Lightfoot presses Buttigieg on consulting past
Mayor wants him disclose his secret work with firm
Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot took presidential front-runner Pete Buttigieg to task Friday night over his secret work for McKinsey & Co. early in his career, telling the South Bend mayor he should break a nondisclosure agreement with the consulting firm.
Buttigieg has cited the agreement as reason for not disclosing the nature of his McKinsey work or the clients he served during his 2 ½ years working at the company. That position has drawn criticism and heightened scrutiny in recent days as he’s surged to the front of the polls in the early voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire.
Lightfoot raised the issue during a U.S. Conference of Mayors event in Waterloo, Iowa, in which different mayors interviewed presidential contenders. In the windup to her question to Buttigieg about his work at McKinsey, Lightfoot noted how President Donald Trump has “broken literally every convention,” including refusing to release his tax returns, ignoring “basic transparency” and casting aside “any notions of good government.”
“You said you can’t talk about your work at McKinsey because of a nondisclosure agreement, and I think you said today you’ve got to honor your commitment to McKinsey,” said Lightfoot, who previously worked as a partner at the giant corporate law firm Mayer Brown. “I’m asking you, should you break that NDA so you have the moral authority and the high ground against somebody like Trump, who hides behind the lack of transparency to justify everything that he’s doing?”
After the crowd applauded the question, Buttigieg noted his campaign had just released some additional details about his work at the firm, “as much information as I can without breaking the promise I made in writing.”
“This is my first job out of school. It’s not like I was the CEO. I was making a lot of spreadsheets and PowerPoints, but people ought to know from somebody who proposes to be president of the United States, what’s in your past,” Buttigieg told Lightfoot. “And I am asking my former employer to do the right thing — to not make me choose between claiming the moral high ground and going back on my word. They could fix this tonight.”
“Yeah, but they’re not going to, right?” Lightfoot interjected. “NDAs, courts across the land have said they’re not enforceable. You should break the NDA.”
Buttigieg gave a noncommittal response: “I’m going to give them a chance to do the right thing, and then we’ll take it from there.”
The exchange marked the highlight of the 30minute sit-down between the two mayors, a discussion that capped a night of interviews with four other presidential candidates, Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, former U.S. Housing Secretary Julian Castro, New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker and billionaire philanthropist Tom Steyer. Those interviews were routine, with the candidates fielding unsurprising questions about infrastructure, health care and gun violence.
“In fairness, I’m going to throw you some softballs,” Lightfoot told Buttigieg on stage at the top of the sit-down. “And I’m going to throw a few high and tight to see how you do as well.”
The Chicago mayor delivered.
Lightfoot played the role of pesky reporter as much as she did a friendly fellow politician. While she did ask relatively easy questions on immigration, infrastructure, gun violence and gerrymandering, Lightfoot also twice prodded Buttigieg on the perception that he’s been unable to connect with black voters, in addition to the questions about his work at McKinsey.
“You’re aware that one of the kind of persistent narratives about your campaign is the challenge that you’re having connecting with black folks, and obviously we’re not a monolith, we’re very, very different and there’s lots of nuance,” Lightfoot said while asking Buttigieg about why the perception exists and how his experiences in dealing with the “challenges of a black community” in South Bend might inform his presidency.
The South Bend mayor replied by noting how his administration worked to remedy abandoned housing in the city’s predominantly black West Side and had worked to start improving the historic disparity in public investment that came with redlining in the city. He then talked about his proposals to drive more federal money to African American communities and to encourage black business ownership.
“That all sounds right, and frankly, it’s a lot of the things we’re talking about in Chicago and across the country, but help us understand why you think there’s been a disconnect,” Lightfoot followed up. “You’re saying the right things, you got the experience with a diverse community in South Bend, yet, you’re having a difficulty connecting with the black community. Why do you think that is, and what do you do to bridge that divide?”
Buttigieg started by giving his stock answer that he’s “new on the scene,” and by noting that a majority of black voters in South Carolina don’t know enough about him to have an opinion, so as a result, he’s got to “introduce myself in double time.” But he also said he comes from a city with a “complicated history” and talked about the “anguish” South Bend endured over the summer shooting of a black resident by a police officer, which put a lack of trust in the city’s police department on national display.
Part of the way he’ll address the challenge, he told Lightfoot, would be to have black voices from South Bend help validate his work as mayor. During a recent three-state swing through the Deep South, Buttigieg was accompanied by South Bend council member Sharon McBride, who is African American.
“One of the things we’ve seen is that the black voters who know me best, in South Bend, that’s where we have a lot of our best support,” Buttigieg said. “And so we’ll be working to make sure that the voices that are on the trail with me are able to speak to the South Bend story, so it’s not just me talking about it.”
Buttigieg’s McKinsey work has come up periodically during the campaign, but even more so in the last few days. That has included criticism from Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren for failing to disclose his clients and a New York Times story on Thursday that laid out the mostly unknown nature of his private sector work, followed by a Times editorial Friday entitled “Buttigieg’s untenable vow of silence” that called on him to disclose more about his time at McKinsey.
The South Bend mayor has repeatedly cited the nondisclosure agreement and called on McKinsey to release him from it. In a nod to the growing criticism, however, Buttigieg’s campaign released additional information Friday night but stopped short of listing specific clients.
During his time at McKinsey, Buttigieg was based out of the firm’s Chicago office, but traveled frequently. The campaign disclosed the following:
In 2007, Buttigieg worked on a study in Michigan for a nonprofit health insurance provider “undertaking onthe-job training and performing analytical work” to identify “savings in administration and overhead costs.”
In 2008, he worked in Toronto, serving a grocery and retail chain for six months, “analyzing the effects of price cuts” on various combinations of products. He also worked in Chicago for a consumer goods retail chain on a “project to investigate opportunities for selling more energy-efficient home products in their stores.”
In 2008 and 2009, Buttigieg worked in Connecticut on “research to combat climate change through energy efficiency,” sponsored by a group that included the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy and the Natural Resources Defense Council.
In 2009, he worked in California, serving an environmental nonprofit on a “study to research opportunities in energy efficiency and renewable energy.”
In 2009 Buttigieg worked in Washington, D.C., with “visits to Iraq and Afghanistan,” serving a “U.S. government department in a project focused on increasing employment and entrepreneurship in those countries’ economies.” While in Washington, he also worked on a study to “analyze new sources of revenue” for a logistics and shipping provider.
Revelations about McKinsey’s work around the world in recent years has brought negative attention to the firm known for hiring and developing some of the nation’s brightest young workers.
That includes its work with Purdue Pharma on efforts to “turbocharge” opioid sales, its part in a South
African corruption scandal and its consulting for the Chinese and Saudi Arabian governments. A recent ProPublica and New York Times investigation also revealed McKinsey consultants advised the U.S. Immigration and Customs and Enforcement to cut its spending on food for migrants and medical treatment for detainees.
Buttigieg denounced that latest revelation as “disgusting,” has noted he left McKinsey a decade ago and said “seeing what certain people in that firm have decided to do is extremely frustrating and extremely disappointing.”
In releasing the new but restrained information Friday night, Buttigieg said, “I understand why some are calling on me to break the agreement, but it’s important to me to keep my word and commitments.”
In a statement, the South Bend mayor said the bulk of his work at McKinsey came on three- or four-person teams “doing mathematical analysis, conducting research and preparing presentations.”
“I never worked on a project inconsistent with my values,” Buttigieg said. “And if asked to do so, I would have left the firm rather than participate.”