Lanny Davis is and American political operative, lobbyist and many other things! He has also worked as an advisor for Bill Clinton!
Let’s find out some more things about this American political figure!
- His full name is Lanny Jesse Davis
- He was born on December 12, 1945
- He is an American political operative, lawyer, consultant, lobbyist, author, and television commentator
- He is the co- founder and partner of the law firm of Davis Goldberg & Galper PLLC
- And co- founder and partner of the public relations firm Trident DMG
- From 1996 to 1998, he served as a special counsel to President Bill Clinton
- He was a spokesperson for the President and the White House on matters concerning campaign-finance investigations and other legal issues
- In July 2018, Lanny Davis was hired by Michael Cohen
- A former personal attorney to Donald Trump
- To represent him as co- counsel in the Stormy Daniels- Donald Trump scandal
- Lanny Davis later represented Cohen when he pleaded guilty to tax fraud, bank fraud, and violation of campaign finance laws on August 21, 2018
- Lanny Davis’s clients have included Porton Group, National Women’s History Museum, National Black Chamber of Commerce, eHealth, Sofitel Hotels, Trent Lott, Gene Upshaw, Dan Snyder, Martha Stewart and the Office of the President at Penn State University
- Davis has been a regular television commentator and political and legal analyst for MSNBC, CNN, CNBC
- And network television news programs
- He currently has a column called “Purple Nation” that appears regularly in a variety of publications spanning the political spectrum
- Including The Hill, The Huffington Post, FoxNews.com and The Daily Caller
- He is a Yale Law School graduate
- He won the Thurman Arnold Moot Court prize
- And served on the Yale Law Journal
- In 2005, President George W. Bush appointed Davis to serve as the only Democratic member of the five- member Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board
- It was created by the U.S. Congress as part of the 2005 Intelligence Reform Act
- Lanny Davis grew up in Jersey City, New Jersey
- In a Jewish family
- His father, Mort, was a dentist in Jersey City
- His mother worked as the office manager of his father’s dental office
- He attended Newark Academy in Newark
- Graduating in 1962
- As an undergraduate at Yale, he was a member of the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity
- According to an item in U.S. News & World Report, as part of his initiation into the fraternity, Lanny Davis underwent hazing by, among others, the future President of the United States George W. Bush
- He also served as chairman of the campus newspaper, the Yale Daily News
- Lanny Davis went on to receive his J.D. degree from Yale Law School in 1970
- It was there that he first met Hillary Clinton
- Lanny Davis has four children
- He now lives in Potomac, Maryland
- With his second wife, Carolyn Atwell- Davis
- She is the legislative affairs director for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children
- One of his sons, Seth, is a columnist for Sports Illustrated magazine and a college basketball commentator for CBS
- Glenn Greenwald, a lawyer and columnist for Salon, criticized Davis in 2009 for Davis’s perceived failure to disclose his clients
- Greenwald asserted his clients included dictatorships and opponents of unions and health care reform
- According to Salon columnist Justin Elliot, Lanny Davis “specializes in lobbying for controversial corporate and foreign clients, particularly those seeking Democratic representation in Washington”
- He has “built a client list that now includes oligarchic coup supporters in Honduras, a dictator in Equatorial Guinea, for- profit colleges accused of exploiting students, and a company that dominates the manufacture of additives for infant formula”
- As well as an “Ivory Coast strongman whose claims to that country’s presidency have been condemned by the international community and may even set off a civil war”
- Among his clients are “Ivory Coast leader and flagrant human rights violator Laurent Gbagbo” and “Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, the longtime dictator of oil-rich Equatorial Guinea.”
- “Just as Davis was assuring the American press that his client, Gbagbo, opposed violence, Gbagbo’s forces were in fact mounting a campaign of organized violence against the opposition”
- The latter representation has earned him criticism from human rights groups
- They claim that he “appears to be engaged in little more than a whitewashing exercise designed to rehabilitate the image of the Obiang regime on the international stage”
- Similar criticisms were aired in an acerbic exchange with Jon Lovett in The Atlantic
- At the time of the events in the Ivory Coast, State Department spokesman P. J. Crowley issued the following a statement
- “Lanny did open another alternative channel of communications for us, and was providing the right advice to his client
- President Gbagbo has declined to engage our ambassador, Phillip Carter
- Absent that avenue, Lanny became another route to encourage President Gbagbo to leave
- Unfortunately, every indication is that his client wasn’t heeding his advice.”
- Some of Davis’s emails with Hillary Clinton were released to the public as part of the Hillary Clinton email controversy
- The flattering emails were characterized by some media members as “cringeworthy.”
- Currently, Lanny Davis appears weekly on three radio programs
- America’s Morning News Radio Show with John McCaslin, WMAL’s Mornings on the Mall, and Andy Parks Live
- He was a participant in the D.C.’s Funniest Celebrity competition in 2011
- In 2016, at the age of 70, Lanny Davis co-founded the law firm of Davis Goldberg & Galper
- With partners Adam Goldberg and Joshua Galper
- Stating that he needed to continue supporting his family but was too busy to handle his workload by himself
- In addition to co- founding Davis Goldberg & Galper, Davis started a new PR firm, called TridentDMG
- In partnership with Eleanor McManus
- They had worked with Davis since 2010
- And previously served as a senior producer for CNN’s “Larry King Live.”
- Lanny Davis encouraged Cohen to reveal that he and Trump had discussed a payment surrounding a different affair with model Karen McDougal
- Davis later revealed that Cohen had secretly recorded the conversation with Trump
- He released a tape of the conversation to CNN, which played it on the air
- On it, Trump and Cohen can be heard discussing how to make a payment for “all of that info regarding our friend David,”
- Interpreted as meaning David Pecker
- The head of American Media which publishes the National Enquirer
- Lanny Davis continued to serve as Cohen’s attorney when Cohen came under federal criminal investigation by the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York
- The papers and other materials were seized from Cohen in April 2018 under a subpoena
- Davis helped Cohen to negotiate a plea bargain under which he agreed to plead guilty to several charges in return for leniency in sentencing
- On August 21, Cohen pleaded guilty to eight charges
- They were five counts of tax evasion, one count of making false statements to a financial institution, one count of willfully causing an unlawful corporate contribution, and one count of making an excessive campaign contribution at the request of a candidate or campaign
- After Cohen’s guilty plea and conviction, Lanny Davis made several public comments
- Indicating that Cohen is ready to “tell everything about Donald Trump that he knows”
- Alluding to Cohen’s knowledge which could be used against Trump
- He later added that he believed Cohen would agree to testify before Congress, even without immunity
- He also rejected the possibility of a presidential pardon from Trump
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