Path to Power
West was born in San Francisco in 1965 and was raised in San Jose, Calif. Like Obama, West is a black politician raised outside of the black churches and away from the civil rights movement. His father was from Georgia and his mother was from Alabama, but they moved to California before he was born searching for new opportunities. In high school, he won a race for freshman class president by making posters of himself talking with then-California Gov. Jerry Brown (D). After graduating from Harvard University in 1987, he worked for Michael Dukakis’ (D) presidential campaign as the chief of staff to the treasurer. After Dukakis lost, West worked as finance director for the Democratic Governors’ Association until moving back to the West Coast to attend Stanford Law School, where he would become president of the Stanford Law Review.
During his summers in law school, West worked for the law firms of Swidler & Berlin; Morrison & Foerster and Tuttle & Taylor. But after graduation, he returned to politics, working as the chief of staff to the finance chairman of the California Democratic Party for a year. And after a year as an associate at Bingham McCutchen in California, he began a stint at the Justice Department.
Clinton Justice Department
West’s first job at Justice under then-Attorney General Janet Reno was as a special assistant to Deputy Attorney General Philip Heymann from 1993 to 1994. West worked specifically on crime policy, in particular the Omnibus Crime Bill of 1994, which expanded police training and spending, expanded the death penalty and cracked down on gun transfer laws. In 1994, he was tapped as assistant U.S. attorney for the Northern District of California, where he prosecuted a variety of crimes, including sexual exploitation, bank robberies, tax violations and government malfeasance. During that time, he also served as planning commissioner for San Jose and served on the boards of a variety of agencies.
California Attorney General and Political Campaigns
In 1999, West was appointed by the California attorney general as the state’s special assistant attorney general. In that capacity, West acted as an adviser to the attorney general and specialized in the areas of high-tech crime, identity theft, civil rights and police misconduct.
When Mike Honda (D) left the California Assembly to run for the U.S. Congress in 2000, West ran for Honda’s seat against Manny Diaz (D)and lost in a racially-charged contest. West, who had also lost a race for San Jose city council in 1998, was called “the best candidate to have never won a race.”
West left government in 2001 to take a job as a partner at the San Francisco law firm of Morrison & Foerster, where his work ranged from representing individuals in civil rights cases to representing large corporations in complex litigation to white-collar criminal defense.
Though he was working in private practice, West stayed tangentially involved in politics. In 2004, he was selected to be a delegate for Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) at the Democratic National Convention. West met Barack Obama at that convention (Obama delivered the keynote address and launched himself on the national stage there), and he told Obama that he would volunteer whenever Obama decided to run for president. “I had no doubt that he’d run for president,” West said. “I didn’t anticipate that it would be so soon.”
In December 2006, Obama began thinking about running for president, and he asked West to join his team. West began raising money in northern California, and eventually became one of Obama’s state finance co-chairs. The campaign raised a record $65 million in California during the 2008 contest.
After the election, Obama nominated West as assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s civil division, which defends the federal government in litigation. He was confirmed in April 2009. The civil division deals with non-criminal cases involving the government such as contract disputes. For example, when the government wanted to sue tobacco companies for the money it had spent on treating tobacco-related illnesses, the civil division handled the case.
