Adelson lobbying tactic backfires
News on 30 Jun 2017
News on 30 Jun 2017
Sheldon Adelson’s Coalition to Stop Internet Gambling seems to have blundered in its lobbying efforts to get the Department of Justice and US Attorney General Jeff Sessions to review a 2011 DoJ opinion that the Wire Act applies only to sports betting (see previous reports).
According to a Bloomberg report, the CSIG hired Washington lobbyist Charles Cooper – a lawyer and friend of AG Sessions – to persuade the Department and its newly appointed AG to review the Office of Legal Counsel opinion, clearly hoping to have it overthrown as an important element in Adelson’s strategy to have US online gambling banned through his repeatedly failed Restoration of America’s Wire Act legislation.
However, this month AG Sessions, under pressure from investigations claiming Russian involvement in the election of the Trump administration, announced that he had also hired Cooper as his personal lawyer.
Sessions, Our readers will recall, has in political confirmation hearings prior to his acceptance as AG intimated that he would be prepared to revisit the DoJ Wire Act opinion.
“I would revisit it and I would make a decision about it based on careful study, and I haven’t gone that far to give you an opinion today,” he told a confirmation hearing earlier this year.
The conflict has resulted in the CSIG losing the direct support of Sessions, who has now had to recuse himself from the Wire Act issue, according to Justice Department spokeswoman Sarah Isgur Flores.
Ron Reese, a spokesman for Adelson’s Las Vegas Sands group, declined to comment when approached by Bloomberg.
Cooper, who disclosed his lobbying involvement earlier this month, defends his right to lobby on the Wire Act issue, saying:
“There’s been a change in administrations, and that’s when fresh looks take place. This particular legal issue has certainly struck us as sufficiently questionable that it ought to be reconsidered.”
Watching with interest will be several US states that are actively considering intrastate legalised on line gambling, and New Jersey, Nevada and Delaware, which have had successful, regulated and licensing online gambling industries for several years…all of which could theoretically be impacted by a change in DoJ stance on the 2011 opinion.
