MODERATORS

BILL THOMAS, has covered the White House and Capitol Hill for over twenty years. He has been a reporter for The Baltimore Sun, a columnist for Roll Call and The Hill newspapers and the editor of Capital Style magazine, published in Washington by The Economist. Currently he is a contributing writer for The Washington Post Magazine. He’s also the author of several books, among them Lawyers and Thieves and Red Tape: Adventure Capitalism in the New Russia. His articles have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, National Geographic and many other publications.

Mr. Thomas wrote about the break-up of the Soviet Union for The Los Angeles Times Magazine. He has covered civil wars in three former Soviet republics, street demonstrations in Iran and a Noble Peace Prize ceremony in Norway. He reported on the 1991 communist coup attempt in Moscow and Boris Yeltsin’s 1996 presidential campaign. Recent writing assignments have taken him to South Africa, Mozambique, Finland and the Republic of Georgia.

Mr. Thomas studied for a Ph.D. at the University of Washington and was a professor of literature at Goucher College in Baltimore. He has spoken at a number of colleges and universities in the United States and aboard, including the Moscow Institute of Foreign Relations. He has worked as a radio talk show host and been interviewed on CNN, PBS, Fox News, C-SPAN, Al Arabiya, Entertainment Tonight and The O’Reilly Factor. He was also the Washington correspondent for the short-lived television version of The Drudge Report.

In the early 1990s, he was a screenplay consultant at Paritet, an independent Moscow film studio. The Prez, an Off-Broadway musical about the life of President Warren Harding, was based in part on his book Capital Confidential.

BOOKS

Lawyers and Thieves Simon & Schuster, 1990.

The New York Times called Lawyers and Thieves “wry, witty and eloquent.” The Wall Street Journal praised it as an “entertaining expose” of the legal profession. The Los Angeles Times said Lawyers and Thieves has “the quality of hard-boiled mystery fiction: tough, knowing and full of dirty little secrets.”

Red Tape: Adventure Capitalism in the New Russia  Dutton, 1992.

Kirkus Reviews recommended Red Tape as “a breezy, street-wise guide...that does for the New Russia what P.J. O’Rourke’s Parliament of Whores did for the US government.” Booklist called Red Tap “Hilarious!” “How things in Russia really work,” said the Hoover Institution.

Club Fed: Power, Money, Sex and Violence on Capitol Hill, Scribners, 1994.

The Washington Post praised Club Fed as a “timely...entertaining ... required reading.” The American Lawyer called it “a sprawling and ribald collection of salacious scandals.” Playboy said Club Fed “details the brazen state of corruption in Congress and leaves no doubt that we have the finest government money can buy.”

Capital Confidential: One Hundred Years of Scandals and Secrets in Washington, Pocket Books (paperback), 1996.