FILE — James Cole, then the deputy attorney general, speaks at a news conference at the Department of Justice in Washington, Aug. 31, 2011. Cole was among the well-connected lawyers hired by Caterpillar. In December 2018, a team of U.S. law enforcement agents flew to Amsterdam to interview a witness in a yearslong criminal investigation into Caterpillar, which had avoided billions of dollars of income taxes by shifting profits to a Swiss subsidiary.
In the months leading up to the canceled interview in the Netherlands, Caterpillar had enlisted a small group of well-connected lawyers to plead the company’s case. Chief among those was William Barr, who had served as attorney general in the George H.W. Bush administration. “It appears that Caterpillar was given special political treatment that the average U.S. citizen cannot obtain,” Jason LeBeau, one of the agents who worked on the investigation, wrote to the Justice Department’s inspector general late last year.“Caterpillar cooperated with the government in its review of the issues, and we were pleased to have reached the resolution with the IRS,” said Joan Cetera, a spokesperson for the company.
Investigations of corporate tax dodges are generally civil, not criminal. This was a rare exception, indicating that federal authorities believed that Caterpillar might have engaged in deliberate wrongdoing. By early 2018, the IRS had informed Caterpillar that the agency was seeking taxes and penalties totaling $2.3 billion. The U.S. attorney’s criminal investigation was also moving ahead.
To press Caterpillar’s case, Cole met several times with Zuckerman. Whereas Cole was a powerhouse lawyer in Washington, Zuckerman had only recently moved to the capital from Michigan to join the Justice Department. That afternoon, a lawyer in the tax division wrote to Miller, the federal prosecutor in Illinois, to ask about the extent of Caterpillar’s objections to the ongoing investigation. Miller responded that he knew of several instances of the company’s representatives protesting. He also asked what steps would be taken to wall off Barr from the investigation.
Miller made a plea for an explanation about why the investigation was being paused. “Perhaps if we understood the underlying reasoning, we could address those concerns and still conduct the interview,” which had taken months to arrange, he wrote.
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