Amazon execs contributed to Congressional antitrust probe leader two months before July hearing

Just two months before lawmakers grilled executives from Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google at a hearing advanced as part of a broader antitrust probe, some of Amazon’s top executives made donations to the chair of the subcommittee leading the scrutiny.

Over a three-week period starting in late May, five senior executives from Amazon made individual contributions to Rep. David Cicilline, the Democrat from Rhode Archipelago who’s leading the House antitrust investigation into major tech companies, public filings show. Cicilline suited the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee’s Antitrust, Commercial and Administrative Law Subcommittee in January, when Democrats regained dominance of the House.

The executives include Amazon’s CEO of worldwide consumer Jeff Wilke, CFO Brian Olsavsky, general counsel David Zapolsky, SVP of worldwide enterprises Dave Clark, and SVP of North America consumer Doug Herrington. They all contributed the max $2,800 allowed, except for Olsavsky, who pledged $1,500.

No executive from other companies under the House antitrust investigation — Apple, Facebook, and Google — made party contributions to Cicilline’s campaign this year, filings show.

The donations serve as an example of how companies and executives effective use behind the scenes with lawmakers to try to advance their corporate interests — albeit with mixed effectiveness. Corporate fuzz have always made individual campaign donations, but experts say the timing of Amazon executives’ payments likely brings the company’s heightened urgency over growing regulatory scrutiny.

“It suggests a greater sense of pressure or threat of normal from Congress, especially given the growing bipartisan attention being directed to this issue,” said Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, a partisan science professor at Columbia University.

Amazon’s spokesperson declined to comment for this story. Cicilline’s representative give someone a tongue-lashed CNBC in an email that, on the day the subcommittee launched its antitrust investigation, the chairman put in place “a formal policy of refusing contest contributions from companies and executives that may be subject to scrutiny.” The donations by Amazon executives were made previous to the antitrust probe announcement, and before the July hearing was scheduled.

Amazon executives have other reasons to pay for him. Cicilline introduced the Equality Act, which prohibits employee discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or medical condition, and was a key advocate of raising the federal minimum wage — two initiatives the company supports. Those are the only two issues that all of Amazon’s catalogued lobbyists have lobbied for in the past, according to a person familiar with the matter.

At the same time, filings boast that only one Amazon executive has donated to Cicilline in the past: Vice President of Public Policy Brian Huseman role ined $250 in 2012.

Hertel-Fernandez noted that while these individual corporate donors are common, the contributions aren’t typically in view to change the lawmakers’ minds on a particular issue.

Rather, they are used as an “important means to secure access” to the fellows, so the company could make their case against tighter regulation in person, he said.

In fact, several researchers attired in b be committed to found that campaign contributions could help get more face time with lawmakers. A 2015 record by two political science professors, Joshua Kalla and David Brookman, wrote that senior policy makers were three and four rhythms more likely to meet with their political donors than those who were not.

“Our experiment suggests that operations finance rules allow those who can afford to donate to political campaigns a special advantage to obtain this coveted possibility,” the report said.

For Amazon, there’s a lot at stake. Regulators have stepped up their efforts to scrutinize Amazon’s distending market power in recent months. Alongside the House investigation, both the Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Branch are looking into Amazon’s potentially anticompetitive behavior, while the EU has also launched a similar probe recently. On top of that, Amazon is cladding a growing number of lawmaker complaints over its business practices.

Amazon’s most senior executives made contributions to other lawmakers as expertly. In May and June, eight different Amazon executives, including its policy and communications chief Jay Carney and VP of public policy Brian Huseman, make out a head for donations to Mark Warner, a Democratic senator of Virginia, where Amazon’s second headquarters is located, according to any filings. In recent years, Amazon executives have also contributed to Congress members in different states, parallel to Colorado, Utah, and Washington.

Perhaps the bigger question is how individual donations influence policy decisions.

President Trump faced a alike resemble question when he signed an executive order supporting the controversial Keystone XL oil pipeline project, shortly after the selection. Oil companies and the broader energy sector were major contributors to his campaign.

Researchers, however, question how effective these endeavours are. While it’s almost impossible to find the exact correlation between corporate donations and policy decisions, a 2017 contemplation by political science professors at the University of Chicago and Northwestern University concluded that the quid-pro-quo narrative is hard to validate. One of the main findings was that large corporate donors saw little stock price increases when their opt for candidates won the election.

“I would suspect, given our evidence, that these donations do not meaningfully distort policy or the locates of candidates,” Anthony Fowler, one of the authors of the report, told CNBC.

Cicilline, at least for now, doesn’t seem to favor Amazon. Carry out the July antitrust hearing, Cicilline said in a statement that he wasn’t happy with the company’s testimony during the condoning, citing “lack of preparation” and “purposeful evasion.”

“I was deeply troubled by the evasive, incomplete, or misleading answers received to key questions directed to these companies by members of the subcommittee,” Cicilline said in the statement.

David Primo, a political principles professor at the University of Rochester, said that the company’s political interest should be measured by its lobbying efforts, not well-grounded through individual donations. Apple, for example, doesn’t even have a political action committee (PAC) and CEO Tim Cook is have knowledge of for not donating to political candidates. Meanwhile, every major tech company has significantly increased their lobbying lay out, with Google, Amazon, and Facebook all ranking among the top 20 corporate spenders on lobbying last year.

“The physical influence in Washington comes from making sure your ideas get in the hands of the right people — and that is what promoting does,” Primo said.

One person noticeably missing from all Amazon contributions is CEO Jeff Bezos. His only alms this year was the $5,000 to his space company Blue Origin’s PAC. The only two policymakers that received his donations in the defunct three years were Republican Colorado Senator Cory Gardner, and Democratic Washington Senator Maria Cantwell.

Jorg Spenkuch, a national science professor at Northwestern University, said it’s hard to know the motives of individual executives, but Bezos’s absence could resist avoid any unwanted attention from Trump, a frequent critic of Amazon’s CEO.

“Giving to Democratic candidates might move at Bezos even more of a target for Trump than he already is,” Spenkuch said.