On Trump’s short list to run the SEC: an ex-U.S. attorney who’s an L.A. native
For half a decade, U.S. Atty. Debra Wong Yang was the last person corporations would want to hear from if they were operating at the edge of the law.
Now, she’s the first person they might call to defend that kind of accusation, as top crisis manager for one of the premiere corporate litigation firms in the country, the Los Angeles-based Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher.
For the record:
2:50 p.m. May 5, 2024An earlier version of this article stated that Debra Wong Yang was appointed in 2002 to California’s Central District court. She was appointed to the U.S. attorney’s office for the Central District of California.
That experience on both sides of the regulatory fence has reportedly vaulted her onto the short list to lead the Securities and Exchange Commission at a time when President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to loosen post-recession financial regulations enacted during the Obama administration.
Yang, a fourth-generation Angeleno who grew up in Chinatown, would replace Mary Jo White, who oversaw implementation of the landmark Dodd-Frank Act, signed by President Obama in 2010.
The financial reform law has been credited with protecting consumers from predatory lending practices and adding resilience to the banking sector after the 2006 implosion of the mortgage financing market. Critics, including Trump, have said the regulations imposed expensive burdens that have thwarted lending and investment, dampening the economic recovery.
Appointed to California’s sprawling Central District of the U.S. attorney’s office in 2002 — the first Asian American woman to rise to that federal prosecutor post — Yang quickly demonstrated an appetite for prosecuting corporate fraud, at one point filing more cases than the New York district that includes Wall Street, and winning several billion dollars in settlements.
In 2003, Yang helped obtain guilty pleas, and one of the largest monetary settlements at the time, in the diplomatically sensitive case against French bank Credit Lyonnais, over its attempts to hide foreign ownership of the defunct Executive Life Insurance Co., whose assets had been seized and sold off by the California Department of Insurance.
Yang’s office also prosecuted Boeing over alleged improprieties in competition to secure launch contracts worth billions of dollars from NASA and the U.S. Air Force — a case that ended in a $615-million civil and criminal settlement in 2006. That same year, Yang’s office secured a $900-million settlement with hospital chain Tenet Healthcare Corp. over alleged unlawful billing practices.
“She’s very well respected,” said former U.S. Atty. Thomas P. O’Brien, a partner at the Paul Hasting law firm who led the criminal division during Yang’s tenure, then succeeded her. “She has deep experience working with corporate litigation cases. She has led from the bench. She led a massive staff at the U.S. attorney’s office — she is a terrific choice for the SEC.”
Yang has since specialized in the defense side at Gibson Dunn, where she chairs the firm’s prestigious crisis management and white collar defense and investigation practice groups.
Yang’s teams defended Hewlett-Packard subsidiaries accused of paying bribes for contracts in Russia, Poland and Mexico, reaching separate settlements with $100 million in penalties.
More recently, she helped Uber Technologies survive a serious challenge to its contractor-dependent business model, reaching a $100-million settlement with drivers who argued they should be categorized as employees, entitling them to benefits and reimbursement of expenses.
Yang also was part of a team from Gibson Dunn that investigated whether former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie helped engineer a massive traffic jam in 2013 at the George Washington Bridge, as political retaliation against the mayor of Fort Lee, N.J. The case came to be known as “Bridgegate.”
The report exonerated Christie, a longtime friend of Yang’s from his days as a fellow federal prosecutor.
Gibson Dunn’s legal bills to the state of New Jersey have topped $8 million, according to published reports.
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During the ensuing trial that eventually led to convictions against two Christie political appointees, U.S. District Court Judge Susan D. Wigenton accused Gibson Dunn of “opacity and gamesmanship,” calling the firm’s practice of over-writing interview notes related to the Bridgegate report “a clever tactic” that “had the same effect” as shredding documents.
Yang donated $2,700 last year to Christie’s presidential campaign, according to Federal Election Commission records. She also hosted a $2,700-per-plate fundraiser this year in Los Angeles.
Gibson Dunn donated $10,000 to the Republican Governors Assn. while Christie chaired that group, according to those records. An analysis of contributions by NJ Advance Media suggests that Gibson Dunn employees donated more than $65,000 to Christie’s presidential campaign in 2015.
Yang’s hiring by Gibson Dunn, with a reported bonus of $1.5 million, came just two months before the controversial firing of eight other U.S. attorneys by President George W. Bush’s administration, at a time when several of those prosecutors were investigating GOP congressmen.
Yang’s office had been investigating powerful House Republican Jerry Lewis (R-Redlands) over his dealings with lobbyists and contractors while he was chairman of the House Appropriations Committee. Lewis was being defended by Gibson Dunn at the time.
Media reports at the time said Harriet Miers, counsel to President George W. Bush, had asked a Department of Justice official if Yang could be forced to resign.
A spokeswoman for the firm said Yang had distanced herself from the Lewis probe at the time, and her departure was not part of the investigations that found hiring and firing at the Department of Justice had become politicized. She declined further comment.
Yang did not respond to requests for an interview.
In 2009, Yang was tapped to fill the term of a departing Los Angeles Police Commission member. By the time she stepped down in 2012, she had missed a quarter of the panel’s meetings. She defended her record at the time, saying she limited her participation to “selected issues on the commission where I felt like I could most assist LAPD in a unique way based on my background — terrorism matters and risk assessment over ongoing civil suits.”
Former Police Commission President Richard Drooyan, an attorney at Scheper, Kim & Harris who also worked with Yang at the U.S. attorney’s office, said Yang worked tirelessly while on the commission.
“I’ve never seen anyone work so hard,” Drooyan said. “She was stretched pretty thin, traveling all over the world, and at the same time she was raising her daughters by herself.”
In 2014, Yang chaired a special committee to investigate charges of sexual misconduct by a former English teacher at the all-girl Marlborough School in Hancock Park, which led to the resignation of its chief administrator, Barbara Wagner.
In an article published by Vanity Fair last year, the attorney for former students at the center of the scandal criticized the investigation for pulling punches, laying blame on Wagner while glossing over any potential responsibility by the board.
A Pitzer College graduate who got her law degree from Boston College, Yang served as a law clerk to U.S. District Court Judge Ronald S.W. Lew before she became an assistant U.S. attorney. She was appointed to the bench of the Los Angeles Municipal Court in 1997, moving over to the Superior Court three years later, according to her biography on the Gibson Dunn website.
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