Then-House Speaker Dan Rayfield, D-Corvallis, speaking at a legislative hearing in 2023. Rayfield is the Democratic nominee to attorney general this year.
Kristyna Wentz-Graff / OPB
With open seats in both the Oregon attorney general and treasurers’ office this year, a familiar roster of wealthy campaign donors are making their presence felt.
Law firms largely headquartered on the East Coast have given hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Democratic candidates for both positions, which can award the firms lucrative contracts.
As of Tuesday, State Rep. Dan Rayfield, the Democratic nominee for attorney general, has reported receiving a total of $172,500 from law firms like New York-based Labaton Keller Sucharow and Delaware-based Grant & Eisenhofer.
The firms do specialized work in class-action lawsuits Oregon is in a unique position to file. They account for about 23% of the money Rayfield has raised this year.
Meanwhile, State Sen. Elizabeth Steiner, the Democratic nominee for treasurer, has accepted $41,500 from some of the same firms, a little less than 10% of her total contributions for the year.
The contributions are notable not just because lawyers thousands of miles away are using their cash to influence Oregon politics. They’d be illegal in some other states.
The law firms donating to Rayfield and Steiner are among a select group that represent state pension funds that sometimes file suit when corporate misdeeds tank stock values and hurt retirees’ investments.
Thanks to the size of Oregon’s massive $94.5 billion pension fund, the state is often in a prime position to act as a central plaintiff in such suits. And it’s the agencies Rayfield and Steiner are vying to control – the Oregon Department of Justice and State Treasury – that decide which law firms will represent the state in that potentially lucrative work.
Some states label such political giving as “pay to play,” and have laws on the books preventing public officials from accepting campaign cash from those that want work that they can dole out. But Oregon has no such prohibitions.
As a result, out-of-state firms have poured big money into races for state treasurer and attorney general for the last 15 years or so, including providing major support to current Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum and current Treasurer Tobias Read.
Both Rosenblum and Read have defended accepting that money, insisting that they wall themselves off from decisions about which law firms to hire. Even so, both politicians acknowledged soliciting the big checks by communicating their willingness to file the kinds of class-action suits the firms are interested in.
Neither Rayfield nor Steiner responded to an inquiry about the recent donations. But both have long signaled they would not hesitate to accept money from the out-of-state lawyers that have been a mainstay for Democrats running for treasurer and attorney general.
“I think I’ve done a pretty good job not giving extra favor to organizations that have given me substantial amounts of campaign contributions,” Steiner told OPB when she announced her candidacy for treasurer last year. “I don’t think taking money from securities litigators or pretty much anybody else is a problem, as long as you’re very careful about recusing yourself from significant decisions about who gets which business.”
Rayfield in 2020 said he’d welcome creating new pay-to-play laws in Oregon, saying the giving from out of state firms “smells real funny to anyone who’s looking at it.” But these days he is at peace with accepting the money.
“My values are what they are, my vision is what it is,” he told OPB in April. “If people support it, that’s fantastic.”
If elected, Rayfield said he would ensure that all decisions about which law firms the state hires are made clear to the public.
“When that decision is made by say a deputy… I would like that process to be transparent, open about why those firms were chosen or why they weren’t chosen,” he said. “I think those are really important things because I think you’re right that whenever you have a cloud over that decision-making process, it leads people to question the credibility or the integrity of why those things are being done.”
Both Steiner and Rayfield have outraised their respective Republican opponents so far this year.
Rayfield faces a potentially tight race against former prosecutor Will Lathrop. He has raised around $1.2 million this election cycle, compared to a little more than $1 million by Lathrop.
“Taking huge checks from law firms that are competing to be hired by, or might be involved in suits against the state, is a clear conflict of interest,” Lathrop said in a statement to OPB on Tuesday. “The people of Oregon need to trust that the Attorney General is representing them and not the highest bidder.”
Steiner, meanwhile, has far outpaced her opponent for treasurer, state Sen. Brian Boquist of Dallas. Steiner has raised more than $675,000 since the beginning of 2023. Boquist, who was barred from seeking reelection to the Legislature for walking away from the 2023 legislative session, has raised less than $15,000.
The law firms that give generously to Oregon candidates are often leery of talking about their motives. When OPB reached out to roughly a dozen firms about political giving in 2019, only one lawyer writing big checks would agree to an interview.
Maya Saxena, an attorney for Florida-based Saxena White, said at the time her goal was to elect Democratic treasurers and attorneys general who would not shy away from filing class-action suits.
This year, Saxena’s firm has given $25,000 to Rayfield, and $5,000 to Steiner.
Those might be the last huge donations the firm — and those like it — make directly to treasurer and attorney general candidates. Thanks to a law Rayfield helped pass this year, beginning in 2027 Oregon will have new campaign finance restrictions limiting corporate donations to $3,300 an election.