15 Facts About Tom Strickland

Thomas Lee Strickland was born on May 16,1952 and is an American lawyer who was formerly chief of staff to Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Assistant Secretary for Fish and Wildlife and Parks in the Interior Department.

Tom Strickland served as United States Attorney for Colorado and was the Democratic nominee for US Senate for Colorado in 1996 and 2002.

Tom Strickland joined WilmerHale as a partner in September, 2011.

Tom Strickland was born in Texas but attended Louisiana State University where he took a degree in English literature, with honors, and played football.

From 1982 to 1984 Tom Strickland served as director of policy for Colorado Governor Richard Lamm, advising the governor on all policy and intergovernmental issues.

Tom Strickland went on to serve and chair the Colorado Transportation Commission from 1985 to 1989.

Tom Strickland was, with Ken Salazar, one of the founders and a board member of Great Outdoors Colorado, a lottery-funded endowment for Colorado's public parks created in 1992.

Shortly after taking office, Tom Strickland led efforts to enact Colorado's Project Exile, under which Federal and local prosecutors would cooperate to bring gun charges under state or federal laws, whichever would offer the toughest sentence.

Tom Strickland levied 37 felony counts of selling large quantities of guns to criminals against Gregory Golyansky, his brother Leonid and their employee and cousin, Dmitry Baravik, in a politically charged trial that ended in a plea bargain with a sentence of just one day of probation and a lifetime ban on selling firearms.

Tom Strickland was responsible for all legal, regulatory and compliance matters and implemented a number of corporate governance initiatives.

On January 21,2009, it was announced that Tom Strickland had accepted an appointment to serve in President Barack Obama's administration as the chief of staff and Assistant Secretary for Fish and Wildlife and Parks in the Department of the Interior.

Tom Strickland's practice focuses on a range of matters at the intersection of law, business, and government policy, including government enforcement cases, Congressional and internal investigations, corporate governance, and high-stakes crisis management matters.

In March, 2013, Tom Strickland was appointed by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to serve on the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation Board, which was recently designated by the United States Department of Justice to distribute the $2.5 billion in criminal penalties from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill to the five Gulf Coast States.

Tom Strickland had represented the Sierra Club and had served on the regional board of the Environmental Defense Fund; he was endorsed by nearly every environmental group in Colorado; however, his Republican opponent, Wayne Allard, borrowed a tactic from Tom Strickland's law partner, Steve Farber, and painted him as "the polluters' lawyer" in commercials based on research of his record of legal work for numerous clients over a ten-year legal career.

Tom Strickland fell behind in the polls and eventually lost.