A month after his father helped broker a meeting between the Trump administration and prominent law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton, & Garrison LLP, Boston mayoral candidate Josh Kraft received $1,000 in political contributions from four top attorneys at the firm, including its chairman, Brad Karp.
In mid-March, President Trump signed an executive order targeting Paul Weiss as part of a broader attack on elite law firms. Robert Kraft — the billionaire Patriots owner who has ties to both Trump and the law firm, which has long represented the National Football League — helped negotiate a meeting between the two parties, according to news reports. After a lengthy conversation between Karp and Trump in the Oval Office, the Trump administration rescinded its order, and Paul Weiss agreed to provide $40 million in pro bono work to support the administration’s priorities, according to those reports.
Weeks later, on April 18, Karp and three other lawyers at his firm contributed $1,000, the maximum legal limit, to Josh Kraft’s campaign, campaign finance records show.
A spokesperson for the Kraft Group said Robert Kraft was not involved in coordinating any donations from Paul Weiss attorneys to his son’s campaign. The Kraft campaign said it did not reach out to any of the donors from the firm.
“Josh is grateful for the significant momentum and support the campaign has received since launching in February,” a spokesperson said.
The donations to Kraft’s political campaign come as the Democrat and longtime nonprofit executive seeks to lead a city that loathes the president — while navigating the close ties between Trump and his father.
Robert Kraft was a longtime friend of the president; Kraft attended Trump’s wedding in 2005 to first lady Melania Trump, and Trump comforted Kraft when his first wife, Myra, died in 2011. Robert Kraft donated $1 million to Trump’s first inauguration.
Robert Kraft seemed to distance himself from Trump after the Jan. 6 insurrection, telling a radio show last fall that he had not spoken to Trump since the attack on the US Capitol. But recently, there have been strong indications that the two are in touch, perhaps most notably Kraft’s role in brokering the Paul Weiss meeting. Kraft’s wife, Dana Blumberg, was also named to the remade board of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington not long after Trump returned to the White House.
Josh Kraft has said he has never voted for Trump or financially supported him, and earlier this year, called him “unfit to be president due to his character and lack of emotional control.”
He has also emphasized that he differs with his father when it comes to his views on the president.
“I love my dad,” Josh Kraft said in February as he launched his campaign. “We agree on a lot of things. Donald Trump, we disagree on.”
Josh Kraft has said he is running as his own person, even asking voters to “set aside any ideas they might have about me based on my last name.”
Still, his father’s ties to the president stand in stark contrast to the views of incumbent Mayor Michelle Wu, who has positioned herself as a fiery counterweight to the administration as its threats to yank federal funding threaten Boston’s key industries. Wu pushed back against GOP criticism during a high-profile congressional hearing last month and even drew the ire of the White House for her State of the City address weeks later.
State Senator Lydia Edwards, a Democrat from Boston who has been an ally of Wu, said accepting funds from attorneys at a firm that “capitulated” to Trump shows Kraft is out of touch with the city’s needs and political leanings.
“If he really does care about the people of Boston, he needs to give the money back,” Edwards said. “He is not a destitute first-time grassroots candidate that can’t get the funds from someplace else.”
To be sure, the recent $4,000 from Paul Weiss attorneys is just a fraction of the more than $775,000 Kraft has reported raising so far in his bid for mayor. And it’s hardly unusual for political candidates such as Kraft to draw financial support from elite lawyers. Wu has drawn generous donations from top law firms over the years, though no recent contributions from Paul Weiss employees, according to campaign finance records.
Still, the donations to Kraft are notable not just for their timing: None of the four Paul Weiss donors — Karp, Scott Barshay, Angelo Bonvino, and Gregory Ezring — live in Massachusetts, and none has ever given to a Boston mayoral candidate before, state campaign finance records show.
Of the four, only Karp, the firm chairman, has ever donated to a state-level candidate in Massachusetts. Karp has been a prolific donor to Democrats at the federal level, giving more than $100,000 last year to candidates, including Kamala Harris. But he has only rarely given to state-level candidates in Massachusetts; the most recent donation was in 2014 to former attorney general Martha Coakley, then the Democratic nominee for governor.
A spokesperson for Paul Weiss and the four donors at the firm did not immediately respond to questions Monday. The firm is also known locally for its role in the Patriots’ 2015 Deflategate scandal: Theodore Wells, a partner at Paul Weiss, wrote a prominent report finding that it was “more probable than not” that Patriots personnel deliberately deflated the team’s footballs.
Even as Josh Kraft has sought to distance himself from his father’s politics, Robert Kraft has made it obvious he takes a keen interest in Boston’s political leadership. (Josh Kraft has said he would recuse himself from any business his family had before the city.)
Robert Kraft has long been stymied by political opposition in Boston, most notably when he failed to strike a deal with former mayor Thomas Menino over a proposal to build a new football stadium in the city. Weeks ago, at the NFL owners meetings in Palm Beach, Fla., Kraft lamented to reporters that “politics takes over in Beantown.”
Asked about his plans to build a soccer stadium in nearby Everett, Kraft added, “We just need the political people and get all the agendas, putting [the] team first. And we hope it happens, but we can’t force it.”
Ben Volin of the Globe staff contributed to this report.
Emma Platoff can be reached at emma.platoff@globe.com. Follow her @emmaplatoff.