Alex Thompson & Theodoric Meyer:
JEFF ZIENTS, the man tapped to lead the Biden administration’s Covid-19 response, “fell in love with” the culture at the management consulting firm Bain & Company. He later founded his own private equity firm, Portfolio Logic. He joined the board of Facebook after the Cambridge Analytica scandal. One chief executive on Obama’s Jobs Council remarked that he thought Zients, then a top Obama aide, was a Republican.
That was the Jeff Zients people read about on Wikipedia. At least, until a few months ago.
The Democratic consulting firm Saguaro Strategies scrubbed those details from Zients’ page this summer and fall as he became a more important figure on Biden’s team and was tapped to co-chair the transition. The firm — which made the edits using the easily decipherable username “Saguarostrat” — corrected some inaccuracies but its overall goal was to portray Zients as more progressive and remove or massage anything that could be politically damaging.
At the top of the section about Zients’ role in advocating for the Trans-Pacific Partnership which faced left-wing opposition, the firm included Zients’ argument that it was “the most progressive trade agreement there’s ever been.” His amorous quotes about Bain were deleted and replaced with a description of the company as a “management consulting firm that provides advice to public, private, and non-profit organizations.”
They added that Zients left Facebook “over differences with company leadership over governance and its policies around political discourse” although Zients has never said that publicly. The transition team has declined several of POLITICO requests for interviews with Zients about why he left Facebook.