He's been bad news since the Nixon administration. Here's a summary from some notes on him that I wrote up two years ago:
Anderson began his career with the Young Republican National Federation in the middle 1960's, when it was first getting into dirty tricks. In the early 70's, he became a staff assistant to President Richard Nixon. His nomination in 1974 as ambassador to Costa Rica was not confirmed by the Senate, but he served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Congressional Relations under Henry Kissinger in 1974-75.
In 1980, he served as general counsel to the RNC and as a counselor to the Reagan-Bush campaign, but instead of joining the Reagan administration he formed his own lawfirm and worked as a US lobbyist for leading Japanese corporations -- benefiting, according to author Joseph Trento, from a business relationship with Korean influence-peddler Tongsun Park.
Anderson has run the Chamber's Center for International Private Enterprise since it was founded in 1983 as part of a Reagan-administration initiative to create private groups funded by the National Endowment for Democracy that could do legally what the CIA could not in the way of intervening in other countries' elections.
Anderson has been involved since 2002 with the Committee for Justice, an astroturf group formed by C. Boyden Grey -- himself a noted astroturfer -- to lobby on behalf of Charles Pickering and other right-wing Bush judicial nominations. (This year, it was behind the Sonia Sotomayor "wise Latina" fracas.)
Anderson was described as a longtime Bush family ally in a 2006 story about his firm lobbying for the Dubai Ports deal and was a McCain "Trailblazer" in 2008, raising at least $100,000 for the candidate.
Since Donohue became the Chamber's head in 1997, Anderson has taken on an expanded role with the organization, serving as the Chamber's chief legal officer and overseeing its National Chamber Litigation Center and Institute for Legal Reform.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A38184-2004Dec5.html?nav=rss_topnewsAdvocacy Groups Blur Media Lines
Some Push Agendas By Producing Movies, Owning Newspapers
By Jeffrey H. Birnbaum
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, December 6, 2004; Page A01
The Madison County Record, an Illinois weekly newspaper launched in September that bills itself as the county's legal journal, reports on one subject: the state courts in southern Illinois. A recent front page carried an assortment of stories about lawsuits against businesses. In one, a woman sought $15,000 in damages for breaking her nose at a haunted house. In another, a woman sued a restaurant for $50,000 after she hurt her teeth on a chicken breast.
Nowhere was it reported that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce created the Record as a weapon in its multimillion-dollar campaign against lawyers who file those kinds of suits. "We wanted to educate
that their county is the laughingstock of the country" because of the large number of lawsuits filed there, said Stanton D. Anderson, chief legal officer for the chamber, which is a part owner of the Record. . . .
Anderson said he didn't agonize over ethics when he was thrashing around last spring for a new way to bring attention to the increasing burden class action lawsuits place on companies. He was focused instead on his frustration that Madison Country's court system plays host to more class action lawsuit filings than any other country in the nation -- 106 last year alone.
His brainstorm: buy a newspaper to spotlight the county's courts. Purchasing an existing publication proved too pricey even for the chamber's Institute for Legal Reform, which spent $40 million this year to battle trial lawyers. So he and Thomas J. Donohue, the chamber's president, decided to start a newspaper from scratch.
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