Anthony Thomas Podesta (born October 24, 1943) is an American lobbyist best known for founding the
Podesta Group
The Podesta Group was a lobbying and public affairs firm based in Washington, D.C. It was founded in 1988 by brothers John and Tony Podesta and has previously been known as Podesta Associates, podesta.com and PodestaMattoon. John Podesta left ...
.
The brother of former White House Chief of staff
John Podesta
John David Podesta Jr. (born January 8, 1949) is an American Political consulting, political consultant who has served as Senior Advisor to the President of the United States, Senior Advisor to President Joe Biden for clean energy innovation an ...
, he was formerly one of Washington's most powerful lobbyists and fundraisers.
Podesta and the Podesta Group were under federal investigation regarding compliance with the
Foreign Agents Registration Act
The Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA)2 U.S.C. § 611 ''et seq.'' is a United States law that imposes public disclosure obligations on persons representing foreign interests. for their work for a Ukrainian group tied to the pro-Russian former Ukrainian President
Viktor Yanukovych
Viktor Fedorovych Yanukovych ( uk, Віктор Федорович Янукович, ; ; born 9 July 1950) is a former politician who served as the fourth president of Ukraine from 2010 until he was removed from office in the Revolution of Di ...
beginning in 2012. The investigation was closed in September 2019 without charges being brought.
In 2021, Podesta was reportedly hired by
Huawei
Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. ( ; ) is a Chinese multinational technology corporation headquartered in Shenzhen, Guangdong, China. It designs, develops, produces and sells telecommunications equipment, consumer electronics and various smar ...
as a lobbyist and consultant.
Life and career
Podesta was born in Chicago, where he was raised, with his
Greek-American
Greek Americans ( el, Ελληνοαμερικανοί ''Ellinoamerikanoí'' ''Ellinoamerikánoi'' ) are Americans of full or partial Greek ancestry. The lowest estimate is that 1.2 million Americans are of Greek descent while the highest es ...
mother Mary, first-generation
Italian American
Italian Americans ( it, italoamericani or ''italo-americani'', ) are Americans who have full or partial Italian ancestry. The largest concentrations of Italian Americans are in the urban Northeast and industrial Midwestern metropolitan areas, ...
immigrant father John Sr., and his brother
John Podesta
John David Podesta Jr. (born January 8, 1949) is an American Political consulting, political consultant who has served as Senior Advisor to the President of the United States, Senior Advisor to President Joe Biden for clean energy innovation an ...
Jr.
His father was a factory worker.
He studied political science both in college, at the
University of Illinois at Chicago
The University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) is a Public university, public research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its campus is in the Near West Side, Chicago, Near West Side community area, adjacent to the Chicago Loop. The second campus esta ...
(UIC), and in graduate school at
MIT
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...
. He received his
J.D. degree from Georgetown University.
As Student Congress President, Podesta spoke at the opening ceremony of the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle campus (now UIC) on February 22, 1965.
He was married to congressional staffer and lobbyist Heather Miller Podesta from 2003 to 2014.
Early campaigns
While studying at MIT in 1968, Podesta left school to work on the presidential campaign of Senator
Eugene McCarthy, for whom he did field work and ran the scheduling advance operation in California and other states.
After McCarthy lost the
Democratic nomination to
Hubert Humphrey
Hubert Horatio Humphrey Jr. (May 27, 1911 – January 13, 1978) was an American pharmacist and politician who served as the 38th vice president of the United States from 1965 to 1969. He twice served in the United States Senate, representing Mi ...
, Podesta organized students on behalf of the
Humphrey-Muskie campaign.
McCarthy was the first of several losing Democrat politicians that Podesta campaigned for. Others included Joe Duffey for the U.S. Senate in Connecticut in
1970
Events
January
* January 1 – Unix time epoch reached at 00:00:00 UTC.
* January 5 – The 7.1 Tonghai earthquake shakes Tonghai County, Yunnan province, China, with a maximum Mercalli intensity scale, Mercalli intensity of X (''Extrem ...
,
Ed Muskie
Edmund Sixtus Muskie (March 28, 1914March 26, 1996) was an American statesman and political leader who served as the 58th United States Secretary of State under President Jimmy Carter, a United States Senator from Maine from 1959 to 1980, the 6 ...
and then
George McGovern
George Stanley McGovern (July 19, 1922 – October 21, 2012) was an American historian and South Dakota politician who was a U.S. representative and three-term U.S. senator, and the Democratic Party presidential nominee in the 1972 pres ...
for president in
1972
Within the context of Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) it was the longest year ever, as two leap seconds were added during this 366-day year, an event which has not since been repeated. (If its start and end are defined using Solar time, me ...
,
Ted Kennedy
Edward Moore Kennedy (February 22, 1932 – August 25, 2009) was an American lawyer and politician who served as a United States senator from Massachusetts for almost 47 years, from 1962 until his death in 2009. A member of the Democratic ...
in
1980,
Walter Mondale
Walter Frederick "Fritz" Mondale (January 5, 1928 – April 19, 2021) was an American lawyer and politician who served as the 42nd vice president of the United States from 1977 to 1981 under President Jimmy Carter. A U.S. senator from Minnesota ...
's presidential campaign in
1984, and
Michael Dukakis
Michael Stanley Dukakis (; born November 3, 1933) is an American retired lawyer and politician who served as governor of Massachusetts from 1975 to 1979 and again from 1983 to 1991. He is the longest-serving governor in Massachusetts history a ...
in
1988
File:1988 Events Collage.png, From left, clockwise: The oil platform Piper Alpha explodes and collapses in the North Sea, killing 165 workers; The USS Vincennes (CG-49) mistakenly shoots down Iran Air Flight 655; Australia celebrates its Australian ...
, the same year the Podesta brothers founded their lobbying firm.
Career in lobbying and activism
In 1981, Tony Podesta became a founding president of
People for the American Way, a secular
liberal
Liberal or liberalism may refer to:
Politics
* a supporter of liberalism
** Liberalism by country
* an adherent of a Liberal Party
* Liberalism (international relations)
* Sexually liberal feminism
* Social liberalism
Arts, entertainment and m ...
group started by television producer
Norman Lear
Norman Milton Lear (born July 27, 1922) is an American producer and screenwriter, who has produced, written, created, or developed over 100 shows. Lear is known for many popular 1970s sitcoms, including the multi-award winning ''All in the Famil ...
. He led the group until 1987.
Podesta's lobbying firm, the Podesta Group, had more than $40 million in annual revenue at its peak at the time of the Obama administration.
In 1988 Tony and John Podesta founded Podesta Associates, which became PodestaMattoon when Republican Daniel Mattoon joined the team in 2001. The name was again changed to the
Podesta Group
The Podesta Group was a lobbying and public affairs firm based in Washington, D.C. It was founded in 1988 by brothers John and Tony Podesta and has previously been known as Podesta Associates, podesta.com and PodestaMattoon. John Podesta left ...
when Mattoon left in 2006.
By 2015, the Podesta Group was the third largest in Washington, D.C. with revenue of approximately $30 million.
Clients of the firm have included Google, Wells Fargo, General Electric, Boeing and the Washington trade group for the U.S. drug industry.
The firm had a number of foreign governments as clients, including the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the Republic of Iraq and the government of South Sudan.
According to ''The Wall Street Journal'', Podesta's lobbying firm performed well in 2015, because clients believed that he had access to a future Hillary Clinton administration.
In the 2016 presidential election, he raised money for Clinton.
Fundraising records show that over the course of a decade Podesta and his wife Heather donated more to the Democratic Party and its candidates than any other lobbyists.
Podesta has lobbied for a variety of groups, including
Bank of America
The Bank of America Corporation (often abbreviated BofA or BoA) is an American multinational investment bank and financial services holding company headquartered at the Bank of America Corporate Center in Charlotte, North Carolina. The bank w ...
,
BP,
and
Egypt
Egypt ( ar, مصر , ), officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, is a transcontinental country spanning the northeast corner of Africa and southwest corner of Asia via a land bridge formed by the Sinai Peninsula. It is bordered by the Mediter ...
.
More recently, he has worked for Pennsylvania Democratic representatives
Joe Sestak
Joseph Ambrose Sestak Jr. (born December 12, 1951) is an American politician and retired U.S. Navy officer. He represented in the U.S. House of Representatives from 2007 to 2011 and was the Democratic nominee for the United States Senate in ...
,
Chris Carney
Christopher P. Carney (born March 2, 1959) is an American politician who was the U.S. representative for from 2007 to 2011. He is a member of the Democratic Party.
Carney is also an associate professor of political science at Penn State Worth ...
, and
Patrick Murphy, and chaired former Pennsylvania Gov.
Ed Rendell
Edward Gene Rendell (; born January 5, 1944) is an American lawyer, prosecutor, politician, and author. He served as the 45th Governor of Pennsylvania from 2003 to 2011, as chair of the national Democratic Party, and as the 96th Mayor of Philade ...
's reelection campaign. In 2016, Podesta was on the board of a Vietnamese casino company run by an American businessman who had been barred from the securities industry in United States for defrauding customers.
The casino company sought to get the Vietnamese government to deregulate the gambling sector.
![Hagans and Podestas 2009](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f6/Hagans_and_Podestas_2009.jpg)
On July 23, 2021,
Huawei
Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. ( ; ) is a Chinese multinational technology corporation headquartered in Shenzhen, Guangdong, China. It designs, develops, produces and sells telecommunications equipment, consumer electronics and various smar ...
reportedly hired Podesta as consultant and lobbyist, with a goal of nurturing the company's relationship with the
Biden administration
Joe Biden's tenure as the 46th president of the United States began with his inauguration on January 20, 2021. Biden, a Democrat from Delaware who previously served as vice president under Barack Obama, took office following his victory ...
.
Investigation
In 2017, Tony Podesta came under scrutiny for failing to disclose the extent of his political work for a Ukrainian group tied to both adviser
Paul Manafort
Paul John Manafort Jr. (; born April 1, 1949) is an American lobbyist, political consultant, and attorney. A long-time Republican Party campaign consultant, he chaired the Trump presidential campaign from June to August 2016. Manafort served ...
and to the pro-Russian Ukrainian President
Viktor Yanukovych
Viktor Fedorovych Yanukovych ( uk, Віктор Федорович Янукович, ; ; born 9 July 1950) is a former politician who served as the fourth president of Ukraine from 2010 until he was removed from office in the Revolution of Di ...
in 2012.
Timeline of events
In April 2017, the Podesta Group retroactively filed new lobbying reports with the Justice Department that revealed more about its work for the
European Centre for a Modern Ukraine
The European Centre for a Modern Ukraine (ECFMU) was an organisation based in Brussels and operating internationally. It described itself as "an advocate for enhancing EU-Ukraine relations".
Operation
It has been described by the ''Ukrayinska Pr ...
(ECMU), a center founded by three senior members of the pro-Russia
Party of Regions
The Party of Regions ( uk, Партія регіонів, Partiia rehioniv, ; russian: Партия регионов, Partiya regionov) was a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine formed in late 1997 that then grew to be the biggest party of U ...
.
On October 23, 2017, Tony Podesta was reportedly facing criminal inquiry in
Robert Mueller
Robert Swan Mueller III (; born August 7, 1944) is an American lawyer and government official who served as the sixth director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) from 2001 to 2013.
A graduate of Princeton University and New York ...
's
investigation regarding this lobbying campaign which ran between 2012 and 2014.
On October 30, 2017, Tony Podesta announced that he would leave the Podesta Group.
On July 31, 2018, it was reported that Democratic
lobbyist
In politics, lobbying, persuasion or interest representation is the act of lawfully attempting to influence the actions, policies, or decisions of government officials, most often legislators or members of regulatory agencies. Lobbying, which ...
Tony Podesta was referred by special counsel
Robert Mueller
Robert Swan Mueller III (; born August 7, 1944) is an American lawyer and government official who served as the sixth director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) from 2001 to 2013.
A graduate of Princeton University and New York ...
to
federal prosecutors for investigation in New York.
On September 24, 2019, the
Department of Justice
A justice ministry, ministry of justice, or department of justice is a ministry or other government agency in charge of the administration of justice. The ministry or department is often headed by a minister of justice (minister for justice in a ...
concluded the probe of Tony Podesta with no charges.
References
External lists
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Podesta, Tony
1943 births
American lobbyists
American people of Greek descent
American people of Italian descent
Living people
Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni
People for the American Way people
University of Illinois Chicago alumni
Georgetown University Law Center alumni