Last week the New York Times reported that Covington & Burling, one of Washington’s most politically connected law firms, had served as legal counsel for ActBlue — the Democratic Party’s primary online fundraising platform.
The arrangement ended badly. In early 2025, Covington issued internal memos warning ActBlue’s leadership that its donor screening practices created what the firm called “substantial risk” of facilitating illegal foreign campaign contributions — and that the organization’s CEO faced potential personal criminal liability over a letter she had sent to Congress. ActBlue, which processed $3.8 billion in contributions to Democratic candidates and causes during the 2024 election cycle, fired Covington, accusing the firm of counsel that “bordered on malpractice.” A Department of Justice investigation into ActBlue’s practices is ongoing.
The episode tells you something important about what kind of law firm Covington & Burling is. But it is only one chapter in a larger story — one that involves some of America’s biggest corporations, a pressure campaign organized by Democrat-aligned labor unions, and a senior Covington partner who billed corporate clients nearly $2,300 an hour to conduct racial equity reviews while simultaneously chairing the Democratic Party’s congressional redistricting operation.
That partner is Eric H. Holder Jr. (pictured above), the 82nd Attorney General of the United States under President Barack Obama. Holder did not disguise his political identity while serving as the nation’s chief law enforcement officer. In 2013, when asked on Tom Joyner’s radio show whether he planned to resign, Holder replied: “I’m still enjoying what I’m doing, there’s still work to be done. I’m still the president’s wingman, so I’m there with my boy.”
Upon leaving the Justice Department in 2015 he joined Covington as senior counsel, and in 2017 he co-founded the National Democratic Redistricting Committee with Barack Obama — a partisan 527 PAC whose IRS filings describe its mission as building “a comprehensive plan to favorably position Democrats for the redistricting process.”
Holder’s partisan worldview was on full display at a 2018 Georgia campaign rally, where he revised Michelle Obama‘s famous motto for a Democratic crowd: “When they go low, we go high? No. No. When they go low, we kick them. That’s what this new Democratic Party is about.”
This is the man that Starbucks, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, BlackRock, Verizon, and Uber paid to certify their racial justice compliance.
The mechanism that delivered these clients to Holder began after the death of George Floyd in 2020. The Service Employees International Union and its affiliated SOC Investment Group launched a campaign filing shareholder proposals at major financial institutions and corporations, demanding independent racial equity audits — independent reviews of company policies, hiring practices, products, and services through a racial justice lens. When companies agreed to conduct audits, the proposals were withdrawn. Companies chose their own auditors and were not directed to Covington by name.
But the activist ecosystem made clear what it would and would not accept. When JPMorgan Chase attempted to satisfy the pressure by engaging PricewaterhouseCoopers — a financial auditing firm rather than a civil rights law firm — SOC publicly savaged the result, accusing the bank of “a basic misunderstanding of what a racial equity audit is and should be.” The message was unmistakable: financial auditors need not apply. Covington, which had landed Starbucks in 2018, was the established market leader among the approved civil rights firms. Corporate clients followed.
Citigroup became the first major U.S. bank to engage Covington for a racial equity audit in October 2021, following pressure from SOC. Wells Fargo followed suit in September 2022. BlackRock, Verizon, and Uber engaged Covington in subsequent years. At each company, Holder’s engagement — reportedly billed at $2,295 per hour — produced a report presented to shareholders as an independent, objective review of civil rights compliance.
What those reports recommended is telling. At Starbucks, Holder’s 2021 report recommended tying executive compensation to racial diversity targets, setting spending goals for “diverse suppliers,” and expanding a mentorship program for BIPOC employees. Each initiative, he wrote, demonstrated Starbucks’ “commitment to civil rights and equal treatment.” At no point did the report address whether those recommendations exposed Starbucks to legal liability under existing civil rights law — a question that courts would subsequently be asked to examine.
The BlackRock engagement produced a different kind of problem. In its 2023 audit report on the asset management giant, Covington praised BlackRock for using its proxy votes to pressure other corporations into conducting racial equity audits — the same kind of audit Covington was being paid to perform. Holder’s firm was publicly endorsing the shareholder pressure campaign that was generating Holder’s firm’s own business. The conflict was not disclosed.
Around the same time, Wells Fargo — a Covington racial equity audit client — gave the NAACP a $50 million grant, described by the civil rights organization as the single largest corporate donation in its history. The grant and the Covington billing appear in separate ledgers. They belong to the same story.
The political profile of the firm conducting all of this work is not ambiguous. Derek Muller, a law professor at Notre Dame, has conducted the most rigorous publicly available analysis of political giving among the top 150 AmLaw firms. His 2025 findings: in the 2023–2024 election cycle, Covington employees sent $1,093,307 to Democratic-affiliated outlets and $9,053 to Republican-affiliated outlets — a ratio of 99.2% Democratic. The previous cycle registered 98.2%. Chambers USA describes Covington’s political law practice as “bipartisan.” The Federal Election Commission data tells a different story.
The corporations that hired Holder presented these engagements to their shareholders as independent, objective civil rights reviews. What they actually purchased was access to a senior partner at one of Washington’s most politically homogeneous Democratic law firms, at nearly $2,300 an hour, through a process driven by Democratic-aligned union funds that had every interest in the outcome. Whether that constitutes genuine corporate accountability or an expensive protection payment to the Democratic legal establishment is a question NLPC intends to pursue.
Next week: Covington was not the only firm in the approved racial equity auditor ecosystem — and the others tell exactly the same political story.
