About 20 years ago, the CEO of the trade association for which I worked was called to testify before Congress. We had lawyers. We had policy people. We had lobbyists. The first call about the hearing date came to me, from a reporter at the Wall Street Journal. (His name was Brody Mullins)
The committee told the press before it told the witness.
I kept coming back to that call while talking with Brandon Rios and Jake Greenberg on The Friday Reporter. Democrats take the gavels in January, and the investigations are coming. Brandon and Jake know how they’ll run because they ran them. Brandon was Democratic counsel on House Oversight and later served in the Biden-Harris White House. Jake was the Republican general counsel on the same committee. They spent six years across the table from each other. In July they launched a congressional investigations practice together at DLA Piper.
Their read is blunt. The White House holds most of the cards. Privilege and testimonial immunity can stall a document request for months. Companies have no such shield. So Democrats will go through corporate America — the contractors, the donors, the businesses holding many of the same emails — to tell the story they want to tell about the administration.
That changes the question a company should be asking. Not “did we do anything wrong?” But “are we a target or a source?”
Brandon’s answer is the best advice I’ve heard all year. Figure out how to be uninteresting.
Most companies won’t. They’ll hire a white collar partner, treat the letter like litigation and wait for a judge who never shows up. A congressional investigation has no judge. It has cameras, members with 10 million followers and staff under constant pressure to produce something new.
Jake made the point I wish every CEO heard before the first subpoena. A call to the chairman rarely makes it go away. The decisions get made by the staff running the investigation day to day. Those are the relationships that matter.
And from where I sit: bring communications in early. Not to talk. To watch the room, and to get the call from the reporter before anyone else does.
Notable quotes
1. “The question for most private sector companies right now is, am I potentially a target or am I a source of information? And how can I be uninteresting?” — Brandon Rios
2. “Congressional investigations are essentially civil discovery with malleable rules. No judge. And everything you do is on TV or could be on TV.” — Brandon Rios
3. “The real decisions in a matter are made at the staff, the much lower level, who are running the investigation on a day to day basis.” — Jake Greenberg
Takeaway
The companies that come through the next two years intact will be the ones that treated a letter from Congress as a political event from day one.
