John Podesta

John Podesta (2014)

John David Podesta (born January 15, 1949 in Chicago ) is an American political advisor . He was the 23rd Chief of Staff of the White House from 1998 to 2001 during the past two years of Bill Clinton's presidency . He currently chairs the Center for American Progress , a progressive think tank . He also holds a visiting professorship in law at Georgetown University in Washington.

He also led the transition team of Barack Obama , the staff selection and preparation for the government takeover after the successful presidential election November 4, 2008 organized. In December 2013, John Podesta was reappointed as a White House advisor. He worked there until April 2015, when he took over the presidential campaign for Hillary Clinton .

The way to the White House

The son of an Italian father and a Greek mother, Podesta spent most of his early years in Chicago . He graduated from Knox College in Illinois in 1971 . He then went to Georgetown University , where he graduated in 1976. As a lawyer, he worked in the Ministry of Justice's talented program in its department for natural resources from 1976 to 1977. From 1978 to 1979 he worked as a special assistant to the head of the government agency ACTION.

Politically, he made his first political appearance on Capitol Hill in 1978: he became an advisor to the Senate Legal Committee . Other posts followed: from 1987 to 1988 as a consultant on the Agriculture Committee; Advisor to Senate Subcommittee on Patents, Copyright and Trademarks; also for security and terrorism; and for administrative reforms. From 1995 to 1996 he advised the Democratic Senator Tom Daschle . He was also a member of the United States Administrative Conference and the United States Commission on protecting and reducing government secrecy.

Lobbying

In 1988, with his brother Tony, John Podesta founded Podesta Associates, Inc. , a paid company that provides government contacts and public relations . She has close ties to the Democratic Party and the Clinton family, as well as the Clinton Foundation. The company was u. a. working on behalf of BP and the defense companies Lockheed Martin , General Dynamics (manufacturer of the Predator drone), United Technologies , and others a. for the states of Albania , Egypt , Azerbaijan , Georgia , Saudi Arabia and Sberbank . The Panama Papers revealed the scope of these connections.

Collaboration with Bill Clinton

From January 1993 to 1995 he was assistant to the president, contact person for staff, and chairman political advisor. Later he was also the President's personal assistant and deputy chief of staff. In 1998 he was appointed chief of staff; he held this post until the end of Clinton's tenure.

Podesta has spoken out under Clinton, as in the rest of his career, for greater openness of the US government and the dismantling of state secrets.

2006 to 2013

In March 2006 he was made an honorary patron of the University Philosophical Society . He still serves as president of the think tank Center for American Progress , which he co-founded. As a visiting professor at Georgetown University, he teaches students the intricacies of congressional investigations and the fundamentals of technology law. He also works for the Constitution Project think tank on the Committee on Freedom and Security.

Under Barack Obama

Following the election of Barack Obama as President, Podesta was appointed head of the transition team. Its task was, on the one hand, to ensure the smooth transition of government responsibility and, on the other hand, to prepare opportunities and priorities for political changes. In particular, candidates for filling several hundred positions in government and administration had to be checked.

In late 2013, Podesta was brought back to the White House by President Barack Obama . He was given the task of coordinating the president's climate policy . After legislative measures have failed, the Environmental Protection Agency gets the backing of the White House to classify carbon dioxide as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act . This is linked to the extensive competence of the EPA to require and implement measures to reduce CO ₂ emissions. As a politically experienced lawyer, Podesta is supposed to support Interior Minister Sally Jewell as the superior of the EPA in making this shift in the approach from legislative to executive legally unassailable. Podesta is also responsible for the program to take renewable forms of energy into account in all decisions. He is said to have had a significant influence on the mindsets of industrial policy in the United States.

He was also involved in the designation of 16 National Monuments . During the Clinton administration he was able to achieve the protection of 19 areas as national monuments.

Podesta also represented other topics: In April 2014, Podesta submitted a report to the President in which a working group under his leadership made suggestions on data protection and the protection of privacy in big data applications by companies. In addition to an obligation to disclose data loss and unjustified access and the expansion of data protection rights to non-Americans, the report also calls for the prevention of discrimination through correlations in databases. While big data applications are suitable for determining the damage patterns of flood events, there is a risk that they would lose established protection against discrimination in questions of housing, creditworthiness, jobs, health, education and consumer rights. In June 2014, he represented the United States at a cyber dialogue event organized by the German Foreign Office in Berlin and explained the US government’s reactions to the global surveillance and espionage affair . Podesta was initially only committed to the White House for one year, but extended it to spring 2015 at the end of 2014 in order to take care of the time until Obama's next State of the Union Address .

Campaign Manager for Hillary Clinton

In April 2015, Podesta resigned from the White House to take over the presidential campaign team for Hillary Clinton . On April 12, 2015, he presented her candidacy. Behind the top Podesta were the campaign manager Robby Mook , who is responsible for operational and strategic business, and Huma Abedin, deputy head of the campaign , in positions two and three of the team .

In the course of the Russian data hacking of democratic servers during the election campaign , Wikileaks published e-mails between Podesta and Clinton, the content of which was sometimes seen as incriminating for Clinton.

After Clinton's defeat by Donald Trump , Podesta responded in an interview that he sometimes feels guilty about Trump being president.

"I feel terrible. It was our job to win and we screwed it up. The fact that we gave Donald Trump the keys to the White House and the codes for the nuclear weapons case crushes my soul and is a heavy burden for everyone who carried responsibility in our election campaign. "

He has since returned to serve as President of the Center for American Progress.

Fonts

• with John Halpin: The Power of Progress. How America's Progressives Can (Once Again) Save Our Economy, Our Climate, and Our Country. Crown, New York NY 2008, ISBN 978-0-307-38255-9 .

Web links

Commons : John Podesta  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Center for American Progress: Biography ( Memento from June 26, 2012 in the Internet Archive )
• National Journal: The audacity of John Podesta , November 22, 2014 - Portrait of Podesta as Obama's advisor

Individual evidence

1. ↑ New appointments in the White House: Obama brings Clinton's chief of staff into the spiegel.de team
2. ↑ ^{a b} The Return of John Podesta nytimes.com, accessed December 16, 2013
3. ↑ REPORT of the COMMISSION ON PROTECTING AND REDUCING GOVERNMENT SECRECY. (No longer available online.) United States Government Printing Office , 1997, archived from the original on December 16, 2008 ; Retrieved November 18, 2008 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
4. ^ Ben Norton: With Saudi and Russian ties, Clinton machine's tentacles are far reaching, according to Panama Papers. In: www.salon.com, April 8, 2016.
5. ^ Clinton aide slams Pentagon's UFO secrecy. CNN, October 22, 2002, accessed December 1, 2008 . 
6. ↑ change.gov: Transition staff ( memento of the original from October 24, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
7. ↑ change.gov: Overview of the Transition ( Memento of the original from October 27, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
8. ^ Whitehouse.gov: Counselor to the President John Podesta ( Memento February 10, 2015 in the Internet Archive )
9. ↑ National Journal: The audacity of John Podesta ( Memento of the original from August 10, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , November 22, 2014 
10. ↑ Elizabeth Shogren: John Podesta: Legacy maker . In: High Country News . May 25, 2015 ( hcn.org ).
11. ^ New York Times: Call for Limits on Web Data of Customers , May 1, 2014
12. ↑ Cyber ​​dialogue. Better not ask Snowden on September 11th. Zeit Online, June 27, 2014
13. ↑ He pulls the strings for Hillary Clinton. In: Der Tagesspiegel , April 13, 2015.
14. ↑ Podesta Says 'She's In'. In: The New York Times , April 12, 2015.
15. ^ Clinton Campaign Chair John Podesta on President Trump. In: Spiegel Online , May 5, 2017.