Baker Consulted FCC General Counsel Frequently as She Considered Comcast Job
Meredith Baker and her aides consulted with FCC lawyers at least 10 times in the three-and-a-half weeks between when the then-commissioner began considering working for Comcast and when the cable operator hired her, agency records show. Emails between Baker and FCC General Counsel Austin Schlick and ethics official Patrick Carney in the Office of General Counsel (OGC) and Baker’s calendar entries were released to Warren Communications News, publisher of Communications Daily. The records confirm the accounts given publicly by FCC and Comcast officials that Baker consulted with the OGC before the date she says she began considering a job at the cable operator, and that she recused herself from any issues at the commission affecting the company. Of the 17 documents Warren received under a Freedom of Information Act request, six were completely blacked out and two were partly redacted.
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The FCC withheld that information from public release under an exemption of the act that lets agencies keep private “records pursuant to the deliberative process,” Associate General Counsel Joel Kaufman wrote Warren on June 27. Several emails between Baker and Schlick with the subject line “press is going to ask me” were redacted. Schlick sent the initial email with that subject line to Baker, and she responded, as the FCC’s monthly meeting wrapped up. Schlick was asked after the meeting by reporters about Baker’s recusal, as the job announcement was made the day before the commission met. Emails with the subject line “Letter to House Commerce Committee,” “recusal” and “voting” between Baker’s and Shlick’s offices were redacted.
The OGC was asked to voluntarily release the redacted materials by Warren. The publisher contended the exemption the FCC cited applied only to discussions about pending rulemakings and adjudications and not to recusals. The OGC declined to release the redacted documents, and Warren didn’t appeal to the full commission. An appeal “would be prohibitively expensive, and it could take years before the information became available,” President Daniel Warren said. But “we believe that we would prevail,” he said.
Baker met with Schlick and/or Carney three times starting April 18. That’s the day before Baker began holding what she called in an e-mail to the two OGC officials “exploratory conversations with NBC Universal about potential employment.” Comcast said May 11 it hired Baker as senior vice president working in Washington to help run NBCUniversal’s lobbying operations (CD May 13 p1). Spokespeople for Comcast and the FCC declined to comment for this article.
The commission documents confirm that Baker consulted with Schlick before she said she began job discussions with the cable operator. They also confirm she recused herself the day before such talks began from what she said in an e-mail were any broadcast or cable “matters that would have a direct and predictable effect on either NBC or Comcast.” Baker asked Schlick and Carney, assistant general counsel for ethics, on May 10 about whether she'd be restricted “for life” on advocating for NBCUniversal about conditions on its purchase of control by Comcast. Carney replied that there’s a “permanent” ban on representing any entity on the “’same’ particular matter” as the Comcast-NBCUniversal deal. “At least initially, that prohibition would reach any proceeding before the FCC involving” the companies’ compliance with or modification of enforcement of the deal’s conditions, Carney wrote. “It would not reach interactions, disputes or arbitrations between Comcast/NBCU and third parties (such as third-party programmers or network affiliates), even if they are affected by provisions in the merger conditions. Nor would it reach discussions with Congress about the merger conditions."
Such restrictions might change “over time,” Carney added. “Factual changes may result in items growing out of the merger no longer being treated as the ’same’ matter” when it comes to such restrictions, he wrote Baker. He said that would be “a fact-specific determination that would best be discussed” with the OGC when it came up. Baker forwarded Carney’s response to Kathy Zachem, who helps run Comcast’s regulatory operations in its Washington office, and Kyle McSlarrow, president of Comcast/NBCUniversal Washington, to whom the cable operator said Baker would report.