Courtesy of Pam Martens.
Top Five Contributors to Mitt Romney's Presidential Campaign As Reported by the Center for Responsive Politics. (Funds Are Not From Firms, But Rather Their PACs, Employees or Immediate Family.)
Wall Street was at war with itself over which presidential candidate received its financial backing. The Wall Street firms were funneling lopsided financial support to Mitt Romney, but the largest Wall Street law firms were doing just the opposite: they were pumping money into the Obama campaign, sometimes 10 times more than they bestowed on Romney. As the accompanying graphic illustrates, the top five contributors to Romney were all Wall Street firms. (See our reporting here for the lopsided support given to President Obama by the Wall Street law firms.)
Now that the election returns are in and President Obama has emerged the winner, the question remains: why would the largest Wall Street law firms risk alienating their largest Wall Street clients by financing the candidate that Wall Street wanted to unseat, along with his Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation.
The answer seems clear enough: Wall Street firms trade; Wall Street law firms must defend those trading practices, frequently to the U.S. Department of Justice to ward off criminal prosecution. And, as the saying goes, the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t know.
Right now, the big Wall Street law firms know quite well three of the top men in the Department of Justice and they like what they see. Eric Holder, the U.S. Attorney General, Lanny Breuer, the Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division, and Dan Suleiman, deputy chief of staff and counselor to Lanny Breuer, all came from the corporate law firm, Covington & Burling.
Covington & Burling is the law firm that, according to an earlier U.S. Department of Justice, fronted for the illegal misdeeds of Big Tobacco for four decades. Covington & Burling’s relationship with Big Tobacco went far beyond the typical attorney-client relationship. The firm set up front groups to hide payments and to hide the coordination of Big Tobacco in promulgating fake science on the issue of second hand smoke.
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