Trump Appointee Intervened in Oracle Case

[mahatmakanejeeves]

Source: New York Times

Trump Appointee Intervened in Oracle Case
A litigator asserts that she faced reprisal after saying Secretary Eugene Scalia was set to settle a discrimination suit for a sum she found too low.

By Noam Scheiber, David McCabe and Maggie Haberman
Aug. 13, 2020
Updated 3:53 p.m. ET

A senior Labor Department lawyer contends she faces removal from her job after objecting to Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia's intervention in a pay discrimination case against Oracle, a tech giant with close White House connections.

Oracle has a lot at stake in the case, which originated in the Obama administration: potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in back pay for female, African-American and Asian-American employees who the department said were paid less than white and male counterparts.

Ordinarily such a case would be left to career employees. But Janet Herold, who has overseen the litigation, asserts in a complaint filed last week with a federal investigative agency that Mr. Scalia broke with normal department practice in seeking a settlement and abused his authority, according to her lawyers.

A Labor Department official with knowledge of the Oracle case said he had heard a similar account. The official said Ms. Herold had told him that a superior informed her shortly before the case went to trial last year that Mr. Scalia intended to settle it for less than $40 million.

{snip}

The effort to reassign Ms. Herold was reported this week by Bloomberg Law. (1)

One current and one former Labor Department official with knowledge of the case said that the department's scrutiny of the work of Ms. Herold's legal team increased significantly after Mr. Scalia took over as labor secretary. The officials said that Solicitor Kate O'Scannlain, the Labor Department's top lawyer, began making line edits in legal briefs that the team planned to file in court, which she had not previously done. One of the officials said that it was reasonable for her to take an interest in important court filings but that he was surprised that Ms. O'Scannlain, who supervises hundreds of lawyers, would involve herself on such a granular level.

According to two former Labor Department officials with knowledge of the case, President Trump's first labor secretary, Alexander Acosta, rebuffed a request by Oracle's chief executive, Safra Catz, who had been a member of Mr. Trump's transition team, to discuss the case in early 2018. Mr. Acosta told Oracle that the company should discuss the case with the Labor Department's legal office following a longstanding custom in which the solicitor's office handles litigation, those officials said.

{snip}

Noam Scheiber is a Chicago-based reporter who covers workers and the workplace. He spent nearly 15 years at The New Republic magazine, where he covered economic policy and three presidential campaigns. He is also the author of “The Escape Artists.” @noamscheiber

David McCabe covers tech policy. He joined The Times from Axios in 2019.

Maggie Haberman is a White House correspondent. She joined The Times in 2015 as a campaign correspondent and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for reporting on President Trump’s advisers and their connections to Russia. @maggieNYT

(1) https://news.bloomberglaw.com/daily-labor-report/federal-litigator-behind-oracle-lawsuit-being-reassigned-by-dol

Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/13/business/economy/oracle-settlement-scalia.html

---

Hat tip, Joe.My.God.

Lawsuit Claims Labor Sec Interfered In Oracle Case
August 13, 2020

https://www.joemygod.com/2020/08/lawsuit-claims-labor-sec-interfered-in-oracle-case/

-- -- -- -- -- --

Noam Scheiber, David McCabe, and Maggie Haberman:

https://twitter.com/noamscheiber

https://twitter.com/dmccabe

https://twitter.com/maggieNYT

[mahatmakanejeeves]

1. Federal Litigator Behind Oracle Lawsuit Being Reassigned by DOL

Federal Litigator Behind Oracle Lawsuit Being Reassigned by DOL
Aug. 10, 2020, 8:59 PM

• Janet Herold, West Coast solicitor, slated for OSHA post
• Herold to file retaliation complaint if change is made

U.S. Labor Department leadership is moving to reassign its top West Coast litigator, Janet Herold, who spearheaded a series of employment discrimination lawsuits against Silicon Valley tech giants, including a pending case against Oracle Corp., Bloomberg Law has learned.

Herold, an Obama-era career appointee who serves as the department’s Regional Solicitor for San Francisco and head of branch offices in Los Angeles and Seattle, was told in a meeting late last month that Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia is transferring her from the Office of the Solicitor to DOL’s occupational safety agency where she will head the Chicago office, three sources briefed on the matter said. The sources spoke on condition of anonymity.

DOL’s chief solicitor, Trump appointee Kate O’Scannlain, informed Herold of the involuntary transfer late last month. Earlier this year, Herold wrote a memo to DOL leadership to complain that Scalia, in her view, was intervening in DOL’s high-profile pay-bias lawsuit against Oracle by attempting to reach a low-ball settlement, the sources said. She’s also clashed with political leadership at DOL headquarters over the last three years, current and former administration officials told Bloomberg Law.

The transfer has yet to be finalized. Herold, who has hired civil rights lawyer Debra Katz, plans to file a complaint with the U.S. Office of Special Counsel alleging retaliation against a whistleblower if the department follows its verbal order with a formal notice of involuntary reassignment, the sources said.

Herold has gained a reputation since her appointment in 2012 as an aggressive fighter for worker justice who’s willing to take cases to trial that other DOL litigators would’ve been more likely to settle. Her reassignment would remove one of the department’s most consequential senior litigators from a region that’s ideally placed to pursue employment discrimination claims against major tech companies. But the change also would place her in a leadership role at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, a federal agency on the front lines of pandemic response.

A DOL spokesman declined to comment on the Oracle case or the ongoing personnel matter, but said that Scalia “has never had any communications with Oracle or its attorneys concerning the Department’s litigation against the company, or any settlement discussions.” Katz and an associate didn’t immediately provide a response when reached for comment.

The department’s case against Oracle, filed in the final days of the Obama administration, alleges the technology giant underpaid female and minority employees and owes them $400 million. Herold’s role in overseeing the long-running litigation, which awaits an initial ruling that could come any day now, put her in the crosshairs of two of President Donald Trump‘s corporate allies—Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, a billionaire who has raised money for the president, and Oracle CEO Safra Catz, who was on Trump’s transition team.

{snip}

Debra Katz?

https://www.google.com/search?q=debra+katz+site:democraticunderground.com

Fri May 8, 2020: A federal agency has found grounds to believe the administration was retaliating against Bright.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

2. Eugene is son of deceased Justice Scalia. Apple, tree, distance. . . . nt

[elleng]

5. I don't recall anything about 'improprieties' by the elder Scalia

(I may be forgetting.)

[mahatmakanejeeves]

3. Additional paragraphs

Oracle has long been proactive in trying to influence legislation and regulation in Washington, spending $8.2 million on federal lobbying last year, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. And its top executives have built something rare among their tech industry peers: a close relationship with President Trump and his administration.

When Ms. Catz, the chief executive, joined the Trump transition team, most tech executives were still sizing up the incoming administration. “I plan to tell the president-elect that we are with him and are here to help in any way we can,” she said before a meeting between Mr. Trump and tech chief executives in December 2016.

Bloomberg News has reported that at a dinner in April 2018, Ms. Catz spoke with Mr. Trump about Oracle’s yearslong fight with Amazon and other companies over a $10 billion Pentagon cloud computing contract, though the Pentagon later announced that Oracle was out of the running because it hadn’t met the minimum requirements for the project.

The company’s executive chairman, Larry Ellison, hosted a fund-raiser for President Trump this year at his estate in Rancho Mirage, Calif. And the two men discussed the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine as a potential treatment for the coronavirus, according to a person familiar with the discussion. Mr. Trump came to be an evangelist for the drug, despite a lack of scientific evidence about its efficacy for such use.

[elleng]

4. CLEARLY Scalia should have recused,

and been hands off.

[riversedge]

6. I hope the Trump Adm gets smacked down!) (I dream