Kamala Harris Invites Visa CEO to VP Residence Even as Administration Sues His Company

And Wall Street's battle against Lina Khan ramps up

Lina Khan testifies before the House Appropriations Committee on May 15, 2024. Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

As part of her business community charm offensive, Kamala Harris recently hosted Visa CEO Ryan McInerney at her vice presidential residence in Washington, part of a gathering of corporate chief executives, according to a new report in the Financial Times. The invitation is remarkable given that just last week the Biden-Harris Department of Justice sued Visa for breaking antitrust law and ripping off customers and small businesses to the tune of billions of dollars.  

“Visa screws every small business in the country and is being sued by the Biden-Harris administration for monopolization,” said Matt Stoller, an antitrust expert and author of the book “Goliath.” “Harris is sending the message, ‘I’m with the people who screw you over’ and she doesn’t even know it. She needs new advisors.” 

Visa is accused of jacking up prices and blocking competition in a lawsuit we covered in detail last week on Counter Points. 

The same FT report relays assurances Harris made to the financial industry executives that she could remove regulators they see as hostile, such as Lina Khan at the Federal Trade Commission and Gary Gensler at the the Securities and Exchange Commission. 

Previous articles in the Wall Street trade press that had expressed the confidence of finance executives that they would win their battle against Khan generally did not include any rebuttal from the Harris campaign, though this new FT piece does. “A campaign official disputed that characterization and noted that when the vice-president discussed antitrust issues, she only talked about policy and not personnel,” the FT reported. A Harris spokesperson didn’t comment on record in response to a request from Drop Site. 

Dan Geldon, former chief of staff to Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., a key Khan ally, said that the Wall Street types may indeed be off in their interpretation. "Campaign donors often just hear what they want to hear, but the reality is they are positioned against a broad base of support for Khan across the Democratic Party ranging from top labor unions, to civil rights organizations, to both progressive and moderate members of Congress and replacing her would provoke an unnecessary and self-defeating intra-party fight,” Geldon said .

The new private assurances, if they are being conveyed accurately, come after Harris surrogate Mark Cuban made a similar promise in public on CNBC. Asked about Harris’ posture toward Gensler and Khan, Cuban said, “She’s been very clear that she’s against regulation via litigation. She said it. She’s had me say it for them.” 

“Is that a veiled way of saying that Gary Gensley is legislating through lawsuits?” asked host Andrew Ross Sorkin.

“I don’t think it’s very veiled at all,” Cuban said. “I think it is what it is. In terms of Lina [Khan], I think she’s done some things right and wrong. I think her efforts in the pharmacy space have been right on, she’s done a good job. Her efforts to try to break up some of these mergers, I don’t agree with.”

Another word for “regulation via litigation” is simply enforcement. If corporations break the law, the only way to enforce it is through criminal prosecution or civil litigation. Regulation without litigation makes the laws on the books mere suggestions.

Khan was previously the subject of a public lobbying effort against her by billionaire donors Reid Hoffman and Barry Diller, both of whom have business dealings before the FTC. Since then, elected Democrats across the spectrum have closed ranks behind Khan, the subject of a recent “60 Minutes” profile. Harris remains a rare Democrat who has not voiced support for Khan.

There are disagreements within the world of big money on how to best attack Khan, with some arguing she would be more properly shivved behind closed doors, not attacked in public where she’s popular. “So some of these guys on Wall Street told me that the people coming out publicly were being slightly dumb,” said one of the FT reporters on the Khan beat. “We’re making [Harris’] life much harder because she already probably wanted to get rid of her, of Khan. Now it’s gonna look bad that she does. And so somebody told me, like, the guys on the West Coast need to shut their mouth.”

Maryland Gov. Wes Moore had also previously suggested—again on CNBC—that Harris would dump Khan and move away from Biden’s tough antitrust approach. The Harris camp did nothing to push back against Moore’s suggestion and Moore’s office, reached for comment by Drop Site, stood by it, saying only, “The Biden-Harris Administration has and will continue to protect working families from rising prices across the country. Hundreds of thousands of Marylanders no longer worry month-to-month about rising insulin costs because of the work of the Biden Administration and those are the results Governor Moore knows Vice President Harris and Gov. Walz will continue to provide for working families.” Asked if that rather confounding response was intended to address our question about Lina Khan, the spokesperson confirmed it was. 

The intense focus on a single regulator during the presidential campaign is highly unusual, as regulators tend to toil in obscurity at best or anonymity at worst. But her relentless moves against predatory companies have won her broad popular acclaim. She even sat for a recent interview with comedian Hasan Minhaj. “As of this interview, there are 98 Wall Street Journal articles about you,” he said. “Do you like that heat?”

“Look, it’s inevitable that when you’re taking on powerful corporations that are breaking the law, there’s gonna be pushback.”

The courtship is at least finding some votes for Harris. “I was going to vote for Trump because I was annoyed about being targeted by Biden . . . I could reconsider now,” one person described as “a leading private equity investor” told FT. “Trump is still better on taxes but Harris seems to be more like Clinton than Obama or Biden.”