Harvard Corporation Members, Lawyer Visited White House

Plus, Warren denounces “blood-sucking” private equity; Biden bashes “Big Banks”

A newly released batch of White House visitor logs discloses recent visits to the White House by members of the Harvard Corporation, the university’s governing board, and by a WilmerHale lawyer who is representing Harvard against Jewish students who are suing the university for allowing a pervasive and hostile environment of antisemitism. 

The senior fellow of the Harvard Corporation, Penny Pritzker, visited the White House on November 9, 2023 and on December 6, 2023, the records show. Another Harvard Corporation member, Kenneth Chenault, visited on February 27, 2024. On that same February 27, 2024, date, Harvard’s WilmerHale lawyer, Seth Waxman, also visited the White House. A “Karen Mills” visited the White House on February 26, 2024. That may have been Harvard Corporation member Karen Gordon Mills. 

It’s not clear whether the visits were Harvard-related or whether Chenault, Waxman, and Mills were all visiting the White House over a two-day period independently and coincidentally on other business, during a period when the university was under unusually intense legal and congressional scrutiny.

In addition to being one of Harvard’s lawyers in the Kestenbaum v. Harvard case, which Waxman today asked Judge Richard Stearns to consolidate with another antisemitism case, Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under the Law v. Harvard, Waxman was also president of Harvard’s Board of Overseers from 2010-2011. The Board of Overseers is larger than the Corporation and generally has less clout, but it is also considered a Harvard governing board. Waxman also made Harvard’s losing oral arguments at the Supreme Court in the Students for Fair Admissions v Harvard case about discrimination against Asian-American college applicants. 

Pritzker and Mills both served in the Obama-Biden administration; Pritzker was secretary of commerce and Mills was administrator of the Small Business Administration. Waxman was solicitor general during the Clinton administration. Pritzker is also serving currently as the State Department’s special envoy for Ukraine’s reconstruction; the State Department announced today that she will travel to Berlin June 11 to June 12 to lead an American government delegation. 

I’m all for national service. Yet we learned here only last week that at least three current members of the Harvard Corporation gave money to elect Alvin Bragg, the district attorney who prosecuted Donald Trump. Between the Biden White House visits and the Bragg donations and the fact that Harvard’s governing board chair, or senior fellow, is literally a Biden administration official, it could start to leave the distinct impression that Harvard is siding with Biden over Trump.

After winning in 2016, Trump and Congress imposed a tax on the endowments of private universities such as Harvard. If Trump wins again in 2024, it wouldn’t be surprising to see attempts to increase that tax or to slow the flow of federal funds to Harvard.

Warren bashes private equity “blood-sucking”: Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, let loose a string of posts on social media blaming “private equity’s endless greed” for the bankruptcy of the Red Lobster restaurant chain. “They followed a blood-sucking model that reaps rewards for private equity owners but leaves communities, workers, and customers holding the bag,” Warren said. 

When President Trump talked about illegal immigrants “poisoning the blood” of the country or said Megyn Kelly had “blood coming out of her wherever” the press went into high-alert mode. Now Warren is talking about private equity as blood-suckers and she’ll probably get a pass from most outlets. Is it because Trump is a Republican and Warren is a Democrat? Or is it because Trump’s targets, the press and illegal immigrants, generate more media sympathy than private equity?

Senator Warren launching her presidential campaign in 2019.

What Warren doesn’t mention is that the rewards from the Red Lobster deals that preceded the bankruptcy accrued to the shareholders of Darden Restaurants Inc., which sold it; and to not only the managers of the private equity funds, but the investors in them. Those investors typically include public employee retirement funds, university endowments like the one at Harvard, the university whose law school employs Warren’s husband, and large liberal foundations such as the Ford Foundation, which last we checked had $6 billion invested in private equity.

As I’ve written elsewhere, this image of businessmen as bloodsuckers has a long and ugly history. When Stalin and Hitler used it, there were deadly results. If Senator Warren has issues with the private equity industry overall or this particular deal, she’s certainly within bounds to raise them. But it would be better if she’d consider doing it without descending to the language about “blood sucking.” It doesn’t add much, and it just contributes to the lack of civility and the demonization of success that is hurtful to America.                        

Biden bashes banks, oil: The stridency of the anti-business rhetoric coming out of the Biden White House is not as widely noticed as it should be. Here is the June 7 “statement from President Joe Biden on the May jobs report”: “I’m fighting corporate greed by calling on corporations with record profits to lower prices…Congressional Republicans have a different vision—one that puts billionaires and special interests first. The Republican plan would increase inflation by repealing the Affordable Care Act, siding with Big Oil to raise utility bills, letting Big Banks rip off Americans, and blow up the debt by slashing taxes for billionaires. I will never stop fighting for Scranton—not Park Avenue.” (This just a few days after Biden was fundraising in Greenwich, Connecticut alongside J.P. Morgan bank heir Governor Ned Lamont.)

Perhaps relatedly, Biden “just hit a new all-time low in approval (37.4%),” polling maven Nate Silver reports. Maybe voters figure that one thing worse than “corporate greed” is the greed of Biden and his fellow politicians to squeeze any successful American industry for more tax revenue they can spend, while also shaking down the owners of those businesses for campaign contributions. Scarier than Big Oil or Big Banks is Big Government, which Biden embodies. 

Thank you: Here at The Editors we would like to get Big, or at least bigger. You can help by becoming a paying subscriber if you aren’t already one.

You can also help by forwarding this newsletter to your friends in the private equity business and suggesting that they sign up. Who else is going to defend them when Senator Warren calls them blood suckers?