As various U.S. presidents have discovered to their sorrow, a cover-up is often more damaging than the underlying offense. That’s the uncomfortable position in which Washington powerhouse law firm Jones Day finds itself, one day after two privacy groups flagged the firm for deleting potentially embarrassing Web pages.
For the last several months, the Federal Trade Commission has been reviewing Google’s proposed multibillion-dollar purchase of DoubleClick, the leading server of online advertising. Earlier this week, the news broke that Jones Day was working with DoubleClick both in Europe and the United States.
The news quickly raised conflict-of-interest issues, because FTC Chair Deborah Platt Majoras is the wife of John Majoras, an equity partner in Jones Day.
Jeff Chester, founder of the Center for Digital Democracy (CDD), and Marc Rotenberg, Executive Director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), who have both expressed serious concerns about the privacy implications of the Google-DoubleClick deal, filed a formal petition with the FTC asking Majoras to recuse herself from voting on the purchase.
A Clumsy Cover-Up?
On Wednesday, during the course of their research for the recusal petition, Chester and Rotenberg visited the Jones Day Web site and saw a page listing DoubleClick as a Jones Day client, along with the following statement: “Jones Day is advising DoubleClick Inc., the digital marketing technology provider, on the international and U.S. antitrust and competition law aspects of its planned $3.1 billion acquisition by Google Inc.”
The following day, however, the DoubleClick client page and all related material was gone. Chester and Rotenberg were able to retrieve earlier versions of the deleted Web pages using the cache feature on, of all things, Google.
They included screen shots of the original Web pages and the newly empty versions in a Freedom of Information Act letter on Thursday afternoon to Donald S. Clark,…