gibson dunn is everywhere
the go-to law firm for U.S. capital turns up in the LADWP saga in weird ways.
My former co-worker Meghann Cuniff recently reposted this thing I wrote a couple years ago about Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, maybe the most powerful law firm in the world. After re-reading it I realized it’s due for an update, so I am posting a revised version here.
Here’s something that made me laugh this morning. I was checking to see who donated to Mike Feuer’s mayoral campaign, and one of those people was Ted Boutrous, the high-profile attorney for Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. Gibson Dunn “is a big deal.” But Feuer and Gibson Dunn are ostensibly enemies. Boutrous wasn’t officially involved in the LADWP litigation, but Gibson Dunn is the firm that broke open the whole scandal and proceeded to ruin Feuer’s life.
Now Boutrous has donated $500 to Feuer’s campaign. It’s not a lot, but it’s kinda funny. I guess this is how politics works. You play both sides because it’s all really one sided. Big law and establishment politics are so intertwined that it all blends together. One person once described it to me as “Big Law Buddhism.” It’s how someone like Boutrous, who virtue signaled his liberal credentials by representing CNN against Democrats’ precious little war against Trump, was also hired to be the corporate attack dog for oil vampires like Chevron. It’s classic Third Way politics. We really want it both ways.
Gibson Dunn is the go-to law firm for U.S. capital. And it has also represented everyone from global data hoover and one-man disinformation machine Mark Zuckerberg to the city of Santa Monica, which fended off a minority voting rights lawsuit. It sent an attorney who won a case against Chevron for polluting a rain forest in Ecuador to jail. It also has its hands in the DWP saga.
Most obviously, Gibson Dunn is the firm that first accused Feuer’s office of collusion over the DWP billing settlement. Gibson Dunn repped consulting firm Pricewaterhouse Coopers (PWC), which was facing a parallel lawsuit by the city over the billing rollout. But the suit was eventually dropped after all the controversy emerged.
More low key, former Democratic Congressman Mel Levine, who was the president of the Board of Water and Power Commissioners, which governs LADWP, was simultaneously employed by Gibson Dunn as of counsel. He was still using his Gibson Dunn email account. What gets weird is that Levine is accused in court documents to have known about and done nothing to stop the sham Jones billing lawsuit, which was literally against the city.
“Maybe they have forgotten that [Deputy City Attorney] Jim Clark directed the entire strategy after clearing it with Mike Feuer, Mel Levine, and Bill Funderburk. Maybe they have forgotten we have numerous emails demonstrating they are lying when they deny knowledge and participation in all of this,” former Feuer private counsel Paul Paradis wrote in text messages to his former co-counsel, Paul Kiesel, which doesn’t seem staged at all. Write every text like it will end up in court one day.
Gibson Dunn also used to employ two attorneys who prosecuted the LADWP case for the U.S. Attorney’s office in downtown LA. Those attorneys, Melissa Mills and Mack Jenkins, are both former associates at Gibson Dunn’s downtown office. Jenkins heads the Public Corruption Unit now.
And one of the attorneys who filed the collusive billing lawsuit, Michael Libman, said he was threatened by a Gibson Dunn partner with an FBI “investigation.” The guy is a former assistant U.S. Attorney who, you guessed it, also worked in the Central District. That investigation happened about a year later, and it seemed pretty rough. Libman was dragged into the middle of the street and FBI agents allegedly pointed a gun at his sleeping child as part of early morning raid on his home.
Libman went as far as to say that Feuer dropped the city’s lawsuit against PWC because he was under pressure by the two Gibson Dunn alumni in the U.S Attorney’s Office. And that Feuer did it in order to avoid prosecution related to the collusive Jones v. City of Los Angeles suit and save his political future. Gibson Dunn also deposed Feuer over the collusive lawsuit. There is a tape of it but it isn’t public.
It keeps going. Feuer’s former number 2 at the City Attorney’s Office, Jim Clark, previously worked at Gibson Dunn for a long time, and he sent emails regarding the LADWP case from a Gibson Dunn email account. In a sworn deposition, Clark said an attorney was brought in to file the Jones suit because he was seen as “favorable” to the city. Clark later changed his testimony. A court-appointed investigation into LADWP found that Clark knew about the dual representation of Jones and didn’t do anything about it. Meanwhile, nobody in the Gibson Dunn cult has been criminally charged.
Seriously, how does that work? My conspiracy brain is like, did Gibson Dunn actually just sue itself…man? What are we even doing? The fact that the city represented both sides of the Jones lawsuit infuriated Gibson Dunn attorneys. If true, do they care that one of their own appeared to have endorsed the filing of that lawsuit, which gave them lots of head aches for years to come? It could also be that the only reason Gibson Dunn got wind of the collusion in the first place was thanks to the email accounts of its former employees.
This happens everywhere. The revolving door between government agencies and elite corporations/law firms has obviously long been a problem. It’s why Wall Street got out of control and caused the Great Recession, because those at the Federal Reserve and Treasury Department were essentially corporate plants. It’s why we go to war. And it’s certainly why those in power don’t face consequences. With this in mind, Gibson Dunn and the U.S. Attorney’s Office feel more like a white collar crime protection racket. The elites get away with it and the losers are always the underclass.