Amazon hires ex-Obama aide Carney
Former press secretary will lead public relations, policy teams
SEATTLE – Amazon hired former White House press secretary Jay Carney to run global corporate affairs, company spokesman Craig Berman confirmed Thursday.
The news was first reported by the website Politico.
Carney will become senior vice president and head of global corporate affairs, a new job at the company. He’ll oversee both the public relations and public policy teams, splitting time between Washington, D.C., and Seattle.
Carney will report directly to Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos. Amazon’s public relations boss Berman will report to Carney, as will Paul Misener, who runs the company’s lobbying efforts.
Carney served as President Barack Obama’s press secretary from 2011-14. Prior to that, he was a journalist, covering the White House and serving as Time magazine’s Washington, D.C., bureau chief.
He left the White House in June of last year, and has worked as a senior political analyst for CNN. He will leave that job to work full-time for Amazon.
Carney joins a long line of political operatives who have parlayed their White House work into corporate gigs. Last year, the taxi-alternative service Uber hired David Plouffe, Obama’s former campaign manager and White House adviser, as senior vice president of policy and strategy. In 2012, Microsoft hired Mark Penn, a former adviser to President Clinton and to Hillary Rodham Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign, as corporate vice president of strategic and special projects.
Amazon hasn’t said why it hired Carney. Like any big company, Amazon’s had its share of bruising press, particularly last year’s contentious seven-month dispute over e-book sales terms with the book publisher Hachette.