(FiveNation.com)- According to a report in the New York Post, over 80 former paid staffers for Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer leveraged their time with Schumer to land prestigious positions at Big Tech companies like Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Apple.
The Post compiled data from publicly available filings at LegiStorm, an online data repository on congressional staffers and their compensation. It reviewed about 600 former Schumer staffers over the last 20 years and cross-referenced their employment history.
According to the Post, the Schumer-to-Big-Tech pipeline is significant because, as Majority Leader, Schumer is the one who decides if legislation to rein in Big Tech gets a vote in the US Senate. And thus far, Schumer has been dragging his feet.
The Senate Judiciary Committee voted in January to advance two bills, the US Internet Innovation and Choice Act and the Open Marketplace Apps Act, to full the full Senate. However, Schumer has yet to bring them to the Senate floor for a vote.
It should also be noted that Schumer’s daughter, Jessica is a registered lobbyist at Amazon while his other daughter Alison works as a product marketing manager at Facebook.
In the current election cycle, Google employees and the company’s PAC have donated $200,000 to Chuck Schumer. Though the true amount from Big Tech going to the Senate Majority Leader and his leadership PAC isn’t known as the majority of it comes from dark money donors.
One former Senate staffer told the Post that Schumer is the one person standing in the way of bipartisan legislation to rein in Google, Apple, and Amazon. The staffer blamed this on Schumer’s cozy relationship with Big Tech, including the number of former staffers who now work there.
Among those former staffers is David Hantman, who worked as Schumer’s chief of staff before taking a top job at Yahoo and Airbnb. Now Hantman, whose wife worked as Google’s in-house lobbyist, has opened his own tech lobbying firm.
Schumer’s former chief counsel, Stefanie Martz took a job at Monument Policy Group where she worked as a lobbyist for Amazon and Google.
Former staffer Marisa Hawley, who worked for Schumer from 2019 to 2021, is now with Information Technology Industry Council where she is a lobbyist for such clients as Google and Amazon.
Read the full report in the New York Post HERE.
