Should Boies
Schiller Flexner managing partner and Gillibrand campaign contributor also
chair the tax-exempt Columbia University board of trustees?
“Boies Schiller and Flexner [BSF]
announced today that partner Kirsten Gillibrand was elected…She raised some $3
million in campaign contributions, including substantial support from
colleagues at BSF…The Firm issued the following statement: `We are extremely proud
of our partner…’ Ms. Gillibrand…is on leave while she serves in Washington.’…”
--from a
Nov. 8, 2006 Boies Schiller Flexner [BSF] press release
“Jonathan
is a co-founder and managing partner of Boies Schiller Flexner…He has served as
lead counsel…for clients including Barclays, Goldman Sachs, the New York
Yankees, and the fantasy sports website DraftKings….He has represented global corporations based in the United States,
France, the Netherlands, Germany, Kuwait, and Singapore… Jonathan serves as Chair
of Columbia University’s Board of Trustees...”
--from the
Boies Schiller Flexner website
“…Endowment fund earnings are exempt
from federal income tax….Changing the tax treatment of college and university
endowments…could be modified to increase federal revenues...”
--from a
Dec. 2015 Congressional Research Services Report
Columbia University’s Boies Schiller
Flexner and U.S. Senator Gillibrand Connection
Most people
in the United States don’t think private U.S. universities owning valuable real estate
property and billions of dollars’ worth of corporate stocks and bonds in their
endowment portfolio—like Columbia University, Harvard University and NYU—should
be exempt from paying their fair share of federal, state and city corporate and
property taxes.
Yet since
being named by former Democratic New York Governor David Paterson in 2009 to
replace Hillary Clinton as one of New York State’s representatives in the U.S.
Senate, a former Boies Schiller Flexner [BSF] corporate law firm partner,
Kirsten Gillibrand, has apparently not been eager to introduce much federal
legislation to require private U.S. universities like Columbia University to
pay their fair share of federal taxes.
One reason
might be because the current chair of tax-exempt Columbia University’s board of
trustees, Jonathan Schiller, is, coincidentally, a co-founder and managing partner of the same BSF law firm in
which U.S. Senator Gillibrand previously worked, prior to being first elected
in 2006 to just represent New York’s 20th Congressional District in
the U.S. House of Representatives.
Also
coincidentally, prior to former New York Governor Paterson naming former BSF
partner Gillibrand to fill the U.S. Senate seat vacated by Hillary Clinton, the
election campaign fund of Paterson was given two campaign contributions,
totaling $50,000, by two BSF law firm partners on Dec. 23, 2008. As Zack Lowe
observed in an article, titled “Former Boies Schiller Partner Will Fill Clinton
Senate Seat,” that appeared in the Jan. 23, 2009 issue of The American Lawyer:
“Kirsten Gillibrand, the upstate
Democratic congresswoman and former Boies Schiller Flexner partner…will replace
Hillary Rodham Clinton in the U.S. Senate…The
Village Voice…posted a nice bio of Gillibrand, outlining her father’s ties
to New York’s most powerful Republicans…Gillibrand is a favorite of the
National Rifle Association…
“The most interesting tidbit in the Voice piece for our purposes is the
fact that David Boies (name partner at Boies Schiller Flexner) contributed
$25,000 to Paterson’s campaign fund on Dec. 23, 2008. Boies’s son, Christopher,
also a partner at the firm, wrote a $25,000 check to the governor’s campaign
the same day…”
The law firm
of Columbia University Board of Trustees Chair Schiller, not surprisingly, has
also been the number one source of campaign contributions to former BSF
partner-turned U.S. Representative/U.S. Senator Gillibrand since she began her
federal office-seeking career, according to the Center for Responsive Politics’
Open Secrets website data. Over $668,000 in campaign contributions from
individuals employed at Schiller’s BSF law firm have been accepted by
Gillibrand’s election campaign committees during her political career.
Schiller,
for example, contributed over $9,500 to Gillibrand’s campaign committee between
Jan. 30, 2009 and March 3, 2011; and, on May 12, 2014, Schiller made a $5,000
campaign contribution to Gillibrand’s Off The Sidelines PAC. The Open Secrets
website data also indicates that during the 2015-2016 campaign cycle
Gillibrand’s Off The Sidelines PAC was given $27,800 by individuals employed at
Schiller’s law firm, making BSF the 5th-largest source of money for
Gillibrand’s Off The Sidelines PAC during the 2015-2016 period.
In addition
to contributing funds to Gillibrand’s campaign committee and Off The Sidelines
PAC, Columbia University’s board of trustees chair also contributed over
$67,000 to the politically partisan campaign committees of other Democratic
Party politicians’ campaigns (including over $7,300 to Hillary Clinton’s
campaign committees and over $11,00 to U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer’s campaign
committees) and over $152,000 to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee
between Apr. 30, 2001 and June 1, 2016 (including a $33,400 campaign
contribution on March 23, 2015). Schiller also made a $10,000 campaign
contribution to Minnesota’s Democratic Farmer Labor Party state organization on
Oct. 2, 2014.
BSF Chairman
David Boies, who co-founded the BSF law firm with Schiller, has, however,
contributed much more money than Schiller to fund the election campaigns of
Democratic Party politicians on both the federal and state level between 1999
and 2017, according to the Open Secrets website’s data. Between Oct. 28, 2004
and Oct. 25, 2016, the BSF chairman and co-founder made 49 campaign
contributions, totalling over $388,000, to help bankroll the Democratic State
Party organizations in 34 different states.
On Sept. 13,
2016, for example, Boies gave a separate $10,000 campaign contribution to the
state Democratic Party organization in each of the following states: Maine,
Missouri, Rhode Island, New Jersey, Texas, New Mexico, Virginia, Colorado,
Florida, Mississippi, Wisconsin, Oregon, West Virginia, Wyoming, Louisiana,
Massachusetts, Georgia, Nevada, Montana, South Dakota, Pennsylvania, Michigan,
Minnesota, North Carolina, Delaware, Tennessee and Alaska; and on that same
day, the state Democratic Party organization in Kentucky was given two campaign
contributions, totaling $20,000, by Schiller’s law firm business partner.
The
following month, Boies also gave a $10,000 campaign contribution to Iowa’s
state Democratic Party organization on Oct. 11, 2016 and his second 2016 campaign
contribution of $10,000 to Nevada’s state Democratic Party organization on Oct.
26, 2016. In addition, on June 30, 2016 the Democratic Committee of New York
State was also given a $10,000 campaign contribution by the chairman and
co-founder of the Columbia University-linked BSF.
On the
national level, Boies gave five campaign contributions, totaling $278,000, to
the Democratic National Committee [DNC] Services Corporation between June 22,
2011 and Sept. 26, 2016; and, between Dec. 31, 2007 and March 23, 2015, over
$183,000 was contributed by Schiller’s BSF co-founder to the Democratic Party’s
Senatorial Campaign Committee. In addition, Boies gave a $500,000 campaign
contribution to the House Majority PAC Super-PAC on Oct. 24, 2013 and two
campaign contributions, totalling another $500,000 to the Senate Majority Super
PAC, between Oct. 28, 2013 and Oct. 25, 2016.
Over
$232,000 in direct money contributions to the individual campaign committees of
at least 44 Democratic Party politicians other than former BSF law firm partner
Gillibrand have also been made by Schiller’s BSF business partner between 1999 and
2017 (including over $13,000 to Rep. Charles Rangel’s campaign committee, over
$13,000 to Rep. Nita Lowey’s campaign committee, over $11,000 to U.S. Senator
Al Franken and over $6,000 to U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer).
According to
David A. Kaplan’s Oct. 20, 2010 Fortune magazine article, Schiller
and Boies’s BSF firm of 240 lawyers “revolutionized the economics of corporate
law practice” and, coincidentally, had “the nation’s third-highest profits per
equity partner-$2.9 million” among large corporate law firms. The same article
also noted that “Boies Schiller…has regular corporate clients to maintain a
stream of revenue,” but Schiller and Boies’ firm also “imitates investment
banks by charging flat fees,” so that a firm client’s “signing bonus, for
example, can be $10 million -- regardless of how much lawyer time actually gets
put in.” The Fortune magazine article also indicated that in 2010, about
half of BSF’s revenue “came from flat fees and contingency arrangements,” while
BSF’s regular corporate clients were apparently being billed for a BSF lawyer’s
time at a $960 per hour rate in 2010.
One reason
Boies has apparently been able to contribute so much money in recent years to
bankroll the election campaigns of Democratic Party politicians like former BSF
law firm partner Gillibrand is that BSF apparently was paid a $150 million fee
“on top of an annual $5 million fee” in 2008 for representing American Express
in a legal case; and “a law firm source” told Fortune magazine that
Boies was personally taking “north of $10 million” annually from his legal
work, thus “probably making him the highest-paid lawyer in the country” in
2010.
Besides
providing legal services for American Express, Columbia Board of Trustees Chair
Schiller and BSF Chairman Boies’ law firm has also provided legal services for
tobacco companies like Philip Morris/Altria, R.J. Reynolds and Ligget’s and for
other corporate clients like Goldman Sachs, DuPont, Apple, Barclays, CBS, Oracle
and Sony.
After
Wikileaks, in April 2015, published on its site the emails that a hacker had
previously obtained from Sony’s server, BSF Chairman and Co-Founder Boies, for
example, spent the following week “sending out a hyperbolic letter to various
news organizations pressuring them to avert their eyes from the hacked email
trove that WikiLeaks published” and “misleadingly claiming that journalists
could be breaking US law by even looking at the emails,” according to Trevor
Timm’s April 22, 2015 London Guardian column.
In the same column,
Trevor Timm also noted that “New York Times reporter Eric Lipton”
had previously “won a prize for his…investigative series on how private
companies and their lobbyists are colluding with state attorneys general to
pursue corporate agendas in secret, which prominently featured emails from the
hacked Sony trove in one story;” and BSF lawyers for “Sony should not be able
to tell journalists what to print,” since “news organizations have a First
Amendment right to publish newsworthy information that they know was stolen, as
long as they did not participate in the underlying crime.”
Coincidentally,
Boies and Schiller’s BSF corporate law firm also includes the following ex-U.S.
government officials: former Federal Communications Commission [FCC]
Enforcement Chief Travis LeBlanc; former Clinton and Bush II White House
National Security Council Director for Transnational Threats Leo Wolosky; and
the Obama Administration’s former U.S. Ambassador to the UN for Special
Political Affairs and Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security David Pressman.
According to
a March 4, 2017 BSF press release, BSF law partner LeBlanc was “the chief law
enforcement officer at the FCC” who “spearheaded hundreds of enforcement
actions.” Yet now LeBlanc “will help clients manage their litigation, regulatory
risk and direct strategic responses to government enforcement efforts,” despite
an FCC rule that apparently only prohibits him for one year from working on the
same issues he was working on at the FCC.
As the
former chief FCC law enforcement officer told Big Law Business reporter
Stephanie Russell Kraft in a March 9, 2017 interview:
“I’m going to be working on privacy
and cybersecurity issues. It’s an area where, in the last few years in
government, I’ve been very active, both on the state level in California and on
the national level at the FCC. I’m going to spend a lot of time working on the
issues that tech companies face when dealing with government regulatory bodies,
the kinds of issues that say, an Uber faces when trying to enter a new city, or
what Airbnb faces when trying to figure out how laws about public accommodation
apply to them. As someone who’s had state experience and federal experience..., I believe I have a
skill set that will be extremely valuable to a lot of tech companies, and being
backed by the litigation powerhouse at Boies Schiller, should we need to go
down that road, will be a huge asset.
“…I expect to be working on specific
matters, like companies embroiled in investigations. Sometimes a federal
enforcement action or a state action spawns a private class action or another
private action. I expect to be advising companies on the front end to help
avoid becoming ensnared in a federal or state legal issue, then advising them
when there is an incident, then helping them should it turn into an actual
enforcement action or litigation, so legal services for the full cycle of an
issue….
“…The innovators that are trying to break in, that’s who I hope to
continue to support in private practice. A lot of innovators, the companies
that are disrupting the way we think about business, are in Silicon Valley. As
they disrupt the marketplace they’re also in the position of disrupting the
regulatory and legal structure that we’ve set up. Helping them deal with the
problems that come from being disruptive is a space where I can offer them
particular value….”
Given
tax-exempt Columbia and Senator Gillibrand’s current and historic connection to
BSF, it’s not likely that Columbia’s Journalism School or Gillibrand will examine
very much whether or not it’s ethical for a former FCC enforcement officer to
apparently walk through “the revolving door,” to “switch sides” and begin
working as a “hired gun”-lawyer for corporate clients the FCC is purportedly regulating.
Nor is it
likely that U.S. Senator Gillibrand will be eager to push for more federal
legislation that would, for example, compel Columbia to pay a fair share of
federal taxes or limit the amount of money that the co-founders, chairman and
managing partner at Columbia Board of Trustees’ Chair Schiller’s BSF law firm
are allowed to contribute each year to politically partisan Democratic Party or
Republican Party campaign committees and organizations in the United States.
Yet is this
“what democracy” is supposed to “look like” at Columbia “BSF” University in
2017?
