The goal of FCPA Professor, as reflected in the Mission Statement, is to foster a forum for critical analysis and discussion of the FCPA (and related topics) among a broad audience, including those who disagree with me on certain issues.
This post last week highlighted former Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer’s new job and another recent post highlighted my recent article “Lanny Breuer and Foreign Corrupt Practices Act Enforcement.”
Today’s post is from Thomas Fox who runs the FCPA Compliance and Ethics Blog. After Fox’s perspective, I offer a few concluding remarks.
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A Different Perspective on Breuer’s New Position
Thomas Fox
Last week there was much a-buzz in the FCPA world and, indeed, the greater legal community about the move of former Assistant Attorney General, Department of Justice (DOJ) Criminal Division, Lanny Breuer to the law firm Covington & Burling LLP. Several commentators raised questions about Breuer’s move in light of his work as the former No. 2 at the DOJ. The first of these concerns fall into the category of the “revolving door” issue, the second is a more focused criticism.
The Revolving Door
Dennis Kelleher, a former partner at Skadden Arps in Washington, D.C., and current president of the public interest group Better Markets, Inc., was quoted in a Corporate Crime Reporter article titled “Lanny Breuer Back to Covington” that “nothing is more corrosive to the American people’s trust in government than the revolving door where too many officials turn their so-called public service into multi-million dollar riches unimaginable to most Americans.” Further, Kelleher said that “This blatant cashing-in is destroying faith in government and government officials.” Lastly, Keller said that “Lanny Breuer’s spinning through it is only the latest example: “partner at big DC law firm representing corporate clients before the Department, then becomes a senior official at the Department making decisions whether or not to prosecute those same or similar corporate clients, then leaves to go back to private practice representing those same or similar corporate clients with legal issues before, bingo, the Department of Justice”.
Multi-million dollar salaries are not only unimaginable to most Americans; they are also unimaginable to most lawyers. From my experience, the only lawyers who command such earnings are: (1) plaintiff’s lawyers who work on a contingency and receive a percentage of any settlement or judgment as their fee or (2) lawyers who are very, very good at what they do and clients are willing to pay a very high rate for their services because these lawyers are very, very good at what they do. I believe that Breuer falls into category 2.
Breuer had quite a career before he became the No. 2 at the DOJ. Indeed his bio on the Covington and Burling website has the following information.
Prior to his service at the Justice Department, Mr. Breuer co-chaired the firm’s White Collar Defense and Investigations Practice Group. Over nearly 20 years in private practice, Mr. Breuer maintained a wide-ranging practice that included white-collar criminal and complex civil litigation, internal corporate investigations, congressional investigations, and antitrust cartel proceedings.
Representative Matters
- Represented the Special Litigation Committee of the Hewlett Packard Board of Directors.
- Represented the former Minister of Atomic Energy for Russian Presidents Yeltsin and Putin in a case alleging theft of tens of millions of dollars.
- Represented many major corporations before Congress, including a leading Internet company in a hearing concerning its foreign business activities, major pharmaceutical companies targeted in oversight investigations, the Los Alamos National Laboratory in a national security investigation, and a large Wall Street firm in the Enron hearings.
- Represented leading telecommunications investors in a billion-dollar False Claims Act lawsuit.
- Represented former National Security Advisor Samuel Berger in an investigation of documents at the National Archives.
In addition to the above, Breuer was Special Counsel to President Clinton (1997-1999), where he represented President Clinton and the White House staff in the presidential impeachment hearings and trial, independent counsel investigations, a Justice Department task force investigation, and numerous congressional oversight investigations. Breuer was also an Assistant District Attorney in Manhattan from 1985-1989. In other words, Breuer had quite a bit of experience in government and representing companies before the government before he went back to the DOJ in 2009.
What about the claim that Breuer went back to the DOJ, where he worked for four years so he could ‘cash in’ by going back to private practice? Public service is just that – public service. I am reasonably certain that Breuer did not go back into government service for the salary he received at the DOJ. I think his record demonstrates that he is one of the lawyers committed to serving our country in government. To say that anyone would put up with four years of taking all the shots that Breuer took during his tenure at the DOJ, both from Congress and from others, so he could cash in seems to me to be a little far-fetched. From my perspective, to criticize him for leaving and going back to his former firm does not hold merit.
With regards to one of the issues raised by Kelleher regarding whether a partner in a law firm who represents “corporate clients before the Department, then becomes a senior official at the Department making decisions whether or not to prosecute those same or similar corporate clients”, I do not believe that Breuer made any decisions “not to prosecute those same…corporate clients” while he was at the DOJ. Simply put, he would have been conflicted out. What about “similar corporate clients”? That seems to me to stretch the point way too far.
As to his new work in the private sector, what about another question posed by Kelleher, “Isn’t much of his new multi-million dollar pay package due to the high level connections, high-profile and intimate knowledge of the Department of Justice he gained while doing his ‘public service’ at the Department?”
Breuer himself appears to have answered that question directly in an interview with the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) Law Blog, which quoted him as saying, “Certainly, if I’m not ethically barred,” he told Law Blog. “I would certainly represent clients and anticipate representing clients in all different sectors, and I think that’s the majesty of our system.” But the Law Blog noted that, “Under federal ethics rules, Mr. Breuer has to abstain from matters that he was involved in while at the department, and he can’t approach Justice Department officials on behalf of clients during his “cooling off” period.” This means that he cannot work for Covington on any case he handled at the DOJ and must wait two years before facing off with the agency.
What about clients? If I am a corporation under a serious federal investigation, who do I want advice from? I want advice from someone who knows the ropes. Breuer obviously understands the law from a prosecutor’s perspective and that is of great value to a client. In fact, understanding how a prosecutor thinks and will react is one of the most important pieces of information that a client can have because it provides information on how to respond. Breuer was involved with far more than FCPA cases, and, while I do not know all of them, the one that sticks in my mind was when he had to postpone his talk at the 2012 ACI FCPA conference in Washington to attend the announcement of the US government settlement with BP over the Macondo oil spill. Not only did he have a lot on his plate at the DOJ, he has far-ranging experience in a large number of federal matters.
From FCPA Enforcement to FCPA Defense
The FCPA Professor, in a post titled “Former Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer Joins FCPA Inc.”, had a more focused criticism that he has consistently articulated, with the following statement. “Breuer’s departure from the DOJ to a private law firm is just the latest example of a high-profile FCPA enforcement attorney joining a law firm to provide FCPA defense services.” The Professor said:
“That Breuer (and other former DOJ FCPA enforcement attorneys who also moved to private practice) played a supervisory role as a DOJ enforcement attorney in helping create the current FCPA enforcement landscape and in setting the “priorities” and the “benchmarks” is precisely the reason why I have long argued that it is in the public interest (recognizing the niched nature of both the DOJ and SEC FCPA units) that all FCPA enforcement attorneys should be prohibited, when leaving the government, from providing FCPA defense or compliance services for a five-year time period.”
This is a more focused criticism. The Professor believes that DOJ lawyers who set FCPA “priorities” and “benchmarks” should be barred for a period of at least five years from providing FCPA compliance or defense services. While I believe that many of the arguments I made in the above Kelleher critique apply to this criticism, I also disagree with the Professor for a couple of other reasons.
First there were many, many voices in the DOJ and Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) who set priorities and benchmarks for FCPA enforcement while they were in government service. I do not believe that there is anyone person who sets them, the best example of the benchmarks is the DOJ/SEC FCPA Guidance, which I understand was reviewed by several other government departments in addition to the DOJ and SEC.
Nevertheless to say that benchmarks are set, at least in the form of best practices, fails to acknowledge that best practices can evolve. The clearest example of this is the time frames set for post-acquisition integration of a FCPA compliance program by an acquiring company of an acquired entity. In April 2011, the Johnson & Johnson (J&J) Deferred Prosecution Agreement (DPA) had such time frames in its ‘Enhanced Compliance Obligations’. By 2012, these times frames had become minimum best practices. Another example is last year’s Opinion Release 12-01, which found that under certain circumstances, a royal family member is not a foreign government official for FCPA purposes. There are many such situations which make clear that best practices evolve. So even if Breuer had some hand in creating such benchmarks when he was at the DOJ, I do not think that should preclude him from representing clients going forward.
How about ‘priorities’? I have to assume this means priorities in FCPA enforcement. If so this would seem to suggest that Breuer either (1) ramped up FCPA enforcement so that he could get clients from this newly enforcement law or (2) directed enforcement at certain industries or sectors so that he could represent them. As to point 1, I think that, notwithstanding the DOJ’s Press Release on Breuer’s departure that “At the Justice Department, Mr. Breuer increased enforcement of the FCPA, overseeing more than 40 corporate resolutions and eight of the top 10 largest penalties in U.S. history”; these cases were long in the pipeline before Breuer arrived. While I do not know the reason that FCPA enforcement ramped up, it did so long before Breuer arrived at the DOJ. What about direction at certain industries? Here again the way enforcement operates would seem to belie this claim. Most of the FCPA enforcement directed at the energy industry was a result of Panalpina and its related cases. Pharmaceutical cases seem to follow J&J. The aerospace industry has all come after the BAE settlement. To borrow a line from the book and movie “All the President’s Men”, the point is that the DOJ (and SEC) seem to ‘follow the money’.
As you may have ascertained by now, I do not believe that there is a problem in Lanny Breuer going from the DOJ back to his old firm of Covington & Burling. Is $4 million per year salary a huge salary, of course it is. But he has the experience to merit it if clients will pay his hourly rate and for his new duties as Vice Chair of the law firm.
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Fox’s post of course demonstrates that Breuer has a plethora of legal skills and experience beyond the FCPA. Thus, my suggested prohibition would not have a material impact on his future career prospects.
Nor would my suggested prohibition affect many people. Here, it is important to recognize the highly centralized nature of FCPA enforcement – per the U.S. attorney manual.
9-47.110 Policy Concerning Criminal Investigations and Prosecutions of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act states, in pertinent part, as follows.
“No investigation or prosecution of cases involving alleged violations of the antibribery provisions of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) or of related violations of the FCPA’s record keeping provisions shall be instituted without the express authorization of the Criminal Division. Any information relating to a possible violation of the FCPA should be brought immediately to the attention of the Fraud Section of the Criminal Division. Even when such information is developed during the course of an apparently unrelated investigation, the Fraud Section should be notified immediately.”
Billy Jacobson (former assistant chief of DOJ FCPA enforcement) said it best in this article.
“[T]he FCPA has been recognized and treated as different by the U.S. government since its passage in 1977. […] [The FCPA] is one of just a few, select statutes to be prosecuted centrally from one DOJ office. The over-whelming majority of federal criminal statutes may be brought by each of the country’s U.S. Attorney’s Offices, but FCPA actions may be brought only by the Fraud Section of the Criminal Division within Main Justice.”
In short, per DOJ policy, from a supervisory and discretionary standpoint, very few people control FCPA enforcement. These people largely “enforce” the FCPA behind closed doors in Washington, D.C. via non-prosecution and deferred prosecution agreements in the general absence of judicial scrutiny. This highly-centralized enforcement behind closed doors in the general absence of judical scrutiny further takes place without much caselaw of precedent setting the parameters (something which of course can not be said about many other laws the DOJ enforces such as antitrust, securities fraud, etc.)
It is these unique attributes (most of which are the DOJ’s own making) of FCPA enforcement that warrants special rules. A prohibition on DOJ (or SEC) FCPA enforcement attorneys with supervisory and discretionary authority from providing FCPA defense or compliance services for five years upon leaving government service is a special rule, but one that is in the public interest.
