TALK OF THE TOWN with MIKE AGUIRRE Fri 3-4pm
PROJECT 2025, ITS PLAN, DEMOCRACY, THE RULE OF LAW
Mike is in conversation with his guest Gary Aguirre delving into Project 2025 understanding it, understanding its reach and more.
Gary Aguirre is best known as the SEC attorney who resisted his supervisors’ demands to give preferential treatment to an influential Wall Street banker in an insider trading investigation. Fired for his so-called insubordination, Gary would prove to the satisfaction of two Senate Committees, a federal court, and three federal agencies that the SEC had acted unlawfully. These events became the focus of three Senate committee hearings and 108-page report by two Senate committees. The story has been told in a dozen books, national and international television, and hundreds of news articles, including the front page of the New York Times.
Gary is a San Diego native. After getting a bachelor and law degree from UC Berkeley, he returned to San Diego to work as a public defender. He would later represent plaintiffs in many high profile cases, including Johnson v PSA, which proved PSA’s liability for 134 victims of the 1978 mid-air collision over San Diego. He left law for six years to life in Spain, his father’s homeland. In 2001, he went back to law school (Georgetown) to retool for a new career in public service. His published thesis won second prize for the best paper on securities law in national competition sponsored by the SEC Alumni Association.
After joining the SEC in 2004, Gary soon headed an insider trading investigation of the world’s largest hedge fund. After his firing, he sued the SEC under FOIA to get the investigative files and won. Forbes discussed what happened next: “After a scathing 2007 report by the Senate criticized the SEC’s handling of Aguirre’s Pequot investigation, and after Aguirre dredged up the smoking gun e-mails and passed them along to the Senate, the FBI and the SEC, in late 2008, the SEC reopened the case in January 2009.” Pequot closed its doors a few months later. In May 2010, Pequot and its CEO settled with the SEC for $28 million, the same case Aguirre had uncovered five years earlier.
Since 2010, Gary has represented government and corporate whistleblowers before federal agencies, the courts, and the Congress
