Catastrophe - Dick Morris [102]
DLA Piper is a megafirm with 1,500 lawyers in twenty offices, including Dubai. That particular office is significant because the sheikh of Dubai retained DLA Piper to help it get rid of an embarrassing lawsuit filed against Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the leader of Dubai. It was a big deal for DLA Piper. After the firm collected more than $9.5 million in fees for legal work, lobbying, and damage control on the case, the suit was finally dismissed. (For a full discussion of this tawdry case, see our previous book, Fleeced, pp. 159–162.)
The lawsuit was brought in Miami on behalf of parents of young boys who alleged that the government of Dubai had regularly and systematically kidnapped small boys—starting at age three—from Bangladesh and Pakistan and forced them into virtual slavery as camel jockeys (only boys of very low weight and size can race on the camels). The suit alleged that the boys were kept in squalid quarters, never sent to school or given medical care, and not even toilet-trained; they were abandoned when they were too heavy to ride the camels.
After the United Nations began to report on trafficking in children in Dubai and the United Arab Emirates and the press began to cover the story about the kidnappings, enslavement, and horrid living conditions of the young camel jockeys, the sheikh suddenly started to be concerned about the poor little boys. It was time for reforms. Suddenly robots replaced the young boys as camel jockeys and institutional housing was established for the former camel jockeys. Schooling and medical care were provided.
Once the suit was filed, DLA Piper went into high gear for the sheikh. The firm’s filings with the Justice Department’s Office of Foreign Agent Registration list hundreds of calls and visits made to the State Department, the National Security Council, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and Senator Hillary Clinton (whose husband was a business partner of the sheikh at the time), to try to get the U.S. government to intervene in the lawsuit. The lobbying was successful; the suit was eventually dismissed after the government notified the judge of its intention to intervene.
It pays to have friends in high places.
But is Mitchell another Obama appointment that ignores the enormous potential conflict of interest that exist because of the clients at his last job—at DLA Piper?
Once again, Obama seems oblivious to the implications of such an appointment.
As for Mitchell, he claims he had no involvement in the camel jockey matter and that he was not a lobbyist for Dubai. He’s also claimed he never discussed the case with the sheikh when he visited Dubai. Still, on one visit to Dubai he gratuitously defended the United Arab Emirates’” efforts to rescue the camel jockeys.”350 Was he just personally interested in this issue or was it part of the service delivered for a client? And how likely is it that the chairman of the sheikh’s American law firm would not have discussed a case that was so important to the sheikh that he paid almost $10 million in legal and lobbying fees to the firm to get it to pull out all the stops to fix the problem for him?
Two months after he left the firm to take his appointment as Middle East envoy, DLA Piper’s own Web site still hyped Mitchell’s—as well as former secretary of defense William Cohen’s and former house majority leader Dick Armey’s—Middle East bona fides:
Iraq Reconstruction
DLA Piper US and The Cohen Group have formed a joint Iraq Task Force to respond to increasing client interest in Iraq’s reconstruction by advising them on opportunities and risks associated with doing business in Iraq and the Middle East generally. Both firms have significant experience in the region, as well as in other areas undergoing transition, such as Afghanistan and Kosovo, and are already actively advising clients on matters relating to Iraq. [emphasis added]
Senator George Mitchell enjoyed an illustrious 15-year career