In short, the Warren family’s legacy of deep financial ties to major corporations continues. It began with Warren’s corporate legal work and now extends to providing staffing solutions to major corporations. Despite Warren’s continued vocal criticism of corporate America, the family has prospered in its close association with the same.
Likewise, Warren’s political campaigns have been fueled by campaign donations from major corporate law firms who represent the Wall Street firms and the major corporations that she often criticizes. Warren has three entities collecting campaign contributions while she serves in the Senate. She had a campaign committee, a leadership PAC named PAC for a Level Playing Field, and a joint fund-raising committee called the Elizabeth Warren Action Fund. Each received large contributions from white-collar criminal defense and financial industry law firms, as well as individuals working in the private equity and securities and investment industries. Lawyers and law firms are together the largest group of contributors to the Action Fund. Included contributions are sizable checks from Brown Rudnick, Cotchett Pitre & McCarthy, and others. Her campaign committee funds for the Senate reflect a similar story. Indeed, for her first election in 2012, among her top contributions were high-powered white-collar criminal defense and financial attorneys at Ropes & Gray and at Goodwin & Procter.140
There were other conflicting relationships, too. Elizabeth Warren describes her close relationship with Richard Trumka, who would become president of the AFL-CIO. During her days at the TARP Commission, she describes an encounter with him. Trumka recalls, “She doesn’t see me, and I lean up and I say to her, ‘Don’t worry, Elizabeth, I have your back,’ and she turned around and smiled and said, ‘Yes, you do, and I’ll always have the back of the workers.’ ”141 At the same time, Trumka’s union was a donor to Amelia’s organization Demos.142
* * *
As a United States senator, Elizabeth Warren advocated for projects that were of interest to those corporate law firms to which she was closest. These projects would seem to contradict her stated positions on important issues. In 2018, Warren cosponsored the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe Reservation Reaffirmation Act, which would overturn a federal court decision and allow the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe in Massachusetts to open a casino.143 The idea of allowing the tribe to open the casino was rather odd, in part because it was new—first recognized by the federal government in 2007 after a vigorous lobbying effort that included Washington super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who later went to prison on fraud and bribery charges. The tribe was also small: it had roughly 2,600 members. The tribe wanted to open a casino called First Light Casino and Resort, in the blue-collar town of Taunton, Massachusetts.144 What was most unusual about the project was Warren’s support for it. Going back to 2012, she had consistently taken the position of opposing legalized gambling in Massachusetts. In 2014, she supported efforts to repeal legalized gambling in Massachusetts. “It’s a tough call here. People need jobs, but gambling can be a real problem economically for a lot of people,” she said. “I didn’t support gambling the first time around and I don’t expect to support it [now].”145
The Mashpee Wampanoag casino ran into legal problems in 2016 when U.S. district judge William G. Young halted the tribe’s plans for the casino. Judge Young blocked the Department of Interior’s decision to take land into trust on behalf of the tribe, which was a prerequisite for Indian gaming.146
But in 2018, Elizabeth Warren completely reversed her long-held position by supporting legislation to overturn the federal court’s decision. Her support for the casino was also unusual in that the town where it was to be built was largely opposed to the Mashpee Wampanoag project. Mayor William Carpenter of nearby Brockton actually went to Washington to meet with lawmakers to oppose the bill. The proposed casino would “destroy his community’s [own] plans for a casino.” In short, Warren had long opposed Massachusetts’s desire for casinos providing blue-collar jobs, but now appeared in favor of one for the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe.147
Warren’s move puzzled most observers, who assumed that she reversed course on the issue of gambling in an effort to heal her relationship with Native Americans after the fallout over her bogus claims of Native American ancestry. Other reasons might also explain why she would support the deal.
The First Light Casino and Resort was to be on Mashpee Wampanoag tribal land, but running the casino (and vacuuming up 40 percent of the gross profits) was a massive Malaysian gambling conglomerate called Genting. The Malaysian company had already reportedly sunk $400 million into the deal. In short, they stood to lose a lot.148
Representing Genting in the Mashpee Wampanoag casino deal was Cleary Gottlieb. In fact, the law firm was extremely close to Genting, representing the Malaysian company in several deals, including the financing of a $3 billion casino in Las Vegas, as well as projects in New York City and Miami.149
Elizabeth Warren’s efforts to leverage her positions for her own financial and political benefit are not unusual. As we will see in the next chapter, one of her closest Senate colleagues has been doing so for decades.
6
Sherrod Brown
Sherrod Brown has always relied on a certain roguish charm when in the public spotlight. Described by the media as a “handsome, gravelly-voiced defender of the working class; perpetually mentioned in presidential conversations,” he has spent almost his entire adult life either serving in political office or running for it.1 The unique appeal to his supporters, in addition to that charm, is the fact that he viewed “himself as a progressive before it was cool.”2 While most progressives on the national stage hail from the coasts—think California, Oregon, Massachusetts, or New York—Ohio-born Sherrod Brown has his feet firmly planted in the American heartland.
Brown carries with him all the accessories of a midwestern populist. He speaks of hard-hewn midwestern values and his Lutheran faith. Chapter 25 in the Bible’s book of Matthew features prominently in his speeches and interviews, normally translated to indicate Jesus’ kudos for those who have served “the least of these.” (He takes umbrage at the “least” language, so he reads a version called the “Justice and Poverty Bible,” which apparently translates more to his egalitarian liking.) Brown is, in many respects, a throwback. As one writer puts it, he “often seemed a politician from the radio era.”3 Brown loves telling reporters that he wears suits made just ten miles from his house in Cleveland, and, of course, he drives an American-made Jeep. Brown does not dress like the typical U.S. senator; his “perpetually wrinkled suits and shaggy hair” are standard on the campaign trail or behind the podium.4
Brown displays his working-class sentiments in his Senate office reception area, where he has a miner’s safety lamp sitting on the table, as well as a beer stein from the United Mine Workers. On the wall, there is a plaque of a caged canary. In earlier times, miners used the birds to detect toxic air in the mine.5
Brown’s progressive message has been consistent over the nearly fifty years he has been in political office: he is a fighter for the working class. “It has been a 100-year battle between the privileged and the rest of us,” he thunders like an Old Testament prophet.6
Brown’s supporters and family express his political work in heroic terms. His wife, Connie Schultz, once sent an email to a colleague at the Cleveland Plain Dealer who had drawn a political cartoon critical of him. She wrote: “For 30 years, Sherrod has fought for those who would have no voice and no future without him . . . (and he) remains a hero to so many. Especially to me” (emphasis added).7
But Brown himself, as we will see, grew up privileged. While he has campaigned with a hole in one shoe (and drawn the media’s attention to it with an early, infamous reelection advertisement), his roots are far from working class. His identification with workers has more to do with his reading material than actual working-class experience. As George Packer has pointed out, Brown likes to cite Leo Tolstoy’s Resurrection as an inspiration for his understanding of the degradation of society’s poor. He read T
olstoy at Yale; he never lived a working-class life. “In other words,” writes Packer, “Brown discovered Tolstoy before he discovered the working class.”8
Brown’s approach to politics has been remarkably consistent—and successful—over the course of his more than four and a half decades in public office. Sherrod Brown’s friend John Eichinger jokingly explained at a Democratic Party roast back in 1982 that Brown’s approach is to “get money from the rich and votes from the poor by promising to protect them from each other.”9
It is a formula that has worked in American politics for more than one hundred years.
However, a closer examination reveals a far more complex picture than that of a conventional progressive politician. More than simply using that political strategy to win office, Brown seems to have used his government office to benefit his family, in particular, his brother’s legal practice, which has engaged in what some might consider strange and suspect lawsuits. Additionally, Brown’s advocacy for “workers” appears to be far more about protecting union leaders who donate to his campaigns than rank-and-file union workers. Indeed, when the interests of union leaders and the union members clash, Brown consistently sides with the bosses who have underwritten his many political campaigns.
Brown was born in Mansfield, Ohio, a town midway between Columbus and Cleveland. The son of a doctor, his mother was a staunch Lutheran and progressive social activist; Sherrod inherited both from her.10 While in high school, young Sherrod organized a march in his hometown to celebrate the first Earth Day in 1970. “We did this really cool march and we had a really big crowd,” he recounted later. “But we get down to the square and none of us had thought about what you do when you get down there. We didn’t have any speakers, and it was like, ‘Oh, shit.’ So we just disbanded.”11
He is the youngest of three brothers and is especially close to his brother Charlie. Indeed, as we will see, Brown has seemed to use his political office on regular occasions to help one of his brother’s class-action lawsuits against everything from dentists to vaccine companies.
Sherrod left Ohio to attend Yale University, where he majored in Russian studies.12 Before graduating in 1974, he was recruited during his senior year at Yale by a local Democratic Party leader back in Ohio named Donald Kindt to run for the state legislature. Brown agreed to toss his hat in the ring despite the concerns raised by his father. During that first campaign, Sherrod described himself to voters as a “farmer,” even though he had launched his primary campaign while a senior at Yale. While Brown’s family had owned Ohio farmland since the early 1800s, it is doubtful he did much work with livestock or crops in the hallowed fields of the Yale campus in New Haven, Connecticut.13
Brown worked hard that first election, walking the precincts, knocking on doors, and shaking hands. According to Brown, he knocked on 20,000 doors—about half of the entire district—a claim that is easy to believe. The hard work paid off: he beat a Republican incumbent in a conservative district. At just twenty-one, he was seated in the state legislature.14 It was the beginning of a long political career: eight years in the state legislature; eight more as Ohio’s secretary of state; fourteen years in Congress; and three terms in the U.S. Senate and counting.15
In short, Brown has never held a full-time job outside of government service. Local sportscaster Mike Greene once joked that Brown had a “lifelong quest to avoid gainful employment.”16
Ohio had a part-time legislature, but Brown was one of the few legislators who did not hold an outside job.17 Instead, in those early years, he toiled away in Columbus pushing legislation. Dogs, for some reason, did not fare well in his early bills, perhaps because he claims to have been bitten eight times by dogs while campaigning during his first four years in the state legislature.18 Whatever the reason, Brown supported legislation to allow animal shelters to put down dogs with sodium pentobarbital. He also voted for a bill imposing fines and jail time for dog barking.19
More important, Brown fused himself with the leaders of local unions in his district, to the point that he became embroiled in their internecine leadership battles. In 1981, he was accused by officials of the United Steelworkers of improperly interfering in a local election. By 1982, the battles became so heated that local union leader Dan Martin, of the United Steelworkers Subdistrict 27, complained of “verbal harassment from Sherrod Brown’s mother.” She reportedly verbally attacked him after a party meeting because he did not want to endorse Brown for reelection. There was also a late-night phone call from Brown himself, who according to Martin “used language which was not very becoming to a person who is a state representative.”20
Nevertheless, unions continued to be an important power base when in 1982 he ran for his first statewide office: secretary of state. When he won he was just twenty-nine years old.21
As secretary of state Sherrod devoted much of his time to voter registration efforts. He persuaded McDonald’s to put voter registration forms on their tray liners.22 His other major responsibility included writing language for state ballot initiatives. He was criticized for tilting language in favor of ballot initiatives he liked, and against those he did not.23
His tenure was also marked by tragedy and scandal. When troubles or scandal struck, Brown seemed to use his power to squelch investigations to avoid bad publicity.
On August 30, 1983, someone walked up to the fifth floor of the Frank J. Lausche State Office Building in downtown Cleveland. Sherrod’s deputy director Colleen Shaughnessy had an office there. By noon, the twenty-seven-year-old aide would be dead. She was murdered in a particularly brazen manner: in a state office building in the middle of a typical workday. It was also a notably brutal crime: Shaughnessy was found beaten, strangled, tied up, and murdered with a metal spike stabbed into her heart. “This was a sickening display of violence in broad daylight,” said the deputy coroner.
Just hours after Shaughnessy was murdered, a former Sherrod Brown campaign employee received a threatening phone call, according to the police file.24
As details emerged from the crime scene, there appeared to be more questions than answers. Shaughnessy reportedly kept her steel office door locked and there was no sign of forced entry. This led some investigators to speculate that she may have known her killer.25 As the Akron Beacon Journal put it, “The circumstances surrounding Colleen’s death suggest the plot of an Agatha Christie mystery.”26 Shaughnessy was close to Sherrod Brown. She had helped to manage Brown’s 1982 statewide campaign for secretary of state and was one of his closest aides.27 During the course of the murder investigation, troubling accusations began to emerge. It was reported by a witness that the 1982 Brown campaign had kept two sets of books pertaining to campaign finances. The police files also reveal that Shaughnessy was allegedly one of two female staffers who knew about it.28
Police also heard from several witnesses that Shaughnessy also received a letter from a former Sherrod Brown campaign worker; one reported that the ex-worker was threatening to expose “illegal payoffs” involving the campaign unless the person was given a job.29
At the same time, witnesses close to Shaughnessy explained to the police that the victim was “very upset with Sherrod” and “wanted to change jobs.”30 Another reported that she was “very disenchanted with her job and as the primary election went on she became troubled with Sherrod Brown’s family.”31
Beyond working for Sherrod Brown, there were other ties. Shaughnessy had also dated Sherrod’s brother, Robert Brown, for a year.32
Prosecutors eventually charged a teenager in the case.33 During the trial, though, they presented little evidence actually linking him to the crime. A jury acquitted him.34 Brown had his office, including the room where Colleen Shaughnessy was murdered, closed because of the tragedy.35
Police never solved the case.36
While he was secretary of state, Brown’s office also apparently became a center of drug activity. A retired undercover narcotics officer came forward to report that she had once bought drugs from som
eone on Brown’s staff at the secretary of state’s office.37 Brown himself asked the state police to investigate after he found a bag of drugs under the front seat of his state-assigned car. In 1990, Michael Miller, a prosecutor who investigated the case, explained that there was “undeniable drug activity” occurring in Brown’s office, but too much time had passed to prosecute.38
The narcotics investigation ran into roadblocks and Brown and his aides worked to kill the investigation, according to a former Ohio state police officer. At the center of it was Don Kindt, the Democratic Party county chairman who had first recruited Brown to run for the state legislature. Brown had brought Kindt on as the assistant secretary of state. According to Joseph Hopkins, a now-retired state patrolman assigned to investigate the case, Brown tried to halt the investigation because the 1986 election was on the horizon. “In my view, there was probable cause to believe there was inappropriate interference by someone in this case,” he said. In a written report to his superiors, Hopkins explained, “I called [then–assistant secretary of state] Don Kindt . . . and learned that Brown wants to drop the investigation . . . Brown feels it should be dropped as it is going into the next year [1986].” Hopkins also said that one of his investigative reports was changed to make the offenses look less serious. Hopkins had written that the alleged offenses were felonies, but the reports were altered to claim they were misdemeanors. The Hopkins report has since been destroyed.39
Profiles in Corruption Page 15