What Pete Buttigieg Says He Did at McKinsey
Last month, a source emailed a colleague of mine with a complicated theory that, the source claimed, proved Pete Buttigieg had been in the CIA. “The American people have the right to know if he was ever an agent or officer,” the person wrote, with the kind of baseless confidence that lives on the internet.
By then, Buttigieg’s critics on the left had started to focus more on what the South Bend, Indiana, mayor could have been doing at McKinsey, a company that seems to look worse with each passing week. Progressives, and in particular the Elizabeth Warren campaign, pounced: What was Buttigieg doing at McKinsey for two and a half years? How many people had lost their jobs because of him? How shady was the work conveniently hidden behind a standard McKinsey nondisclosure agreement?
Earlier today, I talked with the mayor by phone as he sat on a charter plane about to fly from South Bend to New York. No, he told me, he was not in the CIA. He said the work he did was mainly about, in consultant-speak, reducing “overhead expenditures” and increasing “efficiencies”—but he said he doesn’t believe that any of the work he did led to job cuts, or to changes in people’s insurance. His campaign also revealed to me his clients from his time at McKinsey: Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan; Loblaws, a Canadian supermarket chain; Best Buy; the Natural Resources Defense Council; the Environmental Protection Agency; the Department of Energy; the Energy Foundation, an environmental nonprofit; the U.S. Postal Service; and the U.S. Department of Defense.
The decision to release his client list came slowly, a few days later, Trevor Noah compared him to a teenager pretending he’d done his homework and then getting mad while trying to hide the evidence he hadn’t.
