Biden Aide Bolsters Kagan’s Liberal Credentials
At a White House background briefing this morning on the nomination of Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court, Vice President Biden’s chief of staff Ron Klain said the nominee is “clearly a legal progressive” whose “pragmatic perspective” will be an important addition to the Court. Asked to elaborate, Klain cited aspects of her resume, not any expressed views. She clerked for appeals judge Abner Mikva and Justice Thurgod Marshall and for Presidents Clinton and Obama, Klain noted, so “I don’t think there’s any mystery” to the fact that she is a progressive.
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For his own part, Klain said he has known Kagan since they were both at Harvard Law School. Klain clerked for Justice Byron White the same year Kagan clerked for Justice Thurgood Marshall. When White retired in 1993, it was Klain, then working in the Clinton White House, who received the news from White. Klain was a top aide to the Al Gore campaign in 2000, then became a partner at O’Melveny & Myers in D.C.
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1108/15632.html
Klain arrives with K Street roots
11/14/08
After leaving the Clinton administration in its waning months, newly tapped Vice Presidential chief of staff Ron Klain lobbied for an asbestos industry bailout package, an airline merger, mortgage regulations to help Fannie Mae and a drug-maker under congressional scrutiny for withholding life-saving drugs from dying patients, among other clients.
Klain’s career as a lobbyist, during which clients paid nearly $700,000 for lobbying in which he participated, ended when he left his partnership at the law firm O’Melveny & Myers in 2005.
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As a lobbyist, Klain worked first for the Coalition for Asbestos Resolution.
The coalition was identified by the nonpartisan government watchdog group Public Citizen as a front group for GAF Materials Corporation, a roofing company facing huge liabilities related to asbestos-exposure lawsuits.
In the first six months of 2000, the coalition paid $80,000 to have Klain and two of his colleagues lobby Congress, as well as his former employers in the White House and the Justice Department on H.R. 1283, which would have protected asbestos companies from lawsuits filed by workers harmed by the product.
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U.S. Airways in 2000 and 2001 paid as much as $140,000 to have Klain and eight of his colleagues lobby Congress and the Justice and Transportation departments on the air carrier’s proposed merger with United Airlines. The merger fell apart after the Justice Department opposed it as bad for consumers and some unions fought it as bad for workers.
Klain and his colleagues had more success with another massive merger proposal. Airborne Express in 2003 paid O’Melveny $120,000 to have Klain and three of his colleagues lobby Congress and the Transportation Department in support of the sale of its ground assets to DHL Worldwide Express, a $1.05 billion transaction finalized one month after the firm was retained. O’Melveny ended its relationship with Airborne less than five months later.
Klain’s team brought in even-quicker cash representing the drug-maker ImClone, which had been the subject of a 2001 CBS News report revealing the life-and-death consequences of the company’s selective granting of so-called “compassionate use” of yet-to-be-approved experimental drugs.
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From 2002 through 2005, the now-failed mortgage lender Fannie Mae paid as much as $120,000 for an O’Melveny team, including Klain, to lobby Congress and the Housing and Urban Development Department on “regulatory issues.”
A telescope maker in 2002 paid O’Melveny $40,000 for Klain and his crew to push for legislation “that would provide a duty suspension on imports of certain toy telescopes.”
And from 2001 to 2005, AOL Time Warner paid O’Melveny as much as $130,000 for a Klain-led team to lobby Congress and the Justice Department on issues related to “competition in Internet and related computer sciences.”