Biden’s Brussels pick isn’t just one of the president’s men

All U.S. ambassadors serve at the pleasure of the president. But Mark Gitenstein, Joe Biden’s choice to be U.S. envoy to the EU, is a beneficiary of the president’s “personal privilege.”

Gitenstein, 74, is a close friend of the president and longtime aide, who was literally at Biden’s shoulder for much of 1987 — arguably the most pivotal year in Biden’s lifelong career in public service. That year, the then-senator from Delaware made his first failed run for president and, as Judiciary Committee chairman, led a successful longshot bid to defeat President Ronald Reagan’s nomination of Robert Bork to the U.S. Supreme Court.

At the time, Gitenstein was chief counsel to the Judiciary Committee, and he can be seen in a video of Bork’s high-drama confirmation hearings, perched behind Biden’s right shoulder, as strategically placed — and nearly as close-at-hand — as the senator’s gold-plated wooden gavel propped on the table in front of him.

Gitenstein was succeeded in the chief counsel job in 1989 by Ron Klain, now the White House chief of staff, and the ranks of future Biden Senate staffers would eventually include the likes of Antony Blinken, now secretary of state. But it was 1987 and the defeat of the Bork nomination that defined Biden’s future and, as a result, means the EU will soon get an ambassador who has not only the president’s ear but also a piece of his heart.

Biden described their friendship during a visit to Bucharest, as Barack Obama’s vice president, in 2009 when Gitenstein was U.S. ambassador to Romania. “We have an ambassador here — America in my view has sent their best,” he said, standing beside Romania’s then-President Traian Băsescu.

“There’s an expression when you stand up on the floor of the Senate, if you are going to talk about something personally, Mr. President, we say please excuse the point of personal privilege,” Biden said. “And full disclosure, our ambassador is my best personal friend. We have raised each other’s children. We have — our wives are close friends. My grandchildren are — consider the Gitensteins to be almost relatives.”

At a time when Biden has put a huge premium on restoring transatlantic relations, it’s fitting that he would send Brussels an ambassador he considers a relation of his own. Even more fitting, according to officials and diplomats who know him, is Gitenstein’s track record as a defender of rule of law and an anti-corruption crusader at a time when the EU is locked in a fierce debate among its own member countries about such basic concepts as how to define an independent judiciary.

From Beltway to Bucharest

In fact, Gitenstein first ended up in the ambassadorial ranks after failing to clinch a bigger Beltway job. Having helped to lead Biden’s vice presidential transition team, Gitenstein was in line for a senior Justice Department position, as head of the Office of Legal Policy, only to be thwarted by criticism from some advocacy groups about his decades as a private lawyer and lobbyist representing big corporate interests.

Instead, Obama nominated Gitenstein as ambassador to Romania, where he served from 2009 to 2012. He refers to himself as a “proud” Romanian-American, citing his Romanian-Jewish great-grandfather who was born in Botoșani, near the current borders of Moldova and Ukraine, in the late 1890s and emigrated to the U.S. as a child.

When Gitenstein arrived in Bucharest in 2009, Romania had been a member of the EU for just over 30 months and officials who knew him then said he helped encourage the country’s integration with Western European norms.

“He was very much involved in this fight against corruption, rule of law, transparency,” said a Romanian diplomat who attended meetings with him at the time.

“He was very popular in Romania, well-connected, in different spheres — justice, but not only justice, economy as well.”

Dacian Cioloș, a former Romanian prime minister who is now the head of the liberal Renew Europe group in the European Parliament, said that Gitenstein had proven to be a strong supporter of Romania at a crucial juncture in the country’s history, and that his emphasis on his Romanian ancestry proved a hit with the public.

“He played these Romanian roots in order to gain the confidence of the people,” Cioloș said in an interview, adding that the discovery of a death certificate of a Gitenstein relative had generated news coverage.

Cioloș, who was Romania’s European commissioner when Gitenstein was posted in Bucharest, recalled a strong improvement in relations between Romania and the U.S., which included the negotiation and signing of the U.S.-Romanian Ballistic Missile Defense Agreement.

“As an ambassador, he contributed a lot to the rapprochement between Romania and the USA,” Cioloș said, citing issues including defense and economic relations. He added: “In a period when democratic and anti-corruption institutions were tested to the limit, he was a very strong defender of the rule of law.”

CioloÈ™ said he expected Gitenstein to thrive on an EU-wide platform, even if Brussels and Washington sometimes disagree.

“He knows very well the situation in the European Union, and the history and evolution of relations between the EU and U.S.,” Cioloș said. “I know it will not be easy on digital issues, also on climate issues. I think overall we have some common goals with the U.S. but not every time will the solutions be in the same perspective.”

But he said, “even when we can disagree knowing the U.S. has an ambassador here, who knows very well the situation in the European Union and the detail — this is a good thing in order to find common ground.”

As ambassador, Gitenstein helped encourage development of the Bucharest Stock Exchange, and he was involved in a Europe-wide effort to promote democracy and rule of law, according to Norm Eisen, who was U.S. ambassador to the Czech Republic from 2011 to 2014, and is now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution as well as co-chair of the bipartisan Transatlantic Democracy Working Group at the German Marshall Fund of the U.S.

“One of his signature initiatives when we served together — and it really was an EU-wide initiative that all of the American ambassadors participated in and Mark helped lead — was fighting corruption and promoting democracy and the two were intertwined,” Eisen said. “Invariably when you have an adversary of democracy, like Vladimir Putin, invariably you see corruption in the regime.”

Eisen, who worked on Obama’s presidential campaign and as a special counsel in the White House before being nominated as an ambassador, said that Gitenstein would benefit in the Brussels post both from his prior experience as a diplomat and his long relationship with Biden.

“There is no stronger, more qualified nominee than Mark. I saw that firsthand when we served as ambassadors together in the region,” Eisen said.

“As one myself who benefitted from having a close longstanding relationship with the president who appointed me, I know how important those ties are and Mark has them to an unparalleled degree. His long tenure with President Biden and his closeness to the president matters to how he is perceived by the Europeans, but they also matter to getting the job done.”

Confirmation complications

The U.S. has been without a fully confirmed ambassador to the EU since February 2020, when then-President Donald Trump fired his own ambassador, Gordon Sondland, who got caught up in the Ukraine impeachment scandal and testified against his boss in Congress. He was replaced as acting ambassador by Ronald Gidwitz, who was Trump’s ambassador to Belgium and resigned upon Biden’s inauguration in January.

Gitenstein is still awaiting Senate confirmation and while his history as a staffer on Capitol Hill will no doubt accrue to his benefit, he also risks getting ensnared in some broader complaints or criticisms that Republican lawmakers have with Biden’s policies toward Europe, especially the president’s decision not to levy sanctions on German firms over Russia’s Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline and instead reach an accommodation with Germany.

Heather Conley, who served as a State Department official under President George W. Bush, said Gitenstein would likely face some scrutiny by Republicans as a result of Biden’s relatively slow approach to dealing with some issues, like trade, on which the U.S. and the EU have substantive disagreements.

“I think the Europeans have been a little surprised at the Biden administration’s lack of trade policy,” said Conley who is now senior vice president for Europe, Eurasia and the Arctic, as well as director of the Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

While there is a marked different in tone compared to Trump’s belligerence, Conley noted that on substance so far, the Biden team had changed little. “What’s the difference between Foreign Policy for the Middle Class, and Making American Great Again?” she asked, citing buzz phrases of the two presidents.

Conley, who has known Gitenstein professionally for years, said he had succeeded in Romania in part by not overreaching in the fight against corruption. “He was very focused, he understood the complexity of that problem in Romania,” she said. “Unlike a lot of other American ambassadors, sometimes you get so caught up in the fight, the fight becomes more important to you than the host nation. He pushed, but he understood it was their fight.”

For Gitenstein, the EU ambassador post is a belated benefit from the fight that defined his career and Biden’s in 1987. Gitenstein would end up leaving government and working for decades as a lawyer and lobbyist at the global law firm of Mayer Brown. And it would take Biden another 33 years to realize his dream of being elected president.

After last year’s election victory, Gitenstein once again jumped into action, joining Biden’s closest confidante Ted Kaufman in leading the presidential transition.

Gitenstein’s own 1992 book about the Bork nomination describes how Biden as a senator felt he was fighting for a way of interpreting the U.S. Constitution that would serve all U.S. citizens in the modern era, rather than the strict narrow approach favored by Reagan’s arch-conservative nominee.

But the book’s very first line celebrates not victory but friendship. “I would like to thank my friend Senator Joseph Biden,” he wrote, “who had the confidence in me to make me Chief Counsel of the Senate Judiciary Committee so that I could participate in the events described in this book.”

Eisen, the former ambassador to the Czech Republic, said Gitenstein’s willingness to work with Republicans, developed on Capitol Hill, would prove an asset in pursuing U.S. interests in the EU, which he noted were now intertwined with all U.S. interests globally, including in relation to China.

“There are no American priorities that are not transatlantic priorities,” Eisen said. “Mark comes out of the Biden school of bipartisanship. You know it’s deeply rooted in the president’s career and Mark has been a part of that extended Biden family, a close part of it for decades.”

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