Former Hillary Clinton adviser Declan Kelly has been secretly helping Boeing Co., which faces numerous safety concerns, The Post has learned.
Kelly — retired from consulting firm Teneo in 2021. Accused of inappropriately touching six employees at charity event — He has been advising former Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun on communications strategy for the past two years, people told the Post.
Mr. Kelly is currently working with Boeing’s board of directors to find Mr. Calhoun’s replacement.
Officials said they were baffled by the decision.
“Due to the number of significant issues Boeing has experienced since 2020 on Mr. Calhoun’s watch, Mr. Calhoun will be effectively forced to resign at the end of 2024,” one Boeing insider wrote in the post. told the paper. “It’s crazy that someone who helped him in that role would be helping him find his successor.”
“Boeing already has trust issues. People are afraid to fly on Boeing planes,” said another person who has known and worked with Mr. Kelly for years. “That’s the worst thing they could do.”
General Electric CEO Larry Culp, a former client of Mr. Kelly’s, introduced him to Mr. Calhoun early in his tenure as CEO, a person with direct knowledge told the paper. The two began working on Calhoun’s communications strategy.
Calhoun, who stepped down as CEO last month, certainly tried to be transparent as CEO.
Earlier this year, Calhoun tried to acknowledge Boeing’s mistakes, saying, “We have a mission to communicate with all of our customers.” “We’re going to admit our mistake and work on this, number one. We’re going to work on it with 100% and complete transparency every step of the way.”
But that strategy wasn’t enough to salvage Mr. Calhoun’s rocky tenure, especially in January when an Alaska Airlines flight from Portland, Oregon, to Ontario, California, blew off the door panel of the Boeing plane and made an emergency landing. After being forced to.
Those close to Boeing say it is strange that Mr. Kelly would remain in the company after Mr. Calhoun was fired. But they say the decision was made around the same time Steve Mollenkopf, a longtime customer of Mr. Kelly’s who had been on Boeing’s board since 2020, was named chairman of the board. Pointed out.
Mr. Molenkopf, the former CEO of Qualcomm, is also a special advisor to Mr. Kelly’s new consulting firm, Consello.
Representatives for Boeing, Consello, Kelly and Culp did not respond to requests for comment.
Kelly is Irish and immigrated to the United States in 2001 after a career as a journalist and PR executive in her home country.
In 2007, Kelly joined Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign as an advisor, becoming a trusted advisor to both the candidate and her husband, former President Bill Clinton.
Kerry was appointed economic envoy to Northern Ireland in 2009 after Hillary Clinton was defeated and became secretary of state under President Barack Obama.
Around this time, he also founded a new consulting firm that later became Teneo. It was founded in 2011 with Bill Clinton’s former bodyman and gatekeeper Doug Band.
The consulting firm advises executives on strategy and communications, and Mr. Kerry and Mr. Bund’s deep political ties helped bring Bill Clinton and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair to its advisory board. As a result, he was able to earn a huge amount of money for his consulting services. Customers include General Motors, Coca-Cola, and Dell.
The newspaper previously reported how Mr. Kelly arranged meetings with the Clintons and had one of his clients, Dow Chemical CEO Andrew Lillis, appear on President Obama’s stage 13 times in one year. I reported on how it happened.
Bill Clinton resigned under intense scrutiny in 2012, and the Clinton family has since severed ties with Kerry.
Kelly’s future as an advisor to blue-chip companies appears to be in jeopardy after he left Teneo after being accused of sexual misconduct at a VIP fundraising Global Citizen event in May 2021. Ta.
The 56-year-old acknowledged the incident as an “inadvertent and publicly embarrassing mistake”, adding that he has “apologized as well as those directly affected”. [to] my colleagues and clients. ”
A few months later, he launched Consello and successfully signed Tom Brady and Serena Williams as partners.
Some say they are not shocked that Mr. Kelly managed to join Boeing.
“I don’t think he knows about airplanes, but he knows about disasters,” a longtime acquaintance of Kelly told the Post. “He’s a good salesman though, so I can understand how he got the job.”
