It’s been almost three months since The Wolves of K Street: The Secret History of How Big Money Took Over Big Government, a novelistic nonfiction account of the rapacious lobbying industry’s excesses, appeared with considerable fanfare. The title’s homage to Jordan Belfort’s financial memoir, The Wolf of Wall Street, and the Martin Scorsese film, plus the book’s two esteemed journalist authors being brothers, gave it extra panache. But even with our focus diverted by an octogenarian president abandoning his reelection bid to allow his Gen X heir to go toe-to-toe with a democracy-threatening former president and his gaffe-prone Millennial running mate, this remarkable book deserves our continuing attention.
For instance, after years of abusing its market power to squelch competition and spy on users, Google is finally facing two federal antitrust lawsuits, one for its search monopoly and the other for its dominance over the digital advertising market. To defenders of the Mountain View, California, behemoth, the suits are misguided. Still, to the federal prosecutors, state attorneys general, and private parties pursuing them, they are a noble, albeit late, attempt to contain a tech giant that spent the first two decades of the 21st century snapping up rivals, dominating new markets, and building an illegal monopoly over all corners of the Internet.
Yet, the feds had tried to halt Google well over a decade ago. The Federal Trade Commission considered suing Google for pushing its products over those of competitors as far back as 2011. However, after quietly wrapping up a two-year-long antitrust probe, Barack Obama’s FTC offered the corporation a toothless settlement. What happened to the lawsuit that would have certainly curtailed the power Big Tech enjoys today? Lobbyists did.
The Brothers Mullins show how Google’s luxe lobbyists outwitted the FTC through a secretive campaign dubbed Project Eagle, targeting the panel’s five commissioners—three Democrats and two Republicans. With 50 policy ninjas—former FTC officials, academics, and antitrust lawyers—the lobbyists cranked out white papers, media interviews, and ultimately 75 op-eds, including ones written by former FTC chairman James Miller and none other than the late Robert Bork, the failed Supreme Court nominee and intellectual godfather of the anti-antitrust movement. (Both were Google consultants at the time.)
In the wake of the failed case, the FTC chair stepped down. President Obama replaced him with the holdout Democratic commissioner, who continued to shy away from holding Google accountable.
The Mullins brothers, who chronicle the shenanigans of D.C.’s power players for Politico and The Wall Street Journal, trace the rise of lobbying from its modest beginnings in the late 1960s and early 1970s to its heyday in the 2010s, when corporate America (and foreign governments) sought lobbyists to quash laws protecting consumers and pass friendly legislation in their stead, all while doling out multimillion-dollar paydays to lobbyists and their pseudonymous firms. The book doesn’t end there, though. The last third recounts how corruption, hubris, and exposure led to the lobbying industry’s comeuppance and the somewhat compromised status it holds today.
Lobbying is a prototypically American industry. Gucci-wearing influence peddlers don’t stalk the ornate hallways of London’s Parliament, Berlin’s Bundestag, or Tokyo’s Diet as they do Washington’s Capitol. As the authors describe, lobbying emerged as a reaction to regulatory expansions of the 1960s and early 1970s that spoke to the concerns of unions, environmental groups, and consumer advocates—the Occupational Health and Safety Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and so on that expanded Progressive Era and New Deal mainstays like the FTC and the Securities and Exchange Commission. Corporate America, which had spent decades on the back foot after Franklin D. Roosevelt, rose from its complacency to battle its opponents in these movements, “transforming Washington’s once sleepy corporate lobbying community into the most powerful influence-peddling machine in American history,” the authors write. In 1967, there were about 70 registered lobbyists in Washington; this number grew to about 115,000 in 2016.
The Wolves of K Street focuses on three lobbying dynasties, two Democratic and one Republican. Two are notorious: Paul Manafort and Roger Stone, whose prominent 1980s lobbying firm was devoted to advancing Republican candidates, the interests of corporate America, the agendas of murderous dictators and warlords of the Global South, and much later, a guy named Donald Trump.
Starting their respective lobbying empires in the late 20th century, Tommy Boggs, the late son of 70s-era House majority leader Hale Boggs, and Tony Podesta, the brother of John Podesta, the Democratic official who replaced John Kerry as climate ambassador, may have been Democrats, but they soon became aligned with corporate interests, sapping the rights of workers and consumers. For instance, Patton Boggs had been instrumental in passing the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act, a 2003 law that forbade the government program from bringing down costs through bulk discounts from the pharmaceutical industry. Boggs’s other lobbying victories included one for Wall Street banks that prevented government-controlled Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac from extending lower-cost mortgages to home buyers.
The Podesta Group also aided corporate America’s ascendancy. Tony Podesta, a liberal activist who helped torpedo Bork’s 1987 Supreme Court nomination, was a favorite lobbyist of Big Pharma and Big Tech. One of the gourmand and art lover’s coups, on behalf of biotech firm Genentech, involved getting the Food and Drug Administration to expedite its approval process for drugs produced by biotech firms. Back in the mid-1990s, Genentech was working on a vaccine for HIV/AIDS. Podesta recognized that the well-educated constituency afflicted with the condition could be enlisted in his cause. He orchestrated a campaign in which groups of HIV/AIDS patients met with members of Congress to fulminate over the FDA’s lengthy drug review process. It worked, and in 1997, President Clinton signed the FDA Modernization Act, slashing the drug review timeline by half. Podesta acknowledged the lobbying profession’s dark wizardry when he said Genentech was able to “convert what could have been seen as a deregulation scheme into a matter of patients’ rights.”
In the early 21st century, Patton Boggs and the Podesta Group routinely topped lists of the most revenue-generating Washington lobbying firms, but both fell apart in dramatically similar ways. Hit badly by the 2008 Great Recession, Tommy Boggs’s firm was looking forward to a $500 million payout to refill its coffers after becoming enmeshed in a byzantine scheme involving Ecuadorian farmers, a New York hedge fund, and Chevron. In a dramatic turnabout, a federal judge ruled that Patton Boggs was a co-conspirator in trying to extort Chevron with false reports of pollution leading to health issues. The firm was now on the hook for $15 million.
Likewise, the Podesta Group suffered a reversal of fortune after the firm entangled itself with Paul Manafort’s murky scheme to prop up Ukraine’s corrupt and Moscow-leaning president, Viktor Yanukovych. Tony Podesta dismissed his employees’ concerns about taking on a client that appeared to be a front for Yanukovych and eagerly signed the European Centre for a Modern Ukraine onto its roster. “Podesta’s willingness to ignore his staff’s concerns underscores the profit-seeking calculus that pervades the foreign lobbying industry,” the Mullins brothers write, noting that the red flags hardly gave Podesta pause that the client might not be working in the interests of American foreign policy. “Rather, they were seen as minor annoyances getting in the way of a big payday,” they write.
The Podesta Group, tarred by the Ukrainian scandal and unable to tout its closeness to the incoming Trump administration, suffered an exodus of clients soon after the 2016 presidential campaign. Both Tommy Boggs and Tony Podesta were approached on several occasions by employees willing to throw them a lifeline in the form of equity in the firm. And both lobbying legends rebuffed the repeated attempts and presided over the demise of their businesses. A diminished Patton Boggs was bought by a law firm in 2014 and lives on as Squire Patton Boggs, while the Podesta Group dissolved in 2017.
In narrating these rollicking tales, the authors give equal weight to the colorful details that lend pathos to the stories of these fabled lobbyists. “Decades of second helpings and stiff drinks had ballooned Boggs’s waistline,” the Mullins brothers write. They similarly describe Podesta’s “meaty torso” and spend pages on his mythic modern art collection, which ultimately led to his divorce from the woman who would take his name, Heather Podesta, and absorb enough of his lobbying acumen to build a storied influence-peddling firm of her own. The authors show equal flair in describing the rise and fall—and rise and fall—of Paul Manafort, the huckster who just peacocked his way through the Republican presidential convention earlier this summer.
However, the authors reserve their most cinematic writing for Boggs’s protégé Evan Morris, who gets swept up in the Washington lifestyle after leaving Patton Boggs to work for Genentech and become one of the Democratic Party’s most energetic campaign fundraisers. By his mid-30s, Morris had acquired a $1.4 million condo in downtown San Francisco, a $3 million waterfront estate on Maryland’s eastern shore, a $300,000 mahogany speedboat, and memberships at several country clubs in the Washington area. As suspected, he did not come by these perks honestly.
Morris’s death by gunshot in 2015, with a $1,500 vintage wine by his side at an exclusive Virginia golf club, was ruled a suicide. The Gothic demise exemplifies the reckoning felt by the Icarian figures profiled in The Wolves of K Street. High-flying lobbyists like Podesta and Boggs helped overturn a 20th-century balance of power that saw victories for consumers and labor and replaced it with a lobbyist-swarmed Capitol where the public interest is largely forgotten. While overweening ambition got the better of them, the world they built has only grown larger, continuing to auction off American democracy bit by bit to the highest bidder. That’s the real story behind The Wolves of K Street, a Spring book that deserves to be read all summer and into this fall’s tumultuous election.
