The quest of Blue Dog Kirsten Gillibrand (D-Amato) to survive a primary from the left and hold onto her Senate seat in 2010 just got a lot harder, as The New York Times blows the lid off her history with Big Tobacco, by whom she was paid over $300 per hour. [LINK]
Since her clumsily-handled appointment by Gov. Paterson, Gillibrand's record has been under scruntiny -- deservedly so. With a history of ties to right-wing figures like "Senator Pothole," a pedigree from the once-notorious Albany political machine, high ratings from the NRA, immigrant-bashing campaign mailers, touting English as the "official" U.S. language, and her belated switcheroo on gay marriage, many key constituencies in this progressive state have begun looking for alternatives.
A growing sense that Gillibrand (who I know personally, but do not support politically) may have an opportunistic streak and a weak moral compass is greatly increased by today's lengthy Times exposé, which depicts the appointed Senator as avidly abetting the Philip Morris cover-up to launch her legal career. Details after the jump...
For this investigative report, The Times reviewed "thousands of documents" and interviewed "dozens of lawyers and industry experts," finding that "Ms. Gillibrand was involved in some of the most sensitive matters related to the defense of the tobacco giant as it confronted pivotal legal battles beginning in the mid-1990s":
When the Justice Department tried to get its hands on [Philip Morris'] research in 1996 to prove that tobacco industry executives had lied about the dangers of smoking, the company moved to fend off the effort with the help of a highly regarded young lawyer named Kirsten Rutnik.
Ms. Rutnik, who now goes by her married name, Gillibrand, threw herself into the work. [Internal company] research showed a connection between smoking and cancer but was kept far from public view. ...
The industry beat back the federal perjury investigation, a significant legal victory at the time, but not one that Ms. Gillibrand is eager to discuss.
Gillibrand canceled the interview she had initially scheduled with the Times, choosing instead to have a spokesman issue a handful of terse and vague denials. This represents a major turnaround for the 2010 hopeful, who eagerly accepted a Times reporter's offer to follow her around for the first month or so of her first term in Congress.
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When Gillibrand's ties to Big Tobacco have come up in the past, she and her supporters have tried to paint her role as minor, that of a lowly associate just doing the work she was assigned. The Times' investigation makes mincemeat of that excuse, noting that she:
- "oversaw a team of associate lawyers working on Philip Morris cases ... and was a frequent point of contact between the firm and Philip Morris executives."
- "was viewed so positively by Philip Morris that by 1999, when the tobacco maker brought in an additional outside law firm to represent its interests, Ms. Gillibrand was one of five Davis Polk lawyers designated to train the firm about sensitive legal issues."
- "as a young lawyer [she] was capable and eager as she plunged into the high-stakes and lucrative world of tobacco defense work."
The Times further demolishes Gillibrand's recent efforts to distance herself from her legal past by noting that:
During her most recent congressional race, Ms. Gillibrand, who is a former smoker, accepted $18,200 in campaign donations from tobacco companies and their executives -- putting her among the top dozen House Democrats for such contributions.
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This job would have exposed Gillibrand -- had she any doubts -- to the mechanisms by which Philip Morris hid its own research into the carcinogenic effects of its property. She became intimately involved with a lab the company deliberately sited overseas, "beyond the reach of the United States government, news media and plaintiffs’ lawyers."
Ms. Gillibrand learned so much about the laboratory’s inner workings during the criminal investigation that by 1997, records show, she provided Philip Morris lawyers with a list of questions about the German lab to help them prepare company witnesses being called to testify in civil cases in Minnesota and elsewhere across the country.
And then, the Times asserts, our junior Senator helped abet the cover-up:
The government sought reams of internal company records to determine whether the tobacco executives had lied. ... Philip Morris internal records show that the company’s top lawyers entrusted her with several essential elements of the case.
As a member of the Eastern District of New York Subpoena Working Group, Ms. Gillibrand helped limit what evidence the government obtained. She also monitored the testimony of witnesses who appeared before the grand jury and wrote strategy memos to the Philip Morris general counsel. [...]
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Now that the facts are coming out, the most likely rebuttal from Gillibrand and her partisans is likely to be that young lawyers don't pick their clients, and that everyone is entitled to a defense. As someone with two self-made Manhattan lawyers in his family, I can say that would be a line of bull.
Just as some Democrats do not take tobacco money (a fact noted by the Times), lawyers do indeed reject clients they consider repugnant. There is a tradition of doing so in New York State legal circles going all the way back to Alexander Hamilton, who pretty much singlehandedly created the State's code after Independence, according to biographer Ron Chernow. Younger associates are not forced to join any particular firm or to have a specialty (such as tobacco defense) imposed on them. Gillibrand was by all accounts considered bright, ambitious and connected, and thus would have had plenty of other options out of law school.
So what of the argument that everyone deserves a defense? In our democracy, that is indeed a sound and guiding principle. But it doesn't mean that Kirsten Gillibrand had to choose to be their lawyer. Clearly, Philip Morris wasn't some pauper needing a public defender -- they were going to have a robust defense without Gillibrand's avid legal support. Other lawyers gravitate toward less opportunistic firms, less lucrative clients, or just less scurrilous clients, whose defense does not require the suppression of evidence, to the harm of millions of customers across the world.
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In closing, I'm reminded of Dr. Paul Proteus, the hero of Kurt Vonnegut's breakthrough novel, Player Piano. A successful and loyal young engineer for a company modeled after General Electric, Proteus becomes disenchanted with his bosses and his work, and decides not to be a servant of a corporation he comes to understand as amoral, and even destructive. My questions, as a New York voter, are (a) why did Gillibrand fail to recognize the import of her work either before or after she began it, and (b) isn't there surely a better option for Democrats in the 2010 primary?