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Coming off a grueling four-year stint at the Justice Department, Lanny A. Breuer is poised to make a soft landing in the private sector.
Covington & Burling, a prominent law firm, plans to announce on Thursday that Mr. Breuer will be its vice chairman. The firm created the role especially for Mr. Breuer, a Washington insider who most recently led the Justice Department’s investigation into the financial crisis.
For Mr. Breuer, who will now shift to defending large corporations, Covington is familiar turf. He previously spent nearly two decades there.
“There’s a strong emotional pull to the firm,” Mr. Breuer, who departed as the Justice Department’s criminal division chief on March 1, said in an interview. “It’s my professional home.”
Mr. Breuer is expected to earn about $4 million in his first year at Covington. In addition to representing clients, he will serve as an ambassador of sorts for the firm as it seeks to grow overseas.
The move is his latest turn through Washington’s revolving door, the symbolic portal connecting government service and private practice. Mr. Breuer, who began his career as an assistant district attorney in Manhattan and later represented President Bill Clintonduring his impeachment hearings, is joining Covington for the third time.
Like Mr. Breuer, Covington operates at the nexus of Washington and Wall Street. It has represented several financial clients facing federal scrutiny, including the New York Stock Exchange, JPMorgan Chase and the former chief executive of IndyMac.
Truth-Out is very critical of this:
. . . one can argue (and the same holds true for Eric Holder, also a Covington & Burling alumni appointee), Breuer was building his value in the marketplace at the DOJ, while Wall Street executives who nearly destroyed the American economy went unprosecuted. And his future value to his old white collar defense firm was dependent, in large part, on him not angering the people who would be the clients of Covington & Burling when he left the Department of Justice. The result, one can contend: no prosecutions of banks "too big to fail" execs as publicly stated as a policy by both Breuer and Holder.
This isn't just a revolving door; one can argue it's a dereliction of legal responsibility by an employee of the people of the United States. One can proffer that it's a cash-in career move by a resume climber who was careful not to bite the hands that will write the checks that will feed him on a lavish scale.
For more information:
- DealBook; Revolving Door.
- Open Secrets: Revolving Door.
- Wikipedia: Revolving Door.
