Fairfax schools hires K Street lobbyist with ties to Chinese Communist Party at $2,225 per hour

Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) is being questioned over its hiring of a law firm better known for its lobbying than its lawyering – at the cost of $2,225 per hour.

The firm, Sidley Austin LLP, is costing nearly 10 times the average Virginia lawyer. The district retained the firm to defend itself against charges of civil rights violations regarding race, a case currently being investigated by the Virginia attorney general’s office.

The contract with K Street firm Sidley Austin LLP was first discovered by the Fairfax County Times via a public request for documents related to the National Merit Scholarship scandal.

The district has been mired in a number of controversies, including its failure to notify recipients of the prestigious scholarship award, which some suspect was motivated by a bias to create more “racial equity” in the district schools. 

Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares began an investigation into the scandal to determine if the district’s failure to notify students was motivated by racial bias, a violation of the Virginia Human Rights Act. 

The district blamed Miyares for having to get the expensive legal help.

“Unfortunately, FCPS has been required to retain legal counsel to counter recent baseless claims made by the Attorney General,” an FCPS spokesperson told local ABC 7News.  

“The Attorney General’s office blocked FCPS from working with any of the most highly-qualified and less expensive Virginia-based legal firms FCPS originally contacted and therefore the Attorney General is responsible for imposing these higher legal costs on taxpayers.”

The AG’s office says the allegations are completely untrue.

“There are thousands of practicing attorneys in the Commonwealth of Virginia,” Miyares Spokeswoman Victoria LaCivita told 7News on Sunday. “Fairfax is free to select any attorney or firm it wishes, subject to Virginia’s well-established ethics and conflict of interest rules. 

“Fairfax’s claim that the OAG somehow blocked the county from retaining any Virginia-based firm is false and a distraction. It is also not the Attorney General’s fault that Fairfax County chose to implement policies that may violate the Virginia Human Rights Act.”

As to Sidley Austin, the firm boasts about its relationships with global powerhouses Morgan Stanley, Novartis, New Horizon Capital, Pfizer, Samsung and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

The law firm defended the CCP against charges of multiple antitrust violations in the U.S., of charges that the communist regime illegally dominated the US poultry market, and of charges that China has tried to corner the market in rare Earth minerals.

In fact, Sidley has seemingly represented the very Communist state agencies in China that are responsible for trying to blackmail the U.S. by withholding antibiotics – which are responsible for record-setting environmental abuses and for currency manipulations which landed China on a U.S. Treasury blacklist. 

“We have maintained close ties with the P.R.C. State Food and Drug Administration (SFDA), the P.R.C. State Administration for Environmental Protection and the State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE),” said the Sidley website. 

As for FCPS, Miyares’ office said the district previously hired a racial equity consultant for $455,000 from Berkeley, California, which recommended “equal outcomes for every student without exception, even if it means treating some students purposefully unequally,” which is one basis for the investigation into violations of the Virginia Human Rights Act.