Harris Campaign Officials Holding Event With Reid Hoffman

In a Friday news dump, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, under fire for explicitly stating on national television that Kamala Harris should fire Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan if she became president, tried to backpedal. “I’ve never spoken with Vice President Harris about Lina Khan, or even about the FTC generally. “I have never demanded, nor would I ever presume to demand, that Vice President Harris fire Lina Khan if she becomes President,” Hoffman said in a long post on X. He also pledged his support to Harris regardless of her views on Khan, and even credited Khan for her work tackling junk fees and noncompete agreements, things which have come up in Harris campaign speeches.

This was certainly a better approach for Hoffman than claiming he is in fact two people, a donor and also an “expert” who gives policy advice. That was met with exactly the kind of skepticism it deserved. Anyone with the slightest knowledge of politics recognizes that a large donor with extended access to a political candidate elevates their chances of seeing their political preferences made into reality.

We now know that Hoffman is maintaining rather close access to this particular presidential candidate and her campaign. An invitation obtained by the Prospect which has not been previously reported asks “Business Leaders for Harris” to join a Zoom call with Hoffman and two members of the Harris campaign’s staff, policy director Grace Landrieu and campaign deputy chief of staff Sergio Gonzalez.

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The meeting, scheduled for Monday afternoon, invites business leaders “to talk about the race and what we can do together.” It also notes that “Vice President Kamala Harris has an impressive track record working with the private sector, including championing efforts to create opportunities for businesses of all sizes.”

While there have been many Zoom-based political rallies in the two weeks since Harris entered the presidential campaign, raising millions of dollars for the candidate, the majority of them have been grassroots-led and featured celebrities or Harris surrogates. This call with business leaders has two top officials from the Harris campaign, along with Hoffman, fresh from facing scrutiny about whether he is using his access as a donor to shape public policy.

Top Harris campaign staff holding a Zoom call with the ringleader of the push to oust Khan will not quiet concerns that big-money interests have the ear of the Vice President and her aides, or about her considerable ambiguity about economic policy issues more generally.

A query to Hoffman’s venture capital fund Greylock was also not returned. Harris spokesperson Lauren Hitt told the Prospect after publication that the Business Leaders for Harris Zoom is not an official campaign event, and that campaign officials have joined other coalition events that were not organized by the campaign.

Also joining the call is Deanne Millison, former chief economic adviser to the Vice President. Millison, now at Georgetown’s Institute of Politics and Public Service, was a legislative staffer in Harris’ Senate office, a legislative director for Rahm Emanuel when he was mayor of Chicago, and a corporate lawyer. She teaches an eight-week discussion group at Georgetown entitled “Corporations as Advocates: The Role Corporations Play in Advancing Social Issues.”

Though only two weeks old, Harris’s nascent campaign does have numerous ties to corporate interests. Harris’s brother-in-law, former high-ranking Justice Department official Tony West, is taking a leave of absence from his position as chief legal officer for Uber, which is currently suing the US Labor Department over independent contractor classification rules, to work in an unofficial capacity on the campaign. West is seen as a key campaign adviser. The law firm of Eric Holder, who was West’s boss at DOJ, was tasked with vetting vice-presidential hopefuls; Holder has represented Merck, Chiquita, Purdue Pharma, Swiss bank UBS, and Uber, and his law firm Covington & Burling represents several large financial institutions. Covington & Burling is also the lead counsel in Amazon’s antitrust case against the Justice Department. In another DOJ antitrust case, Google hired as its lead trial attorney Karen Dunn, who was advising Harris on debate strategy when she was practicing to take on JD Vance before President Biden dropped out of the presidential race.

Gonzalez, who is joining the Reid Hoffman call, has been a campaign strategist to the Vice President for several years, and has recently taken what The Washington Post has called a “more senior role” in the campaign. Landrieu has worked at the National Economic Council since January 2023, and before that at the Domestic Policy Council. She is a holdover from the Biden campaign.

Hoffman has delivered $10 million to a super PAC that is now supporting Harris. It has been reported that he is planning to co-host a fundraiser for Harris, as well as what has been called a “Silicon Valley fundraising swing.” Hoffman is also one of over 700 venture capitalists who signed on to “VCs for Kamala,” seen as a pushback to a prior spurt in support inside the tech industry for former president Donald Trump.

Mainstream Democrats PAC, which Hoffman backs and is often aligned with big-money crypto and pro-Israel organizations to oppose progressives in Democratic primaries, has raised about $3.4 million this cycle and spent close to $1.5 million thus far.

The explicit call for firing Khan invited widespread opposition from virtually all ideological factions of the party, from Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren on the left to Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-NV), a frontliner facing a tough re-election campaign, in the center. Several unions have defended Khan; at least one union leader personally told Harris in a phone call that Khan needed to stay in office to continue her work, the Prospect has learned.

One nonprofit political advocacy group, Grab Your Wallet Alliance, publicly split with Hoffman, who was one of their major funders. “This is not the time for tech billionaires to be airing their grievances,” Grab Your Wallet president Shannon Coulter said in a statement.

Political advocates have questioned the self-serving nature of Hoffman and others openly stating preferences that are usually expressed behind closed doors. It “makes it nearly impossible for Harris to (do Hoffman’s bidding) without it seeming as if she’s kowtowing to donor interests,” The New York Times wrote. But it hasn’t stopped the Harris campaign from cooperating on events with Hoffman.

In his post on X, Hoffman said, “As for Lina Khan, I think her ongoing efforts to dismantle companies weakens America’s innovation economy. I spoke up here, because the impact on how we invest and create the next generation of entrepreneurial companies is real—as is her attempt to limit how effectively large technology companies can compete globally.” Left unmentioned was the fact that Khan’s FTC is investigating Microsoft, on whose board Hoffman sits, and Inflection AI, an investment of his VC firm Greylock, for violating the antitrust laws. Microsoft hired most of Inflection’s staff and paid the startup $650 million in an “acqui-hire” decision that was not disclosed to antitrust authorities as a merger.

This story has been updated with a statement from a Harris campaign spokesperson.