PGA Tour, LIV Golf Tap DC Advisers to Deflect Lawmaker Criticism

The PGA Tour turned to law firms WilmerHale and Covington & Burling to help defend a planned merger with Saudi-backed LIV Golf as some lawmakers criticized the deal Tuesday.

Jonathan Yarowsky, a Washington-based former special counsel to President Bill Clinton and legislative affairs practice leader at WilmerHale, was among those who accompanied PGA Tour chief operating officer Ron Price and board member Jimmy Dunne as the duo testified before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

Alyssa DaCunha, WilmerHale’s congressional investigations co-chair, and Rob Kelner, chair of Covington’s political law group, also accompanied the executives. WilmerHale declined to comment. Covington & Burling did not immediately return a request for comment.

The hearing came as part of a Senate inquiry into the framework agreement reached between the PGA Tour and LIV Golf June 6, which marked a stunning deal for sides that had up until then been fierce adversaries. “There is something that stinks about this path that you’re on right now,” panel chairman Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, told the executives.

Price and Dunne defended the deal to lawmakers, claiming that previous disputes with LIV were bleeding tour assets. They also argued that LIV’s efforts to recruit PGA golfers through astronomical paydays threatened the PGA’s survival.

LIV’s chief subsidizer, the Saudi Kingdom’s Public Investment Fund, has hired Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck to a one-year contract worth $1.3 million to advocate before government officials.

Led by policy director Nadeam Elshami, a former aide to former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat, the firm will engage in “education and advocacy before the US government involving” investment fund transactions, Brownstein Hyatt said in a Justice Department filing in late June.

Others working on the assignment for the firm include Brownstein Hyatt partners Marc Lampkin, William Moschella and Mark Pryor, the former Democratic Arkansas senator, according to the Justice filing.

PGA Advisers

WilmerHale and Covington join Washington lobbyists from DLA Piper and Miller Strategies, both of whom who have been advising the PGA Tour on Capitol Hill.

DLA Piper, including partner and former Senator Saxby Chambliss, a Georgia Republican, has been lobbying Congress on “Saudi Golf League proposals” since 2021, according to public disclosures.

The tour since 2022 has paid more than $600,000 to DLA Piper and Miller Strategies, the shop run by Jeff Miller, a former adviser to House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, a California Republican. The payments include nearly $200,000 in the first quarter of the year, the disclosures show.

Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, whose chairman Ed Herlihy is a policy board chairman of the non-profit PGA Tour Inc., has also advised on the proposed PGA-LIV merger.

An antitrust dispute between the two organizations that commenced last year will be resolved as a result of the merger. The case was set to go to trial in May 2024 and had led to involvement from Big Law firms including Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan and Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom.

In addition to scrutiny from Congress, the Justice Department had been investigating the PGA Tour and LIV dispute since last summer. The parties notified the DOJ of the merger plans after a deal was reached, Bloomberg News reported.