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Vice President Kamala Harris cultivated relationships with many tech moguls as attorney general of California. "That looks terrible, like they've purchased access to justice, or purchased their way out of accountability and transparency." Facebook and its executives, in fact, donated $20,100 to Harris' reelection fund from 2012 to 2014. "How does it look if this company winds up being a donor to an attorney general's campaign?" Pearson said. Bruce Green, who leads the Louis Stein Center for Law and Ethics at Fordham Law School, called it "misleading or irresponsible to promise not to initiate an investigation without first telling the company." And Melba Pearson, who cochairs the prosecution function committee of the American Bar Association, said the meeting as described was "inappropriate" and "problematic." "I am making promises that have nothing behind them."īut two independent legal experts consulted by Insider said the exchange, as described by Castleberry's email, went far beyond normal regulatory practice. "I am basically making nice," he told Insider. Morgester also downplayed the meeting's significance. "As is common with state attorneys general offices, we simply noted that we hoped to keep the lines of communication open and work with them if they had concerns," she said. Jamie Radice, a representative for Facebook, told Insider the meeting was routine. It's not uncommon for regulators to have informal conversations with representatives from the companies they oversee. She clearly wasn't on the case." (The email, marked "highly confidential," was buried among thousands of pages of court-sealed documents that leaked in 2019.)
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"Oh wow, that's in writing?" said a former senior Harris aide who worked in the attorney general's office, when told of the email. According to an internal Facebook email summarizing the meeting, which has not been previously reported on, Morgester assured Castleberry that Facebook had nothing to fear: "The meeting went well and we were left with several useful assurances about the AG's intentions - the most important being that they view Facebook as a good actor and they will keep communications with us open (we will not unknowingly be the subject of an investigation)." Less than a week after Harris announced the Privacy Unit, Will Castleberry, a lobbyist for Facebook, met with Robert Morgester, the senior attorney from Harris' office who would lead the new regulatory unit. But at the federal level, Facebook was under scrutiny by the Federal Trade Commission, an investigation that would eventually cost the company $5 billion. In California, the company still had the halo of a fast-growing, wealth-generating startup. The unit was intended to fill a void left by a state-run privacy office that had lost its funding in the midst of a budget crisis.įacebook was worried. Harris had just announced that her office was launching a new Privacy Unit meant to "hold accountable those who misuse technology" and "enforce laws regulating the collection, retention, disclosure, and destruction" of personal data. The answer, as conveyed by Harris' office, was "more friend than foe." In the summer of 2012, a lawyer working for Kamala Harris, who was attorney general of California at the time, addressed a policy question that would loom large in the years to come: What approach should the government take when it comes to regulating Facebook?