Lanny Davis, Counsel to For-Profits, Now Representing Penn State
SOURCE:
Attorney Lanny Davis, a former White House special counsel, works the phone in his Washington office in 2004.
Penn State’s top administrator has brought on lawyer Lanny Davis to help reshape its image following the Jerry Sandusky scandal.
Davis is a former White House lawyer for Bill Clinton who, earlier this year, was helping for-profit colleges in their efforts to avoid accountability for their deceptive practices.
Davis—whom we’ve dubbed “The Fixer” because of his slew of image-building projects, including representing a business group “credited with backing a bloody coup in Honduras and committing egregious human rights violations” and helping a network of corporations fight against the Employee Free Choice Act—gained prominence while helping represent President Clinton during his impeachment trial.
Update: Responding recently to related charges regarding Honduras on our sister site Think Progress, Davis stated, “I am on the record as having opposed the illegal and indefensible deportation of Mr. Zelaya. Suggestions that I supported a military coup are simply false.” You can find an earlier, lengthier response from Davis covering both Honduras and Equatorial Guinea at the bottom of our earlier coverage, located here.
Davis is typically tapped to help solve huge crises—you know, like his $1 million gig to, according to the New York Times, “rebrand … the reportedly corrupt president of the oil-rich West African country Equatorial Guinea, [which is] accused of engaging in human rights violations and holding political prisoners”.
Now, he's now going back to school to help Penn State President Rodney Erickson.
Update: Davis says the Times story is false and that he was “hired by the President of Equatorial Guinea to implement a reform program of democracy, human rights and due process. It is a public fact that Nobel Laureate Arch Bishop Desmond Tutu wrote a letter to the President of Equatorial Guinea praising a speech written by Davis about the broad political, legal, and economic reform.” The letter from Desmond Tutu can be found here.
Last year, Campus Progress pressed Davis on why he held other media organizations, including us, to a higher ethical standard than his own work.
Watch out, Penn State: You’re in enough of a mess, having this guy around could make things even more complicated.
Brian Stewart is the journalism and online communications manager at Campus Progress.
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