Officials at an obscure federal agency with a history of steering contracting dollars to its own staffers and their friends hired its director’s immediate past employer, then tried to hide it.
Legal paperwork shows that in a 2012 Equal Employment Opportunity complaint brought by an employee, in which then-director George Cohen was the named defendant, the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service was represented by the law firm of Bredhoff & Kaiser.
Cohen was a lawyer at that firm until he retired in December 2005. He was appointed by President Obama to lead FMCS in 2009.
Cohen signed a White House Office of Government Ethics statement saying that “I also will not participate personally and substantially in any particular matter involving specific parties in which Bredhoff & Kaiser is a party or represents a party unless I am first authorized.”
In this case, Bredhoff & Kaiser represented a party in a matter he participated in — because he was that party.
Authorization would be provided by the agency’s general counsel, Dawn Starr, who worked for Cohen, and who, according to federal regulations would have to determine that “the interest of the government … outweighs the concern that a reasonable person may question the integrity of the agency’s programs and operations.”
FMCS refused to say whether it had granted any such authorization.
The ethics agreement signed in 2009 also said that in each year since he retired in 2005, he had been paid partnership shares by the firm for work that took place during his time there, and that he would seek a separate written waiver from the White House if he had involvement “in any particular matter that has a direct and predicable effect on the ability or willingness of Bredhoff & Kaiser to pay.” No such written waiver was obtained, though the hiring of the firm did not necessarily run afoul of that clause.
Cohen resigned from FMCS in 2013 after the Washington Examiner reported that he had overseen rampant financial impropriety, including using government funds to purchase artwork created by his wife.
His then-deputy, Allison Beck, signed off on using Bredhoff & Kaiser for FMCS legal work. Beck has been nominated by Obama to replace Cohen and is awaiting Senate confirmation.
No payments to Bredhoff & Kaiser appear in USASpending.gov, which is supposed to list all government contracts over $25,000. A search of FedBizOpps.gov, which coordinates opportunities for competitive bidding, shows no opportunities to bid on legal work for FMCS.
The firm has done work on multiple cases for years for FMCS and the charges are virtually certain to have exceeded that threshold.
FMCS has a history of using purchase cards and other under-the-table payments to minimize red tape and get around federal procurement regulations that require competitive bidding.
For example, in 2008 it paid $85,000 to the Paper’s Edge, a phantom company created by a just-retired employee. No one could say what services were provided, and the payments were made via credit card rather than by putting the work up for bid as is required.
“FMCS’ use of purchase cards to procure legal services is questionable, but so, too, is obtaining legal services from a firm that had ties to then-director George Cohen,” said Scott Amey, general counsel of the Project on Government Oversight.
“The revolving door is about placing personal or private interests above the interests of the public. Rewarding friends and trying to keep the transactions out of public view concerns me and it deserves a look by government investigators.”
Employees say Beck continues to casually send work to favored vendors without going through the contracting process.
FMCS is ostensibly a nonpartisan mediator between public and private employers and their unions. It has some 200 employees and a budget of $50 million. (Read the Examiner’s 5-part series on the agency’s troubles.)
Bredhoff & Kaiser is a fiercely pro-union law firm, though ironically, it was representing management in this case. The agency paid to settle the EEO complaint, in which several employees alleged they were discriminated against because they were women.
Bredhoff’s website boasts that “a Union’s Use of Intense Economic Pressure to Achieve Its Objectives Is Not Extortion and Cannot Be the Basis of a RICO Action.”
“With the firm’s broad representation of labor federations, international unions, and local unions, most often as litigation counsel, we have been characterized as ‘the voice of labor,’ ” the firm says.
Bredhoff attorney Dan Zirble, who worked on an FMCS EEO case, did not respond to an Examiner request for comment.
OGE financial disclosures show that Cohen has between $1 million and $5 million in a Bredhoff & Kaiser retirement plan, as well as a $17,000 annual pension from the United Steelworkers of America, for which he worked before joining the law firm.
Until just before taking his FMCS job, Cohen was a member of the National Hockey League Players’ Association’s advisory board. In 2012, he and FMCS mediated a collective bargaining agreement between the players and the league.
“I have had separate, informal discussions with the key representatives of the National Hockey League and the National Hockey League Players’ Association during the course of their negotiations for a successor collective bargaining agreement,” he said in a statement. In his ethics letter, he limited to one year the amount of time in which he would not be involved with that group as a government official.
FMCS has repeatedly farmed out legal work to Bredhoff & Kaiser. The firm was doing legal work on FMCS matters as recently as September of this year, defending Beck against an internal grievance accusing her of using government resources to benefit friends, paperwork shows.
Bredhoff partner Gary Kohlman headed up the work until he left to become general counsel for the National Basketball Association’s players union in October. FMCS has brokered high-profile negotiations between the NBA and its players union in recent years.
