Lanny Davis

Lanny Davis
Born	Lanny Jesse Davis (1945-12-12) December 12, 1945 United States
Nationality	American
Education	Newark Academy (1964) Yale University (1968) Yale Law School (J.D., 1970)
Occupation	Lawyer, author, lobbyist
Known for	Former Clinton advisor, political strategist, presidential advisor
Political party	Democratic
Religion	Jewish
Spouse(s)	Elaine J. Charney[1] (?-?) Carolyn Atwell-Davis

Lanny Jesse Davis (born December 12, 1945) is an American lawyer, consultant, lobbyist, author, and television commentator. From 1996 to 1998, he served as a special counsel to President Bill Clinton, and was a spokesperson for the President and the White House on matters concerning campaign-finance investigations and other legal issues.

In 2005, President George W. Bush appointed Davis to serve on the five-member Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, created by the U.S. Congress as part of the 2005 Intelligence Reform Act. Davis's clients have included Porton Group, National Women's History Museum, National Black Chamber of Commerce, eHealth, Sofitel Hotels, Trent Lott, Gene Upshaw, Dan Snyder, Martha Stewart and the Office of the President at Penn State University. Davis is currently a Fox News Contributor and has a column called "Purple Nation" that appears regularly in The Hill, The Huffington Post, FoxNews.com, The Daily Caller, and Newsmax. He is a graduate of Yale Law School, where he won the Thurman Arnold Moot Court prize and served on the Yale Law Journal. As a Yale undergraduate, Davis served as chairman of the Yale Daily News.

Background

Davis grew up in Jersey City, New Jersey, in a Jewish family. His father Mort was a dentist in Jersey City and his mother worked as the office manager of his father's dental office.^[2] He attended Newark Academy in Newark, graduating in 1962. As an undergraduate at Yale, he was a member of the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity. According to an item in U.S. News & World Report, as part of his initiation into the fraternity, Davis underwent hazing by, among others, the future President of the United States George W. Bush.^[3] He also served as chairman of the campus newspaper, the Yale Daily News.^[4] Davis went on to receive his law degree from Yale Law School in 1970. It was there that he first met Hillary Clinton.^[5]

Davis has four children, and now lives in Potomac, Maryland, with his second wife, Carolyn Atwell-Davis, who is the legislative affairs director for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. One of his sons, Seth, is a columnist for Sports Illustrated magazine and a college basketball commentator for CBS.^[6]

Career

Politics

From 1970 to 1972, Davis was National Director of Youth Coalition for Muskie, the youth organization of Edmund S. Muskie's unsuccessful campaign for the 1972 Democratic Party Presidential nomination.

In 1976 Davis ran for Congress as a Democrat in Maryland's 8th congressional district and lost to Republican Newton Steers.

Davis served three terms (1980–1992) on the Democratic National Committee representing the State of Maryland. In 2005 President Bush appointed Davis to serve as the only Democrat on the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board.

Davis was the treasurer for Joe Lieberman's Reuniting Our Country PAC.^[7]

Attorney

Davis started his legal career as an associate at Patton Boggs in 1975 and became a partner in 1978. He served as special counsel to the President from 1996 to 1998, during which time he also was the spokesman for Clinton in issues regarding campaign finance investigations and other legal issues, including President Clinton's impeachment trial.

After leaving the White House, Davis returned to Patton Boggs. There he worked as a lobbyist for the nation of Pakistan prior to the attacks of September 11, 2001.^[8] In 2003, Davis became a partner in Washington, D.C. office of the law firm Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe. There, he provides counseling to corporations and government contractors on crisis management. He left the firm in late 2009 to join McDermott Will & Emery, but separated from the firm seven months later to open his own company, Lanny J. Davis & Associates.^[9][10]

He was a senior advisor and spokesman for the Israel Project. In 2009, he did "damage control for hawkish Democratic congresswoman Jane Harman over the American Israel Public Affairs Committee leak story".^[11]

In January 2012 Davis launched a new public affairs firm, Purple Nation Solutions. Davis also joined the Philadelphia-based law firm of Dilworth Paxson L.L.P. in March 2012 and will practice out of the firm's Washington office, where he will focus on "legal crisis management".^[12]

In October 2012 Davis was the subject of a CBS Sunday Morning segment where he took investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson behind the scenes into the world of lobbying, focusing on his work for eHealthInsurance.^[13] In October 2013 Davis began acting as outside legal counsel to the Washington Redskins to help defend the organization's nickname.^[14] He also represented Kathleen Kane and Bo Dietl in his solo practice.^[10]

In 2016, at the age of 70, Davis co-founded the law firm of Davis Goldberg & Galper with partners Adam Goldberg and Joshua Galper, stating that he needed to continue supporting his family but was too busy to handle his workload by himself.^[10]

Foreign government representation

In July 2009 Davis represented the Honduran Business Council and testified publicly before the House Western Hemisphere Subcommittee on its behalf. He criticized the deportation of former President Manuel Zelaya but also supported a reconciliation solution based on principles of the rule of law and due process.^[15]

In 2010 Davis worked with the State Department's West African Bureau and the U.S. Ambassador to Equatorial Guinea to assist in transitioning to a transparent democracy that protected due process and human rights. These efforts culminated in a speech Davis wrote for the President of Equatorial Guinea^[16] that was ultimately endorsed by Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa.^[17]

For ten days in December 2010, Davis represented the Washington, D.C. Ivory Coast Embassy and Ambassador and worked closely with the State Department's West African Bureau to facilitate a phone call from President Obama to the defeated president of Ivory Coast to try to persuade him to avoid bloodshed and make a peaceful exit from office. When the defeated Ivory Coast president refused to accept the phone call, Davis resigned.^[18] On January 1, 2011, the official spokesman of the U.S. State Department, P. J. Crowley, publicly acknowledged that Davis' role was "helpful".^[19]

Author and commentator

In 1999, Davis wrote a memoir about his work in the White House entitled Truth to Tell: Tell It Early, Tell It All, Tell It Yourself: Notes from My White House Education. His most recent book, which appeared in 2006, is entitled Scandal: How "Gotcha" Politics Is Destroying America. The book received praise from politicians and commentators across party lines, including Senators Evan Bayh and Lindsey Graham.

Davis has also served as a frequent political commentator on television, radio, and newspapers. He writes for The Hill's online Pundits Blog.

In 2006, through opinions expressed in the Wall Street Journal (August 8, 2006) and on Fox News, Davis strongly supported longtime friend Joseph Lieberman in his losing bid against Ned Lamont for the Democratic Party nomination for the post of U.S. Senator from Connecticut. He then continued to support Lieberman when he ran and won the General Election as an Independent.

In 2008, Davis supported Senator Hillary Clinton in her race for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States, and has appeared on Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC as a surrogate for her. After Clinton conceded, Davis went on to support Barack Obama.^[20]

In 2008, Davis questioned the United States' response to the conflict between Russia and Georgia and advised present and future U.S. leaders to consider the point of view of the Russian leaders before unilaterally supporting the government of Georgia in the conflict.^[21]

Currently, Davis appears weekly on three radio programs: America's Morning News Radio Show with John McCaslin, WMAL's Mornings on the Mall, and Andy Parks Live. He was a participant in the D.C.'s Funniest Celebrity competition in 2011.^[22]

Opinions and criticism

Glenn Greenwald, a lawyer and columnist for Salon, criticized Davis in 2009 for Davis's perceived failure to disclose his clients. Greenwald asserted his clients included dictatorships and opponents of unions and health care reform.^[23]

According to Salon columnist Justin Elliot, Davis "specializes in lobbying for controversial corporate and foreign clients, particularly those seeking Democratic representation in Washington".^[24] He has "built a client list that now includes oligarchic coup supporters in Honduras, a dictator in Equatorial Guinea, for-profit colleges accused of exploiting students, and a company that dominates the manufacture of additives for infant formula", as well as an "Ivory Coast strongman whose claims to that country’s presidency have been condemned by the international community and may even set off a civil war". Among his clients are "Ivory Coast leader and flagrant human rights violator Laurent Gbagbo" and "Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, the longtime dictator of oil-rich Equatorial Guinea."^[24] "Just as Davis was assuring the American press that his client, Gbagbo, opposed violence, Gbagbo's forces were in fact mounting a campaign of organized violence against the opposition".^[25] The latter representation has earned him criticism from human rights groups, who claim that he "appears to be engaged in little more than a whitewashing exercise designed to rehabilitate the image of the Obiang regime on the international stage".^[26] Similar criticisms were aired in an acerbic exchange with Jon Lovett in The Atlantic.^[27]

At the time of the events in the Ivory Coast, State Department spokesman P. J. Crowley issued the following statement: "Lanny did open another alternative channel of communications for us, and was providing the right advice to his client. President Gbagbo has declined to engage our ambassador, Phillip Carter. Absent that avenue, Lanny became another route to encourage President Gbagbo to leave. Unfortunately, every indication is that his client wasn’t heeding his advice."^[19]

Some of Davis's emails with Hillary Clinton were released to the public as part of the Hillary Clinton email controversy. The flattering emails were characterized by some media members as "cringeworthy."^[28][29]

See also

• List of U.S. political appointments that crossed party lines

References

External links

• Official website
• Lanny Davis's Pundits Blogs for The Hill
• Dilworthlaw.com