John Knepper, To the White House and Back to Wyoming

 

105. John Knepper

 

Will Bachman  00:02

Will. Hello and welcome to the 92 report conversations with members of the Harvard and Radcliffe class of 1992 I’m your host. Will Bachman, and I’m delighted to be here today with John Knepper, John, welcome to the show.

 

John Knepper  00:16

Thank you will. It’s great to be here.

 

Will Bachman  00:18

So John, tell me about your journey since graduating from Harvard.

 

John Knepper  00:22

Well, thank you. I think, you know, I listened to a couple of the podcasts before this, and I’ve been thinking about sort of how to describe my my, my journey since graduation. And I think the best metaphor is probably Mr. Magoo, because if you remember that that cartoon, he, you know, he would sort of walk out the out the window and on to a construction girder that would then helpfully land him on a traveling bus and and, you know, he never quite knew where he was going, but somehow it all worked out and, and that’s a little bit of my career story and my personal life story, you know, I had so so this will be, this will be a little longer in that I think the longest I’ve ever been in a job is Five years, which, which is, you know, not as remarkable when you’re, you know, 28 it’s a little bit more off, off beat if you’re 53 so what happened is I, so I graduated from Harvard, and I in that summer, I did The Harvard Radcliffe summer theater. And I thought, Oh, this is fantastic. I had not done a lot of theater at Harvard, and I had missed it. And then I then I said, Okay, well, what I’m going to do is I’m going to try, I’m going to pursue that as a and so I’ll what I my parents had moved from Wyoming to Memphis, Tennessee, while I was in college, and Memphis was a city of a million people without a professional theater company, so they had tremendous resources for community theater, and I thought, Oh, this is what I’ll go do. So I moved down to Memphis live with my parents, and never auditioned for another play again because I had, I got a job with a the nation’s at that time, the nation’s fifth largest security guard Company, which was headquartered in Memphis, and I was in the marketing department. And my, what I imagined to be a nine to five job was, was sort of 9am to 5am the next morning type job. I mean, just working constantly, you know, writing the employee newsletter, writing other publications, etc, within the company, and I learned a great deal, such as all the ways to enlarge and reduce photocopies. I was a master of the machine by the time I was done, but, but I also didn’t have a lot of of a social life so, so after about nine months in 1993 I quit, and I traveled around the country for six months, living in my car, just seeing the various things that I had always wanted to see, you know, going to the Grand Canyon and going down to the bottom, standing the night and hiking back out the next day, visiting college friends and college roommates, just sort of driving around to the places that that I you know that looked interesting. And you know, anyone who tells you, you know, anyone who spent a lot of time at the wheel of a vehicle will tell you that after a while, you start talking to the windshield. And that was a really great way for me to figure out what it is that I really wanted to do. And fortunately, during that time, I had gone through Washington, DC, and had had other my cousin was getting married, and I stopped by the congressional offices for the state of Wyoming, where the assistant to the Chief of Staff for Senator Al Simpson of Wyoming was a young woman who had been a year ahead of me in high school. So I gave her my resume and and then proceeded to call for about, you know, you know, every couple of months I’d call and see if they had any openings. And sure enough, about six months later, I you know, they had, they wanted me to come out and interview for a job. And so I said yes immediately, and flew out, and I started working on Capitol Hill in spring of 1994 so I worked in the US Senate. For Senator Alan Simpson, first as his personal assistant. So, you know, other than his his wife and his driver, the first person he saw in the morning and the last person he saw at night, you know, giving him a schedule, making sure that you know that getting people into his appointments, getting people out of his appointments, the you know, making sure he had phone calls, you know, doing whatever he needed to have done. And then at the end of 1994 there was, you know, you’ll recall that that was when the the Congress in that changed hands and became all became a Republican majority, instead of the Democrats, and Al was a Republican, so I then moved from there to the Senate Judiciary Committee, where I worked on the Senate immigration subcommittee. Al had been either the chair or the ranking member, the top Republican on that committee since 1980 and the Democrat was Ted Kennedy and Alan Senator Kennedy, were very close friends, and so I worked 1995 and 1996 On the what ultimately became the 1996 immigration law, which was, I think, the last major piece of immigration legislation that that the Congress has passed. And Al had been involved in all of the prior legislation, the 1990 immigration law, the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act. That’s the the one that provided amnesty, but employer sanctions, then even the 1980 Refugee Act. So I had, I worked for Al from 1995 to 1996 and then he decided that his life was more than just being a senator. So he retired. And I, I, you know, went, went through what is the first period of unemployment for a couple of months, looking for work. And then I worked for Senator Fred Thompson of Tennessee on the, what was then called the Governmental Affairs Committee, and now called the Homeland Security Committee, for, excuse me, for two years. And you know, I worked on anything that that they would let me work on. That was the time when he was doing the he was the chair of the investigation into foreign influence in the 1996 presidential election. I don’t know if you know, these, these stories are, you know, they they lose their currency. But that was, that was the one where you had the, the the fundraiser at the Buddhist temple with, with Vice President Gore. And then there was, you know, the allegations that, you know, you could for a large enough donation, you could stay in the Lincoln Bedroom at the White House, and the Republicans were convinced that this was, you know, a scandal of monumental proportions. And so you had, you had this tremendously detailed, but ultimately partisan investigation into into campaign fundraising in 1996 that concluded 1996 so I worked some on that. I worked some on the other business of the committee. So regulatory reform, I did a lot of, I did a lot of work, actually, for on the, you know, related to the work of the Senate Judiciary Committee, because all the lawyers were working on the investigation and thereby becoming one of the most knowledgeable staffers for the Senate Judiciary Committee without a law degree, which is, you know, there’s, there’s a, there’s a pretty low ceiling For that, that long term career path, uh, so, so in 1998 I decided I needed to make a change, and I went to law school. I don’t at the time, you know, I didn’t really understand what lawyers do? You know, I had been given this advice. You know, if you want to be a lawyer, go to law school. And if you don’t want to be a lawyer, don’t go to law school. Which is it? You know, most people will think that’s the dumbest piece of advice you could ever receive. And it was, I mean, the Congressional staffer who gave that to me was, was subsequently fired because he was sexually harassing his babysitter. So, I mean, you know, not, not, not a man who showed the best judgment, but, but at the what I thought it meant, because I didn’t really understand what attorneys do, is, I thought it meant, you. Know, if you want to be Perry Mason, if you want to be in the courtroom, you know, then, then, then you should become a lawyer. But if that’s not your vision of, of of what, of what you want to do with your life, then then don’t become a lawyer. Which is, which is wrong. I mean, lawyers are sort of involved at every level of of of most industry, most government and and often we are advisors in in in various ways. And it really is. It has the advantage of being a terminal degree after only three years. And no one expects you to get another degree after you go to law school, and then you can go on and pursue whatever career path is is most interesting or exciting for you. So I went to the University of Michigan, School of Law. I it. It was the perfect time, personally for me to do that, having been out of college long enough that I hadn’t, you know, hadn’t been in the academic world for a while, also having worked on Capitol Hill, where, you know, your most successful accomplishments are other people’s accomplishments. You know, you write a fantastic speech that your boss gives. You write a great press release for your boss. You help your your boss or the members of Congress pass legislation you’re not. You know, the people of the United States of America haven’t entrusted you with with policy making authority. And so at the end of of that time, I I had the opportunity to sort of work for myself, right? If I worked really hard and and learned a lot, that that glory reflected only upon me and and so I was an incredibly focused student during law school. I I really had a wonderful time at the University of Michigan. I referred, I referred to it then, and I, you know, this is somewhat parochial in that I don’t know what other law schools are like, but it was the it was at the time, the best law school filled with nice people in the United States. And I just, I loved my classmates, I loved my professors. I learned a tremendous amount and really still enjoy the benefits of the work that I did at that time. I also, I also got to meet and I’ll just as a casual aside, shout out to Richard Primus wife Eve, who is one of my classmates and one of one of my favorite friends in law school when we graduated in 2001 so I, I graduated from law school in 2001 and wasn’t sure what was next. I I worked for federal judge for a year, and then I got a position with the US Department of Justice in an area called the Federal Programs Branch, which is part of the Civil Division of the Department of Justice that litigates sort of high profile defenses of of federal statutes and federal programs. So my first, my first case is that is that in 1990 or rather, in 2002 is I was made part of the team that defended the McCain Feingold campaign finance law. So the, you know, President Bucha signed the, the McCain Feingold law, but there immediately a constitutional challenge was, was, was brought, and there was a lot of, I would say, mistrust among people involved, right? You know there were, there were folks that thought the they didn’t want the Department of Justice to defend the law vigorously because they thought the president shouldn’t have cited to begin with. You had the FEC, which is in the Federal Election Commission, which is an independent agency. Nobody really was sure what they how they were going to interact with the rest of the defense work. You had the Republican National Committee and the Democratic National Committee both challenging the law. But, of course, none of them, they don’t trust each other as a general matter, on, on, you know, sort of confidential secrets or confidential practices. And we were, we were very fortunate. You know, Robert McCallum was the head of the civil division. And he was, he had known the president for for years, and and the instruction that he gave us was, I want you to do the very best job you can. And there were, there was no nothing, nothing but support. Support from from the leadership of the Department of Justice, and we and everybody trusted us more because we were career Department of Justice employees. So we were the ones responsible for, you know, document review at the Republican National Committee, document review at the Democratic National Committee, all of the work that was involved. And early on, we made the decision at the Department of Justice that we were going to work to build an effective record work, to build, sort of create the facts necessary to explain how campaign finance works and why the regulations were important. And so there was just a tremendous there was a tremendous amount of review of documents, et cetera. And then we went to trial before a three judge panel of district court judges in DC, or two district court judges in a circuit court judge, and we won. And then we went up to the US Supreme Court, and we won. That was McConnell versus FEC so that was the the decision that held the campaign finance reform was constitutional and not an impingement on free speech. That was reversed in 2008 by Citizens United, which people are more familiar with. But sort of after that, I moved, or sort of related to that, I ended up moving from the Civil Division to a small office within the Department of Justice called the Office of Legal Counsel. And it is a, it’s, it’s sort of the government constitutional law or law Think Tank. You know, there are some legal issues where federal agencies may disagree about the answer to a question, and by executive order, the President has delegated that responsibility to work that out to the Attorney General, and he’s delegated that to the Office of Legal Counsel. So it’s about 30 lawyers, and we spend a lot of our time working on those issues, or working on issues where there really isn’t the ability to get court resolution. So this was in 2003 was when I joined. So this was, you know, September 11 was about a year and a half earlier. The invasion of Iraq was about six months earlier. And so a lot of our work was on the national security side for President Bush, you know, questions like the one that, the one that I, that I that I can talk about, is the kind of question might be, you subsequent, you know, or in conjunction with the 1992 invasion of Kuwait by or 1990 invasion of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein, the United States had frozen a great, not a great portion, of the assets of the Government of Iraq. Outside of Iraq, we’ve done that with some of the the assets of Russian oligarchs in in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine. But United States invades Iraq and new government there in night, in 2003 and the question is, well, how do we give Iraq back this money? You know, you’ve you’ve got billions of dollars, and you’ve got the Coalition Provisional Authority, you know, which is the occupying authority of Iraq that could use some money to pay civil servants to, you know, keep, you know, keep, you know, order in the country. And they would like access, and we, the United States government, would like to give them access. And so how do you, how do you, you know, get the, you know, billions of dollars back to Iraq, and in what form, and part of it part of it was pallets of cash, but, but also, yeah, they’re big, you know, big, big planes flying pallets of us, us money to the government or the Coalition Provisional Authority into the people of Iraq. That was their money. But that’s,

 

Will Bachman  19:17

that’s how you came up with it. Like, no wire transfer. Oh, yeah, let’s just Well,

 

John Knepper  19:22

well, so, so, I mean, it wasn’t that wasn’t the legal question, that wasn’t the legal decision. The legal question was, how can we do that? Right? How can we, how can we take this money, and what are the steps that you need to do as a government to free up this money and then move it to the Coalition for provisional authorities? Is that an appropriate substitute for the Government of Iraq? Is it the success or an interest? What about people who had, who had claims against the government of Iraq when it was operated by Saddam Hussein? You know how? You know they’re you know what? What kinds of things do you want them? You know what are their rights? Rights in this process and and so those are the kinds of legal questions that that would come to the Office of Legal Counsel. You know, that we hadn’t really done as a nation any kind of we hadn’t been involved in the occupation of a country since post World War Two, you know, the occupation of Japan and Germany and so there, you know, there’s some developed law from that time, but we were, we were busy working to, you know, to figure out, okay, these are the obligations you have. This is what you can do. This is what you can’t do. You know, these are decisions that need, you know, that are really not yours to make. But for a period of time after the invasion, the government of Iraq was the, what we call the Coalition Provisional Authority, which was the group of of invading nations who operated as an occupying authority. And we were, we were responsible for trying to make sure that we did that in accordance with law, sending the cash was actually what the what the government wanted, because you had to pay people. I mean, there, you know, you were, you know you had, you need to pay people to clean the streets and pick up the garbage and and, you know, keep order at a at the basic level at Iraq. And, you know, US dollars worked well, and they needed them, and they wanted to be able to to sort of keep, keep the government operating as they work, to re establish, uh, civil authority. Hm, no, but those are the kinds of questions that you know that you can’t really go to a court and say, what, what am I supposed to do here? Your honor, and so the Department of Justice takes the lead, and in the Office of Legal Counsel works on, works on those kinds of questions.

 

Will Bachman  21:47

Wow, fascinating. Yeah,

 

John Knepper  21:49

it was, it was, it was, but, you know, it was one of those, you know, I mentioned earlier, one of those Mr. Magoo moments, right? Because I had been working at the Civil Division, and one of my law professors was appointed as a political appointee of the of the President Bush and at the Office of Legal Counsel. And she called me up and said, Hey, we’re looking for more people. Would you like to come over? And I said, Sure, that sounds like fun. And so I, you know, left the left being a trial attorney, which I loved, and went over and did this work, and then in about, about two years later, in 2004 one of the attorneys I had worked with on the campaign finance defense had gone on to the White House, and he was working at the Office of Management and Budget, which is a fantastic agency within the White House. I’ll describe it a little bit, but he was the Associate General Counsel, and he wanted to become the deputy general counsel of OMB, and he needed somebody. If that was going to happen, he had to find somebody to become the new Associate General Counsel. And so he called me up and said, Hey, John, would you like to come over to the White House and work as the Associate General Counsel the office management budget? And I said, Wow, that sounds interesting. And, you know, stepped off the girder into that into that traffic. And so the Office of Management and Budget is, there’s what everybody thinks, which is sort of green eyeshades and not much you know, you know, very sort of dry internal accounting responsibilities. And then there’s what the Office of Management and Budget really is, which is, it’s, it’s about 400 employees, mostly career within the White House structure. So there’s the the Executive Office of the President, which includes, you know, the White House Counsel’s Office, but also this larger agency, the White House Office of Management, budget. It what, what the white what it has become is, if you think of the President as the head of the executive branch, OMB is the neck. It is the agency responsible for ensuring that the actions of the federal government are consistent with the President’s priorities. And so it’s its origins were under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, where he took the what was the Bureau of the Budget out of Treasury and brought it to the White House. Because if you think, if you think about the kinds of policy decisions that are made with with resource allocation or budgeting, those are decisions that the President should be able to control. I want more money spent on this. I want less money spent on that. I want these are my priorities for my administration, and this is what, this is where I’m going to ask that you, you Congress, when you’re funding my agencies, you know, give. Of give the most attention, and so that that’s part of it. It also, over time, is responsible for reviewing all all testimony and legislation sent by the executive branch to Congress, as well as all major regulations issued by the executive branch and so and again, it’s, it’s reviewing for consistency with the President’s agenda, whatever that president may, may may seek. So it is, you know, the the intent is that it be a value neutral Effort, Right? You know, if you have a you know, President Obama will have different priorities than President Bush had, but your role at OMB is to make sure that President Obama’s priorities are are fulfilled, or President Bucha priorities, whatever they might be. And I was there under I went there in 2004 under President Bush, and I was there for about four years, at which time I transitioned from a career employee to a political appointee under President Bush, and ultimately was the deputy general counsel of the Office of Management and Budget. And it’s, it’s the best way to describe it is, is not so much in terms of the specific issues that I worked on, but, but what? What didn’t I work on? You know, if there was an issue that came up, ultimately, we got involved, one way or the other, supporting the, you know, whatever the President’s views were, we were also the agent, you know, the general counsel’s office was also the sub component that that was responsible for the clearance of executive orders. So if the President wanted to issue an executive order, or, you know, the process was that if the President was going to issue an executive order, we were responsible for reaching out to all the other federal agencies and saying, the president’s going to do this. You know, do you have any concerns? Do you do you want? What are your edits? What you help us make sure that we understand all the consequences when this comes out. It doesn’t mean that agencies get a veto, but, but the agencies were at least allowed to, you know, share information, and if they had concerns, then they could raise it through an interagency process, and the President and his senior advisors could accept or reject those those thoughts. So I was there until summer of 2008 when I said I wanted to look for a job because, you know, the Bush administration was coming to an end, and I was a political appointee in the White House at that point, and, you know, whatever happened, I wasn’t going to be there. When a friend of mine who had been in the White House Counsel’s office called me up and said, Hey, John. He was the the recently installed general counsel of the Department of Treasury, and he said to me, I I’m a little nervous about the economy. This was in June of 2008 you know, we’re, you know the, you know, these concerns with with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are real. And, you know, maybe nothing will happen. But boy, I sure would like it if I had a my then deputy general counsel was a woman who had just been confirmed as the General Counsel of the Department of Commerce. He said, I have this vacancy that I really like to be fully staffed, just in case something happens. So I said, you know, I’m looking for a change. I can look for a job just as easily from the Department of the Treasury as I can from from the White House. So I’ll, I’ll go over and help my friend Bob white, you know, for the last nine months of the Bush administration. And so I moved over, and I was the deputy general counsel of the Treasury. You know, no one listening to this podcast will will have any illusions about what happened next. You know, we so I went, I went with my family to Disney World, sort of toward the end of August, and I came back after Labor Day, the first day after Labor Day, and and I didn’t I was in the office every day until the end of October. The first day off was my birthday on october 28 was the first day I didn’t, I didn’t go to the office. Just, you know, as you’ll recall, there was just sort of event after event after event that, you know, there was the I came back and we were working on the the bail out of. Of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and then bank failure, and then folks, I mean, folks will probably remember the two, the two that really roiled the economy were the potential bankruptcy of AIG, the giant insurance conglomerate, and one of the mutual one of The mutual funds, not mutual funds, money market funds broke the buck. So for the non financial folks, and I was very much a non financial folk. I was, I was an expert on sort of how government worked and how money moved. I wasn’t a finance expert by any, by any means. But, money market funds are the ideas. It’s like a savings account. But if you have more money than the 250,000 or at that time, $100,000 limit that’s guaranteed by the FDIC, you would put your money in the money market fund, and it would get a small amount of income. But the guarantee was that if you put $1 into the money market fund at the end of whenever you chose to withdraw, there would be $1 for you and and this particular money market had invested a great deal of money into Fannie and Freddie securities, the stock of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which was not worth much after we had gone in to bail them out and reduce shareholder equity and other corporate bonds to sort of get a better rate of return, you know, 1.2% instead of point 5% But when a number of those assets went south. They had to tell their depositors, you know, you’re going to get less than your dollar back, which resulted in a tremendous rush to cash and tremendous rush to treasuries, and basically a run on the bank in the money market area. And so we, you know, we had to step in and devise a a money market support program under which, you know, money markets could, could, could, basically, could be guaranteed, if they, if they reached out, if we worked with the Department of Treasury, that that they would, you would always get your dollar back, even if you didn’t make more money than that. And, you know, there was, there was this cascade, you know, I was there when we developed the tarp, the Troubled Asset Relief Program, which I don’t think, I think many people don’t fully understand the real value of that program, which was the, you know, it was what, $700 billion of investment by the federal government. But anyone who was around at that time will realize that there was a great deal more panic than just $700 million of of assets. And what tarp really allowed us to do was to provide an asset against the against which that company could then borrow from the Federal Reserve. So the amount of money that actually went into the economy as a result of the bailouts was significantly greater than tarp, but tarp allowed us, you know, TARP was cash. You know the Federal Reserve still had, the Federal Reserve is a bank, and so it needed to be, needed to lend money. It couldn’t, it couldn’t give money. And so the tarp worked in conjunction with the, with the, the lending authority of the Federal Reserve, which, which made far more than $700 billion available to keep, I would say, to keep the velocity of money in in the system, the, you know, I mean, You know, in the early October, GE was going to disappear, and AIG may be the best example of why. You know, I’m proud of the work we did. AIG was a fantastic insurance company that had a tiny little group of derivatives traders, sort of working out of London, the that that managed to enter into a number of of of agreements that was going to result in a complete, uh, dissolution of AIG. But AIG also, you know, ensured all teachers pensions in India. I mean, it was, it was a fantastically valuable ongoing concern. And. Our ability to, sort of, the United States to sort of keep these businesses operating, I think, you know, is a credit to our our nation, and is in as the as the the worry about solvency receded, we have, you know, AIG still operating. It’s a fantastic company the United States Government made money off of most of those investments, because once the companies were, were sort of stabilized, we were able to, you know, unwind those investments, and and, and the companies exist today. But, you know, there were, there were, there were there were definitely moments, right? We were working on, you know, I remember we, we were working one unsung moment. And I apologize to listeners who are now sure that this particular podcast is going to go significantly longer than some of the others, given that I’m only in my 30s now in terms of my career history, but I can remember the weekend. So we had one, one of the, some of the unsung heroes of the financial bailout were Merrill Lynch and Wachtell Lipton, Rosen and Katz, which is a very, very high profile Wall Street firm. And when we were working on the bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Wachtell worked pro bono for the United States government. Because, I mean, no one in the United States government had that kind of deal experience, and the the Merrill Lynch agreed at a exceedingly reduced, if not zero rate, to provide advice to the United States Government on financial their their fixed income group was was advising us about how you know how to deal with Fannie and Freddie, how to make sure that the taxpayers were able to bail them out and and keep them solved, and keep in, keep value but but also Keep the mortgage business and homeownership available for Americans. You know, there’s, you know, what? One of the things that I don’t think has come out is that one of the reasons we had to act when we did is because, you know, the People’s Republic of China was buying a significant amount of mortgage backed securities in the summer of 2008 you know, if you’re going to artificially, if you’re going to keep your currency artificially low for for various other governmental reasons, you have to find some place to park all that extra cash, and they were parking it in mortgage backed securities, Fannie and Freddie stock, which was used by a lot of investors as a sort of an equivalent of a cat of cash or money markets, because they were seen as safe and guaranteed by the by the United States government, even if, even if they weren’t officially so and China had announced that in, you know, offline, that they Were going to stop putting as much money into Fannie and Freddie, and that, you know, that was sort of a precipitating event for what we were concerned would be a meltdown in the in the mortgage backed securities market, so, you know, but, but I can remember one weekend where we had, we worked on Fannie and Freddie. And then, I think it was Tuesday or Wednesday, was when Goldman Sachs borrowed $60 million from Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway to stay afloat. And then, and then, I think that weekend we were working on something else, and we came back on Monday, and Merrill Lynch had sold itself to Bank of America. So the end of September was, was dizzying. And then, you know, General Electric, which had made a big bet in the in the credit side of the house. Had had financial financial services, you know, was having trouble making short term bonds and and then that turned into the auto board had seen this coming and had leveraged itself to everything, including the shield and in February of 2008 so Ford was going to be okay, but, but GM and Chrysler were not going to survive, and I can remember sleeping on my my couch in the office the night we saved Chrysler because. Us so the and then, you know, get to January 20, and you’re gone. January 22,001, but, but I worked up until that day and had no time to look for work, because, well, you know, I was recused from the entire economy, right? Like I could, I could either do the work that I was doing or look for a job. But there was, I couldn’t honestly say that. I couldn’t ethically look for a job, if you know that wasn’t going to be somehow affected by the work that I was doing at Treasury. So I could do one or the other, but I couldn’t do both. So it was, it was, it was extremely valuable. You know the one, the one thing I would share. You know that that night, when I was sleeping on on my couch, the thing to remember, and the reason why I was optimistic then and continue to be optimistic now, is that the United States has has it an incredibly high rate of voluntary tax compliance. The people of the United States, you know, we don’t like paying taxes, but many of us view that as our responsibility. You know, tax tax avoidance. Okay, sure. You know, if I can take this deduction. Great, please do take that deduction. You’re not. You’re not supposed to pay more tax than you should, but, but you shouldn’t, you know, but it, but ultimately, it’s our responsibility as as citizens of this country to to keep our government afloat and funded. And so, you know, there are many countries that don’t enjoy that level of trust and support of their citizenry. And it was fundamentally, I think what, what protects us in these, in these, in these difficult times, is the investment and support of the of the people who are out creating value every day in their daily in their in their lives. So I so I was there until January, 20, at noon of 2009 and then I put my Blackberry into a FedEx pouch that they had given me. And I was unemployed, as elections have consequences. And I tell people, that’s a good thing. You want to live in a country where you have you hold an election and people lose their jobs, you think of the countries where there’s an election nothing changes, like Russia or China, those are those are bad places to live. Those are places where you don’t have the opportunity to change your life by participation in the electoral process. So it’s a good thing that elections have consequences, even if for some of us, it means, you know, looking for work in 2009 which is not, not the, you know, looking for work in 1992 was pretty hard, but looking for work in 2009 was a little harder. It what I ended up. What ended up happening is, I had, I had gotten married in 1994 and by 2009 my wife and I had four children, and a fifth was on the way, which is a particularly stressful time to be looking for work. And I had always told my wife that I wanted to move back to Wyoming, where I grew up. And I don’t think she really believed me. She sort of said, Oh, great, yeah, that’ll be fine. And then, you know, was ultimately of the view that no one that that that would never actually happen. My wife is from Long Island, New York, so, but in 2009 you know, there was there, you know, there weren’t a lot of jobs in Washington, DC or on the Eastern Seaboard for for a former Bush political appointee, attorney with eight or so years of of post law School experience. So I ended up moving to Wyoming, a lot of that money that had left the the housing or the or the equities market had moved into commodities, and Wyoming sells an awful lot of commodities, coal and natural gas. So Wyoming’s economy was was was buffered for about a year, year and a half by by the long term commodities contracts that that that were, that were in place. So I, I came back to Wyoming and worked for the city of Cheyenne Wyoming, as you know, an attorney. So I. Uh, basically, it’s, imagine what I did at the White House. Only move every decimal point about, you know, five places to the left. So whereas, you know, previously, I’d be working on, you know, $50 million government programs, you know, now a $50 bad debt collection action was going to get me, you know, outraged on the on behalf of the citizens of Cheyenne. So I worked there for two years, and then one of my one of the people I had met with in the when I was working for the city, I met with the state, one of the state attorneys who was working on water issues and then ended up moving to the state of Wyoming, and I worked for the Wyoming Attorney General’s office. I worked for two years as a revenue attorney for the state of Wyoming, which is sort of an interesting experience in Wyoming, because we don’t have a state income tax either individual or corporate, so revenue is largely mineral taxation. So, you know, I was with people in Wyoming suing coal companies to over tax burdens and things like that. It was a, it was a, you know, a lot of sort of very complicated mineral production issues in terms of when, you know, most states levy a tax on minerals when they’re severed from the ground. So if you take coal out of the ground, then there’s, we tax the value of that produced mineral. And those, those, those numbers can be high. That’s a significant portion of Wyoming’s tax base. And we’ve got to, you got to make sure that folks pay the right amount, whatever that amount is. And so I did that for two years. Then again, sort of falling into another position, the the Attorney General of Wyoming was confirmed to the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, Federal Court judgeship. His number two person was succeeded him as the Attorney General of Wyoming. And that person called me up from my line position and said, hey, you know, you have this experience in other you know, at the federal government level, how would you like to become the chief deputy attorney general of Wyoming? And I said, Yes, I’d love to do that. And so for five years, from 2013 until 2018 2019 I was the number two lawyer for the state of Wyoming. You know that that was, that was a tremendously rewarding time. I mean, not the prior work I did, wasn’t, but that was the, you know, that was the time when, you know the President Obama, in the first term, he the President was very clear that there was no war on coal. I think by the by the second term of President, of President Obama, he no longer was saying that. And you know the good people of Wyoming, you know, coal companies are one thing, but I’m a big fan of coal miners. I like, I like them, and I like their jobs. So I did. I, you know, we worked on environmental issues, we worked on law enforcement issues, we worked on gun rights issues. You know, it, it, it can be tremendously rewarding and and and delicate to be a Political Supervisor of career attorneys, because, you know, you I don’t expect people to have a specific political viewpoint when they work for a government entity. But elections have consequences. I do expect you to to work on, you know, to support, you know, the President’s agenda. Where lawful. And, you know, I used to tell people I, you know, I don’t, I don’t care where, where you are about, like the Second Amendment and firearms, but I can tell you where the people of Wyoming are. You know, Wyoming is a state with one out of every five, one firearm for every five people, and that includes babies. So there’s just an awful lot of very strong views in Wyoming on that kind of issue. And so, you know, we worked on we worked on those issues, we worked on pro life issues. And so I did that through March of 2019 and then i. Of elections have consequences. So I moved on. And so starting in 2019 I have been since that time, I’ve been self employed as an attorney in Wyoming. It’s, it’s, you know, will can see my office. But this is the extent of my, of my domain. This, you know, this office in the little sort of answer room where my paralegal sits. But you know, I chose to go into solo private practice for two reasons. One, because my family, my wife and I have six children, and they are happy and healthy and enjoying their childhood here in Wyoming, and I didn’t want to move them. We didn’t we thought this was a good place for them to be. And also I wanted to be able to take more controversial litigation, and, you know, larger firms are more risk averse. They don’t, they don’t like, you know, nobody wants to find out that. They’re, you know, this the guy in the, you know, in the Wyoming office, has taken on this controversial client and and now they’re talking about boycotting the entire firm and all of that work. And so it just works out better for some of these more controversial issues to to have somebody to have to be boycott proof. I mean, march around my building. But it’s not really go for it. It’s not, it’s not really going to have much effect on me.

 

Will Bachman  51:36

Can you tell us about some of the more controversial cases you’ve taken on?

 

John Knepper  51:40

Sure, sure. So, I mean, you know, having, having mentioned that I was a political appointee of George W Bush, I don’t think folks have any questions about sort of, so I sort of cases that I’ve been involved with more recently. I worked on a number of both pre and post Dobbs litigation on pro life issues, so filing either amicus briefs or appearing to defend in first to challenge Roe v Wade, and then after that, to defend state laws that are, you know, that that have come into into into effect since, since Roe v Wade was overturned, I’ve actually spent one of the more controversial as I’ve spent a lot of time defending or becoming involved in, questions like, does the Constitution require coverage of gender transition services? Is that an equal protection is it a violation of equal protection. If the government says, you know, we don’t, we just simply and health, a government health insurer doesn’t cover those types of issues, so areas involving, sort of trying to to work out what, what the law requires or doesn’t require or expects of in the treatment of transgender individuals. That’s, I mean, those are, as you can imagine, extremely hot button issues. And you know, large, large law firms, you know, you know, you they have no desire to get, you know, as businesses concentrated in America, so to have their law firms, and the law firms have are, you know, extremely eager to stay out of that kind of of area. It just, it’s not, it’s not financially viable, especially especially when, when you’re defending the lack of coverage for gender transition, or you’re representing members of a sorority who said, you know, look, when we signed up for the sorority, we didn’t we, you know, instead, it was a women’s sorority and and you know, this individual is not a woman. And I would like, you know, we want, we want you to fulfill the guarantees you made to us in the bylaws and so. So those, those are, those are the kinds of cases that you know. I, you know, when people ask what kind of law I practice, there’s really only one accurate answer, and that’s paid law, you know. You know, at the end, at the end of the day, you know, if you’re willing to pay me to practice law, I will practice law on your behalf. If you want me to do it for free, that’s, you know, I don’t, I don’t. I can’t make free law pay the bills, but I can make bad law pay the bills. So, so I. Type clients from, you know, wills for small you know, you know, wills for retired teachers or retired teachers aides. To, you know, multi district, you know, consulting and working on multi district litigation.

 

Will Bachman  55:24

You have covered a lot of ground, and listeners will know, normally, I’ll be butting in with a bunch of follow up questions. So there’s been, I’ve lost count, seven or eight segments of this episode where it could have been a whole episode by itself. I mean, you know, being a personal assistant to Alan Simpson, you know, from two to being at the Office of Management and Budget to being at Treasury when I mean, I hope you’ve thought about putting together a memoir to, you know, share all those experiences, because that, I mean, that is amazing insider view,

 

John Knepper  56:04

but, but it really is, and this is the, this is the truth of it, right? I never would have said at any time, this will be my next, my next experience right now, this will be my new I’m going to do this next. I’m going to do that next. I, you know, I would never, you know, I, when I left the the Wyoming Attorney General’s office, I would never have said, Oh yeah, I’m going to become an expert on trans transgender medicine and transgender rights issues. I just never, couldn’t, you know. I would never have imagined that. But it just, you know, I I open up the door and there’s something new,

 

Will Bachman  56:46

even an adaptable and and in front of a lot of different issues, wow, um, which we did not have time to get into all these, my gosh. I mean, any one of these seven or eight segments, I could have easily been fascinated to dive in more on and so what? But I see that we have gone a little bit even past the top of the hour. It’s a little longer episode than some of our normal ones. So much your career has gone from so many different

 

John Knepper  57:15

no one has ever accused the conversation. Wow, being brief,

 

Will Bachman  57:20

yeah, well, so I do want to ask you the question we get to it to kind of close the show is, yeah, tell me about any courses or professors at Harvard that continue to resonate with you? Sure. Yeah.

 

John Knepper  57:35

Well, I want to talk about two of the courses, and then I want to talk about a couple of specific memories I have from Harvard perfect. So you know that there were two courses at Harvard that really, really, I can say, changed my life. The first was, was a class called General Education 136 explaining the Holocaust and the phenomenon of genocide, by Professor Eric Goldhagen. And you know, I had, I grew up in Wyoming, I I knew basically nothing about the Holocaust. When I went to Harvard, I can remember a picture in in a fifth grade, you know, Harcourt Brace, Jovanovic textbook, but, but that was, that was about it and, but I just it was not something that I understood or really comprehended about what it means to, what we are capable as of, as human beings and and so I took that course, and it it sort of changed my studies at Harvard, and it changed what I was interested in, because I became very interested In in not just the, you know, the horrible details, but you know, what were the things that caused people to resist? You know when, when you’re standing around, when you when you’re when you’re in a society where where horrible decisions are taking place. I mean, you know murder, you know, atrocities, what? What causes you to say no, and who are those people and how? What? What? What are their backgrounds that lead these individuals to have the courage, even at the cost of their own lives, to stop, to stand up for what’s right? And how can we as a society encourage that? Because those are the kinds of decisions that we want people to make, you know, the and so I ended up taking, you know, course after course after that. You know, a course from herb Kelman, who. Is a social psychologist at Harvard on resistance to authority. You know that my my thesis was actually my thesis advisor was, was a Danny Goldhagen professor. Goldhagen son who was a graduate student at Harvard. He wrote a he wrote a famous book after graduation, after my our graduation, called the Hitler’s willing executioners. But Danny was my senior thesis advisor in social studies. And, you know, my senior thesis was on the concept of the witch at the Salem witch trials. You know, what did people think witches were? Why did they think they were dangerous. Why did they think that the appropriate response to which is was was to arrest and kill them in in in 1692, and, and you know that question of, of, how of, how can you resist? What resist wrong has been a part of has been a question that I’ve you know, I’ve struggled with my whole life, because I think all of us have moments in our lives when, when we are presented with a difficult decision. Well, whether it’s a right or wrong decision is obvious, but it’s difficult because of other pressures and things like that, and we and and, and, you know, having the courage to make the right decision and accept the consequences is something that that I think all of us, you know when, we do that, we we look back on that moment with the sense of pride, and when we fail, we look back. That’s one that can be one of the regrets we carry with us throughout our lives. The other class was sort of at the end of of of Harvard, and that was Professor Orlando Patterson of the sociology department had a class on freedom that, you know he, you know he, he was, he wrote a book. But ultimately, what he was trying to understand was, where does this western concept and this very American concept of freedom come from this concept of liberty and and what are? What? What a content? What’s the meaning of that word? And the you know his, his conclusion, I think he’s right, is you, you can only understand freedom in the in the context of slavery, that that to understand what it means to be free is, is often what it means to not be a slave. And that would, you know his point was that that was true. You know, in the early concepts that were taking place during the Roman Empire, but, but that significant amount of significant portion of the content and the understanding that we have of Americans, of what it means to be free, is a debt we owe to African Americans and the stain of slavery on our society. But that has you know that that is that has given us an understanding and an allegiance to liberty that I think we wouldn’t have otherwise. As far as specific events, you know, there are two that have two moments in two months, one in class and one out of class that I’ve that I’ve never forgotten. And I will confess to having looked up the names here because I so one of them was in my first semester class with Greg naj the literature not C 14 heroes to zeros. The concept of a hero in Greek civilization or an Atlantic civilization, there was a, there was a, there was a story in that, the story of Cleo bus in bitan. It, it’s from the Herodotus histories and and the the story is that these, you know, two young, you know, you know they asked so long the wise lawgiver, what does it mean to be happy? And he tells the story of cleavus and beton. I’m probably mispronouncing it, but you know that’s I’ve gotten much more understanding when you hear people mispronounce words, it means they learn them by reading. So that’s a good thing. But these two young men, the oxes died, and there was no no one to pull the cart of the priestess of Hera, their mother. And so these two young men pulled the cart of the priestess to the festival and then the their mother, the priest. Has prayed to Hera to reward these young men for their service, and Hera did so by striking them dead. And you think about that at the time, and you’re like, Whoa, but I think it there’s there’s a deeper truth to it which has followed me throughout my life, which is that you know, the measure of our lives is not known until we are dead and and there are always opportunities for redemption. There are always opportunities to, you know, for mistakes, but, but to, but to do something new and important and good. And that you know, if you want, if you want, to look back on your life with success and happiness. You know, remember that you’re making that decision every day and that you know, people who are successful, you know, can can make bad decisions and fail, and people who’ve made bad decisions can make good ones and be and be viewed as, you know, tremendously successful. And the other one was a, was actually not a class, but I can remember going to meet, and folks remember the Kings fellowship was one of the Christian groups on campus at at Harvard. And I remember meeting with the guy from Kings fellowship, and, you know, talking, and he said, Well, you know one issue that you know 111, challenge I see that you’re having, John, is that you know you, you’re you don’t sort of trust in the plan for your life. You know that you think you need to be the one making these decisions and not let let God make those decisions and try to ascertain what he wants for you next. And I, you know, I thought, you know, I think, I think that’s true. I mean, I think we, you know, I certainly have had that vanity to think that I’m making, I’m the one making the decisions, and I’m the one, you know, that’s responsible for what I’ve what I’m accomplishing. But you know, when I look back over my Mr. Magoo career, I, you know, I can’t help but think that that I was, I was the one who was wrong. I never, you know, you know, these opportunities and roles that I’ve been able to play in my life were, were made. You know, I couldn’t have planned them. Wow,

 

Will Bachman  1:07:27

John, what a fascinating journey you’ve had, and you’re still on and reminding us that stumbling

 

John Knepper  1:07:33

my way through

 

Will Bachman  1:07:35

every every day, we have the option to make decisions. Where can listeners find you online if they wanted to follow up old classmates, old friends, if they wanted to follow up with you?

 

John Knepper  1:07:47

Sure. So I’m terrible about online presence. I mean, I have a Facebook account, but I never check etc. My recommendation is you can always email me. I’m john.knepper@gmail.com so that shouldn’t be hard. And if you’ve managed to make it all the way through to the end of this episode, I’m not as worried about your about about getting, you know, enormous amounts of spam. At some point, somebody sold it to a campaign, and you know, now I get just terrible things. You know, just, you know, out of every 20 emails I get, 19 of them are terrible. But also, I just as an offer, you know, I live in Cheyenne Wyoming, which is notable for a number of things, one of which is that I’m on I 80, which is the, you know, the same route that the Transcontinental Railroad follows, and I am sure that a vast majority of a significant number of my classmates are going to be driving through Cheyenne one one way or the other. And you know, I would just urge you, even if you don’t remember me or remember me fondly, or don’t remember, remember. You don’t remember me fondly. Feel free to give me a call. My name is my number is 307-631-9469, that’s my cell phone. And you don’t have an obligation to, like, have dinner with me or anything like that. But if you’re driving through and are trying to find a good restaurant or a good hotel and and, you know, you just don’t know what you don’t know. You know, please always feel free to reach out. And I’m perfectly happy to give you advice. And, and without feeling that, you know, making you feel the need to be entertained by me or otherwise occupied. So there’s that i i also you mentioned interests and sometimes at the end of these podcasts. And so I want to share one of the passions that I’ve sort of accumulated over my lifetime, in the last and this is the last 15 years or so. I’m a huge fan of fountain pens. Now. I. I absolutely love writing with fountain pens. I love, you know, I love the experience. I love sort of collecting interesting ones, etc. And I’m sure there are people who will listen to this podcast and and, you know, I would like nothing more than to talk about fountain pens with, any and all of you, one of the things I love about that hobby is that there’s no wrong way to do it. You know. You know, if you enjoy writing right handed, left handed, you like old pens. You like new pens. You know, whatever, whatever the whatever your interests are, your opinions, they’re not wrong. They’re, you know, they’re personal to you. And it’s one of those ways for us to to interact and communicate with each other in a way that’s accepting and supportive of one another and where, where we emphasize where we have something that we agree on. This is fun, but we don’t have to agree on anything else. And I think in our, in our in our society now, there are so many opportunities for disagreement. I always try to find what you know, areas where, where we can enjoy one another without judgment.

 

Will Bachman  1:11:27

So experience as the deputy general counsel and fountain pen enthusiast. John Knepper, what an amazing journey you’ve had. Thank you so much for joining today. This was a really amazing conversation. Well,

 

John Knepper  1:11:45

thank you will and thank you for making this possible for all of us. You.