Philip Perry

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Philip J. Perry (born 1964, San Diego County, California) is an American attorney and Bush Administration political appointee. He was Acting Associate Attorney General at the Department of Justice, General Counsel of the Office of Management and Budget, and General Counsel of the Department of Homeland Security. He is currently a partner at Latham & Watkins in their litigation department.

[edit] Biography

Perry graduated from Colorado College in 1986 and from Cornell Law School in 1990. He married fellow Colorado alum Elizabeth Cheney in 1993; they have five children. Cheney, the former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs at the State Department, is the daughter of Vice President Dick Cheney.

Perry was a junior partner at Latham & Watkins in Washington, D.C. with a practice in commercial litigation and federal administrative law. In 1997-98, Perry was Counsel to the United States Senate hearings on campaign finance abuses in the 1996 Presidential campaigns. In 2000, he was a policy advisor for the Bush-Cheney presidential transition team and an advisor on the Vice Presidential Debate preparation team.

Perry joined the Department of Justice as acting Associate Attorney General (the Department’s third-ranking official), overseeing five DOJ legal units. After the September 11, 2001 attacks, Perry also advised the Attorney General on issues relating to the government response and the War on Terrorism and the Victims Compensation Fund. He then moved to the White House to be General Counsel for the Office of Management and Budget. Among his tasks was drafting the blueprint for the new Department of Homeland Security.

In 2003, while at the OMB, Perry helped add language to a Department of Homeland Security authorization bill that granted DHS authority superseding chemical industry regulations passed by the State of New Jersey.^[1]

In 2003 he left the government and returned to Latham & Watkins as a full partner, where he joined their Homeland Security practice group, lobbying the Department of Homeland Security on behalf of Fortune 500 clients. His Latham salary reportedly topped $700,000.

In 2005 he was nominated as General Counsel for the Department of Homeland Security to succeed Joe Whitley. In that position, Perry supervised over 1,500 lawyers, and advised Chertoff and the White House on the Department's legal and policy issues. He had substantial involvement in the passage of legislation authorizing DHS to regulate chemical site security. DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff is a former colleague at Latham.

On February 6, 2007, Perry left DHS and returned to Latham & Watkins, where he will chair the firm's Public Policy Practice Group.