsylvania faculty, Warren began to list herself as a “minority” Native American law professor in the directory of the Association of American Law Schools.22 Her claim as a Native American, she would later say, was based on family lore about their ancestry.23 When it became an issue during her 2012 Senate campaign, she turned up a great-great-great-grandmother who was designated as Cherokee in an online ancestry posting of a marriage license back in 1894. In 2018, she took a DNA test that demonstrated that she had some Native American DNA. If her account is true, she is, at a maximum, 1/32nd Native American. If, however, the heritage she claims was a few generations further back, she is as little as 1/1024th Native American.24
Warren says that she claimed Native American status in the directories not to benefit her career, but instead “I listed myself in the directory in the hopes that it might mean that I would be invited to a luncheon, a group, something that might happen with people who are like I am.”25 But there is no record at Texas, Penn, or Harvard that she joined any groups or organizations that would bring her in contact with people “who are like I am.” Furthermore, the directory is used explicitly to make “diversity-friendly hires,” something that Warren undoubtedly would have known.26
Warren, by declaring herself a Native American law professor, was a rare find for the University of Pennsylvania. They made a point of publicizing her alleged ethnic roots. The law school’s federal affirmative action reports listed a sole “Native American female professor” (presumably Warren) while she taught there.27 Penn’s “Minority Equity Report,” for example, identified her as an ethnic minority.28
At Penn, she caught the attention of Harvard. They recruited her, offering Warren an endowed chair position on the faculty (the Leo Gottlieb Professor of Law) that would make her the third-highest-person on the payroll at Harvard.29 Her recruitment to Cambridge came at a time when Harvard Law School “was under intense pressure to diversify its faculty with more minorities.” Harvard contends that she was not hired because of her claimed ethnic background.30 As the University of Pennsylvania had done, Harvard was eager to tout her as a minority recruit. A Harvard University spokesman described her as Harvard Law School’s “first woman of color.”31 She was repeatedly identified as an example of minority hiring at Harvard Law. “Harvard Law School currently has only one tenured minority woman, Gottlieb Professor of Law Elizabeth Warren, who is Native American,” noted the Harvard Crimson.32
But something curious happened after Warren secured her new position at Harvard Law School. She stopped listing herself in the directory as a minority the same year Harvard hired her to a tenured position.33
A corporate law firm named Cleary Gottlieb funded her endowed chair. They set up the chair to honor one of the firm’s founding partners—a Harvard graduate. Cleary Gottlieb is a global firm that counts foreign governments and multinational corporations as its most lucrative clients. The firm specialized in commercial and financial law, representing a variety of corporate firms and Wall Street investment houses.34 In addition to funding her chair, Warren also credited them with providing funds for research on various writing projects.35 As we will see, her ties to Cleary Gottlieb spilled over into her roles as a government official.
While at Harvard, Warren ta
ught classes in stately red sandstone law buildings like Austin Hall, with its Romanesque architecture and graceful arches.36 But her teaching load was light, affording her other opportunities to generate income, many of which seem to contradict her 2008 public persona.
* * *
Oklahoma’s economy is heavily tied to energy prices and has experienced booms and busts over the decades. A depressed energy market meant that jobs were scarce and real estate values were down. People lost their homes, unable to pay their mortgages.37 It was the sort of economic calamity and hardship for the middle class about which Warren has eloquently spoken. In her books, she wrote about victims of the housing bust.38 But Warren and her husband took advantage of the economic tumult, buying foreclosed properties at rock-bottom prices and then flipping them for profit. Warren knew what she was talking about when she later wrote a book titled The Fragile Middle Class, noting that foreclosures are “notorious for fetching low prices.”39 In all, the two law professors worked to supplement their income and net worth through a number of real estate deals that netted the family serious profits once they “flipped” the homes. Warren and her husband bought properties in their own names, but they also financed the purchase of properties by her relatives. (In those instances, she charged her family high interest rates for her investment.) For example, in June 1993 they purchased a foreclosed home from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) for $61,000 and then sold it eighteen months later for a 56 percent profit. In another instance, they bought a house on N.W. 16th Street in August 1993 for just $30,000. Five months later they sold it for $145,000—a 383 percent gain.40
Profiles in Corruption Page 12