Former attorney general Eric Holder, now a senior counsel at the white shoe law firm Covington & Burling, is taking a break from conducting "diversity, equity, and inclusion" audits for major corporations to vet Kamala Harris’s potential running mates.
Holder, who charges corporations over $2,000 an hour to assess their racial inclusivity, was enlisted on Monday to vet potential vice presidential nominees including Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer, Sen. Mark Kelly (D., Ariz.), Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, and Kentucky governor Andy Beshear, Reuters reported on Monday.
Harris’s selection of Holder to oversee the first major undertaking of her short-lived presidential campaign suggests the man who held down the left flank of the Obama administration, particularly its race-focused legal policies—and has devoted much of his time since leaving office to battling "voter suppression"—is poised to play a key role in the campaign.
Holder, who served seven years as Obama’s attorney general, was the president’s hardline enforcer of policies that focused on protecting and expanding the power of minority groups who tend to support Democrats. During his tenure, the government aggressively sued to block state efforts to fight voter fraud, claiming these laws were designed to suppress minority voting. Holder’s Justice Department also successfully sued to block much of Arizona’s landmark 2010 immigration law, SB 1070, that at the time was the broadest and strictest immigration law in the country. Holder has committed himself to immigration reform which he describes as a matter of civil and human rights.
Holder’s defense of radical, anti-Israel campus protests may put him at odds with Pennsylvania’s Shapiro, who called for the resignation of former University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill after her disastrous testimony before Congress in December and denounced protests outside an Israeli-style restaurant in Philadelphia later that month.
"The purposeful gathering of a mob outside of a restaurant simply because it is owned by a Jewish person. Well, that’s anti-Semitism, plain and simple," Shapiro told reporters at a press conference at the time.
Holder took a different tack towards disruptive protesters. When anti-Semitic and pro-Hamas protests erupted at Columbia University in April, Holder said the "unrest" was fueled by "legitimate concerns about Gaza."
Holder’s law firm Covington—in addition to assisting with Harris’s running mate search—also represents TikTok, the social media platform owned by the Chinese Communist Party. Led by Covington, TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, is challenging a federal law that requires the company to sell TikTok within six months or face a federal ban.
The Washington Free Beacon reported last year that an "equity audit" Holder conducted for the coffee giant Starbucks led to a lawsuit from shareholders over some of the race-based employment programs the former attorney general endorsed.
Starbucks hired Holder and the Covington firm to analyze its racial equity policies in 2018. Holder’s assessment voiced support for initiatives to compensate executives based on diversity targets, increase the amount the company spent on "diverse suppliers," and create mentorship programs available only to certain racial groups of employees, the Free Beacon reported.
A 2022 lawsuit from National Center for Public Policy Research, a conservative watchdog group and the shareholder plaintiff in the case, accused Starbucks of civil rights violations that put the company’s shareholders at risk. The plaintiffs argued that the programs amounted to "discriminating on the basis of race."
A court tossed the lawsuit last year, saying it was unrepresentative of the majority of shareholders. But the suit is part of a larger wave of legal challenges to corporate "diversity, equity, and inclusion" programming.
Disclosure: The Washington Free Beacon is a Covington & Burling client. But the firm, which once represented the Free Beacon in matters of defamation and employment, no longer does so after Covington partner Lindsay Burke and Of Counsel Jason Criss cited a conflict of interest given their discomfort with the Free Beacon’s coverage of Holder’s practice.