Tony Podesta represented BP after the oil spill. Now he’s trying to promote Egypt’s interests in Washington.
Tony Podesta, one of Washington’s best-known Democratic lobbyists and public-relations operatives, is no stranger to trouble. The Podesta Group represented BP during the Deepwater Horizon oil spill last summer and the Republic of Georgia when the Russian army invaded it in 2008. But few of Podesta’s clients have been in as much trouble as the one that’s making news right now: the Egyptian government of Hosni Mubarak.
His firm is part of a trio of lobbying and PR shops that represent the Egyptian government in Washington (the others are the Livingston Group and the Moffett Group). This week, as cable networks carried round-the-clock images of increasingly violent clashes between the government and Egyptian protesters, Podesta talked about the situation.