Attorneys at the law firm Kirkland & Ellis – home to Whitewater prosecutor Kenneth Starr – have donated more money to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign than to all the top Republican candidates combined.
Lawyers at Chicago-based Kirkland – also home to Bush administration official Jay Lefkowitz – have contributed $111,950 to Clinton and another $82,651 to fellow Democrat Barack Obama. Donations to Republicans Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney and John McCain total $84,750.
Kirkland attorneys gave 28 percent more to George Bush than to Al Gore in 2000, and 34 percent more to Bush than to John Kerry in 2004, Bloomberg.com reports.
In an even more glaring example of politics making for strange bedfellows, lawyers at the firm Jones Day, which represents the Republican National Committee, have contributed more than three times as much to Clinton, Obama and John Edwards than to GOP candidates.
"Firms want to be on the good side of who they think is going to be the incumbent, whether or not that person is good for business,” Bruce MacEwen, a nonpartisan legal consultant in New York, told Bloomberg. "The conventional wisdom is that the Democrats are going to win the White House.”
The largest contribution to Clinton’s campaign came from a law firm – $241,220 from the attorneys at DLA Piper. The fundraising efforts there were led in part by Jim Blanchard, a partner and former governor of Michigan.
Blanchard told Bloomberg that the shift to Democrats "has a lot to do with the war in Iraq, Guantanamo, torture” and controversies surrounding Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.
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