Secretary of State nominee Antony Blinken speaks at the Queen’s Theatre in Wilmington, Delaware, Nov. 24, 2020.
Antony Blinken, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s choice for secretary of state, has consulted for U.S. technology giants and Wall Street, according to disclosed financial reports.
In 2017, Blinken co-founded the consulting firm WestExec Advisors with other former Obama administration officials Michèle Flournoy, Sergio Aguirre and Nitin Chadda.
According to Breitbart, the firm provides consulting services to major technology companies such as Facebook, Uber and LinkedIn, as well as Blackstone, Bank of America, Lazard Investment Bank, McKinsey & Company, and others. McKinsey & Company, and other Wall Street firms. They also work for major biopharmaceutical companies Gilead, Boeing and AT&T.
According to Politico, a political news company, the firm had previously refused to disclose its client list until financial reports were released.
The report shows that WestExec has paid Blinken nearly $1.2 million over the past two years and is expected to pay him $250,000 to $500,000 for his work this year.
The documents also disclosed that Blinken has signed a term sheet to sell his stake in the company, valued at $500,000 to $1 million; he also plans to give up his stake in sister venture capital firm WestExec Ventures, valued at between $1 million and $5 million.
Biden’s appointments have sparked resentment from the far left of the Democratic Party. They criticized the nominations as a “corporate revolving door” in Washington, D.C., with insiders and executives close to big business and special interest groups.
The far-left Congressman O’Casey (AOC) has said, “It’s not just a revolving door of private corporations, it’s a revolving door of the same people 10, 20, 30 years from now…”
As Biden raised tens of millions of dollars from multinational corporations and big banks during his presidential campaign, Wall Street and tech giants scrambled to install people in his transition administration.
Last month, Reuters quoted four people familiar with the matter as saying that executives at Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft and other companies were pushing to place candidates in senior positions at government agencies. Their target agencies include the Commerce Department, the Office of the Trade Representative, and the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs – a key agency under the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) that drafts policies affecting the technology industry, the State Department and the Defense Department.
The sources also revealed that one of the allies of some big tech companies is Biden’s choice for secretary of state, Blinken. Blinken has ties to both Amazon and Google: Google is a client of WestExec Advisors, and Blinken helped hire Jay Carney, Amazon’s director of public policy and communications, to Biden’s media team in 2008.
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