McKinsey Gives Pete Buttigieg Permission to Disclose Clients

WASHINGTON — Mayor Pete Buttigieg will disclose his management consulting clients, open his fund-raisers to reporters and reveal the names of people raising money for his presidential campaign, his campaign announced Monday, a series of significant concessions toward transparency for a candidate under increasing pressure to release more details about his personal employment history and campaign finances.

The announcements follow several days of intense questioning surrounding Mr. Buttigieg’s work for McKinsey & Company, the management consulting firm that was his first post-college employer. The company said on Monday that it would allow Mr. Buttigieg to disclose the clients he worked for at the firm from 2007 to 2010, acceding to a request the Buttigieg campaign made last month and the candidate himself amplified in public last week.

Mr. Buttigieg had also been challenged by Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts to open his fund-raisers to the press and release the names of the major financial bundlers who raise money for him. His decision to do both is a tacit admission that he could not sustain a transparency fight with Ms. Warren and the additional media scrutiny that comes with being among the presidential campaign’s front-runners.

As he has risen to the top of the polls in Iowa, Mr. Buttigieg, 37, has become a more frequent target of other Democrats, in particular Ms. Warren, who has sought to regain her advantage in the first nominating state by confronting Mr. Buttigieg.

His silence about his work for McKinsey, a firm distrusted by many on the left, has handed fodder to Democrats who believe it undercuts his appeal as a candidate of transparency. On Friday night at a forum in Iowa, he was pointedly challenged about his work for the company by Lori Lightfoot, the mayor of Chicago.

The issue gained new urgency last week following revelations that the firm helped the Trump administration implement its immigration policies, leading to more criticism and prompting Mr. Buttigieg himself to call for the firm to release him from a nondisclosure agreement. On Friday night the campaign put out its most detailed description yet of his work for the firm, describing the type of work he performed but not revealing the names of his clients.

Releasing new information about both his McKinsey clients and campaign donors may offer additional ammunition to his rivals. But he plainly determined that there was more risk in stonewalling questions, which have intensified.

Lis Smith, Mr. Buttigieg’s senior adviser, said Monday that the campaign would be releasing the list soon.

Opening his fund-raisers to press coverage paves the way for scrutiny of both what he says to donors behind closed doors and the process of high-dollar fund-raising itself. Ms. Warren and Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont are not holding any private fund-raising events. Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. has allowed print reporters to attend them since the outset of his campaign. There have been several news cycles driven by inopportune remarks Mr. Biden made to donors.

Mr. Buttigieg’s campaign manager, Mike Schmuhl, said fund-raising events would be open to the press beginning Tuesday, and that a list of people raising money for the campaign would be released within the week.

Privately, Mr. Buttigieg’s supporters believe the criticism over his fund-raising practices and the work he did in his 20s for McKinsey will have little impact on voters.

Whether it does matter will be determined in large part by what exactly he did for McKinsey, which is not yet clear.

Democrats not affiliated with Mr. Buttigieg or his rivals said Monday that as long as he didn’t work for any particularly toxic companies, his tenure at the firm wouldn’t matter much in a race largely defined by who can defeat President Trump.

“This issue already had very little impact on voters’ lives, so I start from the baseline that it was not a big problem for Mayor Pete in places like Iowa or New Hampshire,” said Meredith Kelly, a Democratic strategist who worked for Senator Kirsten Gillibrand’s campaign. “But to the extent this topic matters to certain people, radical transparency should do the trick.”

Mr. Buttigieg’s supporters, though, are somewhat irked by the scrutiny.

In an email Monday to would-be contributors, one Washington-based Democratic consultant who has been helping the mayor raise money characterized the McKinsey questions as the product of opposition research.

“And yes, the opposition-placed stories about McKinsey are predictable but no less important to address,” wrote the consultant, Alex Slater, in the email under a header “McKINSEY MADNESS.” “I’m sending a link to Pete’s statement released on his work at McKinsey as well as a timeline of summary of the work that he performed at the firm.”

Mr. Buttigieg and Ms. Warren for weeks have been engaged in a bitter campaign for Democratic support in Iowa, a state both of their campaigns view as critical to their path to the presidential nomination.

Their sparring over transparency escalated shortly before Thanksgiving, when Mr. Buttigieg challenged Ms. Warren to release tax returns from beyond the 11 years she had already made public, while releasing his own tax returns from the three years he worked at McKinsey. Those tax returns revealed no details about the type of work he did for McKinsey, only the locations of the offices to which he was assigned.

Over the weekend Ms. Warren renewed calls for Mr. Buttigieg to open his fund-raisers and name his campaign’s bundlers, telling reporters in New Hampshire that she was concerned about “conflicts being created every single day when candidates for president sell access to their time to the highest bidder.”

Mr. Buttigieg’s concession on his donors and the release of his McKinsey work comes on the heels of Ms. Warren’s decision Sunday to detail how much money she made from her corporate work. Their dueling disclosures suggest that both candidates believe they can defuse criticism — and effectively end the other’s main line of attack — by putting out information that may be somewhat unflattering.

In Las Vegas Monday night Ms. Warren said she was “glad to see what the mayor has done,’’ but that to win the White House “we have the candidate who can most aggressively make the comparison between Trump’s administration and how Trump has raised money, and how the Democrats are going to do it.”

Mr. Buttigieg did release a list of people who bundled campaign contributions during the first quarter of 2019 but has not done so since. Senator Kamala Harris of California, who dropped out of the presidential race last week, released lists of her bundlers, but no other 2020 Democratic presidential candidate has done so.

Ms. Warren on Sunday night bowed to pressure from Mr. Buttigieg to release information about payments she’d received from corporate law clients, revealing she’d earned about $1.9 million over three decades — a sum that is far less than she could have earned as a law professor at Harvard and other universities.

McKinsey had not weighed in publicly about Mr. Buttigieg’s nondisclosure agreement until late Monday, when a spokesman said the candidate was now free to discuss his clients there.

“We recognize the unique circumstances presented by a presidential campaign,” the spokesman said. “Any description of his work for those clients still must not disclose confidential, proprietary or classified information obtained during the course of that work, or violate any security clearance.”

Jennifer Medina contributed from Las Vegas.