CRISIS COMMUNICATORS WARN SBF TO CAN IT: “Sam Bankman-Fried squandered a multibillion-dollar cryptocurrency empire. Now he won’t stop talking about it ,” POLITICO’s Sam Sutton writes. — “The 30-year-old former executive has kept tweeting and talking to reporters since his digital asset exchange, FTX, collapsed under financial mismanagement in early November. … Bankman-Fried’s unrelenting public campaign has crisis management specialists, public relations experts and even some lawmakers warning that refusing to stay quiet is unlikely to salvage his reputation — and that he’s putting himself in growing legal danger.” — “He’s openly defying the advice of his own lawyers, boasting in an interview released Tuesday that ‘I told them to go fuck themselves’ after they urged him to stop talking about mistakes he made at his startup.” — “‘Every time he opens his mouth, he increases his civil and criminal liability,’ said Niki Christoff, a Washington-based strategic consultant who previously held leading policy communications roles at Uber and Google. ‘It costs nothing to keep quiet, but he can’t seem to do that.’” WHO’S GOT RAIMONDO’S EAR: “In her first seven months as commerce secretary, Gina Raimondo met with or spoke in front of 230 CEOs, top executives, or industry trade groups, an average of more than one meeting per day , according to calendar logs recently released under a Freedom of Information Act request,” The American Prospect’s David Dayden reports. — “The list includes six meetings with Apple CEO Tim Cook, three with Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, three with Microsoft Vice Chairman Brad Smith (and two with the company’s CEO, Satya Nadella), two with Google/Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, and one with Facebook ’s former chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg. Aside from these heavy hitters, Raimondo met with other lead executives at tech firms like Airbnb, Lyft, PayPal, eBay, Salesforce, IBM, Rakuten, and more. There are three Cook meetings with Raimondo just between August 25 and September 30, 2021.” — “Some of Raimondo’s meetings with tech industry leaders have been reported previously, upon the release this summer of the March and April 2021 calendars. But the assignations with corporate America go well beyond tech, touching defense contractors, financial institutions, airlines, pharmaceutical companies, automotive firms, and more.” SOME NEW FRIENDS? Cook is in town this week to meet with the Republican lawmakers who are set to steer much of the tech agenda for the GOP-led House next year, Bloomberg’s Emily Birnbaum and Mark Gurman report. — He’s got meetings scheduled with Reps. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) and Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.), two of whom are slated to lead the House Judiciary Committee and House Energy & Commerce Committee next year. — The timing of the trip is … less than ideal for Cook. Though “the meetings were likely scheduled weeks ago, far in advance of the diatribe against the company launched by Twitter Inc. CEO Elon Musk … Apple faces intensifying heat from conservatives.” — “Some Republicans are rallying behind Musk, who on Monday attacked Apple and Cook in a series of tweets, claiming that the company threatened to remove Twitter from Apple’s app stores and paused its advertising on Twitter’s platform.” Cook is also planning to meet with Cornyn, a frequent critic of Apple’s ties to China, as well as Sens. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) and Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii). FLYING IN: The National Alliance on Mental Illness is on the Hill today to push for the inclusion of mental health measures in a year-end spending deal. Members of the group were slated to meet with more than 80 offices, and spoke with Sens. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) and Reps. Tom Emmer (R-Minn.) and Joe Sempolinski (R-N.Y.). They’re calling for increases in mental health funding, workforce and telehealth policies and investments to improve mental health crisis response . WHAT TO EXPECT WHEN YOU’RE EXPECTING … A FARA INQUIRY: The Justice Department has become more aggressive in enforcing FARA, meaning that less headline-grabbing letters of inquiry from the FARA Unit — one of DOJ’s primary instruments for fact-gathering — are on the rise. — Wiggin and Dana’s David Laufman , who once oversaw FARA enforcement at the department, and Sarah York have put together some pointers for how best to respond to such letters , which they write have become “a major component of FARA compliance practice for lawyers in this field.” — “Understanding how best to respond to an LOI is critical not only to helping clients avoid a determination by DOJ that they must register under FARA, but also to mitigating any risk that an administrative compliance inquiry might transform into a criminal investigation,” which could then allow DOJ access to more serious investigative tools. UTILITIES CHANGE THEIR TUNE: “After years of taking steps like backing dark-money groups to sue the government to block tighter air pollution rules … a growing number of other utilities have joined forces to speed the transition away from fossil fuels,” The New York Times’ Eric Lipton reports. — “Their new stance is driven less by evolving ideology than the changing economics of renewable energy, fueled in part by the sheer amount of money the federal government is putting on the table to encourage utilities to move more quickly to cleaner and more sustainable sources of energy like solar and wind.” — “But if industrial policy initiatives can provide powerful incentives to corporations to pursue those goals, they also inevitably raise questions about whether they are constructed in ways that reward companies for taking actions that market forces would lead them to take anyway — an issue that hovers over the legislation embraced by both Mr. Biden and the electric utilities.” — To wit, the Inflation Reduction Act includes “a 10-year, $220 billion hodgepodge of tax breaks and major changes in federal tax law and other climate-change-inspired inducements that amount to a kind of lobbyist wish list never before considered even remotely possible by the industry. With so much on the line financially, the industry ramped up spending on lobbyists to help push the package through the House and the Senate” in addition to padding the campaign coffers of key negotiators. GOTHAM JOINS FORCES WITH NEW YORK ‘TABLOID’ ATTORNEY: New York-based Gotham Government Relations, the government affairs and PR shop that helped stage Donald Trump’s famed 2015 presidential campaign launch and expanded to D.C. once he was elected, is joining up with Aidala, Bertuna & Kamins, another New York firm known for its representation of “America’s tabloid villains,” as The New York Times has put it. — Gotham will become the lobbying arm of Aidala, Bertuna & Kamins, whose clients have included Harvey Weinstein, Alan Dershowitz and Rudy Giuliani, the firms announced. Gotham’s David Schwartz will be president of the joint venture, while ABK’s Arthur Aidala will become chair of Gotham and Denny Salas will become vice president of government affairs. Former Rep. Gary Ackerman will lead congressional outreach for the firm.
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