Chevron Slow to Announce Hire of Controversial Pentagon GC

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Chevron Slow to Announce Hire of Controversial Pentagon GC
Brian Zabcik
Corporate Counsel
April 11, 2008

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William "Jim" Haynes II

When a company recruits a prominent government official, it's usually eager to put the word out immediately. But Chevron Corp. took more than a month to publicly confirm that it had hired William "Jim" Haynes II, the controversial former general counsel of the Pentagon. Chevron officials say that they didn't make a big deal of Haynes' hiring because they didn't think it was newsworthy.

Haynes, however, is very much a man in the news. In addition to having run one of the biggest law departments in the federal government, Haynes has drawn fire for his role in developing the Bush administration's detainee interrogation policies. Democratic senators maintained that Haynes had approved interrogation procedures that amounted to torture and were able to kill his nomination to a federal judgeship.

The U.S. Department of Defense announced Haynes' resignation as general counsel Feb. 25. Two days later Chevron general counsel Charles James sent a memo to the company's management committee stating that Haynes would be coming aboard as chief corporate counsel. Haynes, who will report to James, will manage the 45-attorney legal department.

Chevron spokesman Kent Robertson says that the company did not make an external announcement about Haynes' hiring. "I don't think we thought it was newsworthy," Robertson says. Word of Haynes' employment by Chevron began appearing in blogs last week, and was reported on Newsweek's Web site April 5.

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