King County Executive-Elect Girmay Zahilay Thanks Constituents For Telling Him He’s Working With A War Profiteer, But Doesn’t Kick Him Off The Team

King County Executive-elect Girmay Zahilay told The Burner he’s grateful to his constituents for raising concerns in a recent community letter about his decision to prop up Microsoft President and Vice Chairman Brad Smith as one of four co-chairs on the team guiding his transition to office. Zahilay joined them in condemning “the facilitation of human rights violations in Gaza,” but he did not commit to the chief demand of the letter: Removing the big tech boss they accuse of facilitating the aforementioned human rights violations.

Rather, Zahilay's team said he "will be reaching out” to Microsoft about the community’s outrage over their reported participation in the genocide in Gaza and other issues raised in the letter including the company’s complicity in the mass deporation machine and advocacy against a fairer tax code. 

Earlier this month, Zahilay announced his 100-person transition team, which will help steer the first transfer of power in that office in more than 15 years. Zahilay, who ran as the marginally more progressive candidate, pitched a big tent for his transition team including big business interests, the real industry, organized labor, non-profit leadership and some of the more palatable area activists. Zahilay designated four co-chairs to lead the team: former Seahawk football star Doug Baldwin, MLK Labor Council head Katie Garrow, the Seattle Indian Health Board CEO Esther Lucero, and, of course, Smith from Microsoft. Many politicos would argue that the makeup of the transition team is not as important or as powerful as who Zahilay ends up hiring, but it’s still a statement of the perspectives he values  — or at least the ones he strategically doesn’t want to piss off.  

The Smith appointment did not go over well with some. 

“It’s bonkers to me that [Zahilay] calls himself a ‘progressive’ while doing business with executives & corporations guilty of mass murder,” Palestinian poet and activist Tariq Ra’ouf wrote in an Instagram caption last weekend. “[Zahilay] put [Smith] at the HEAD of his transition team, clearly showing his cards as someone who cares more about corporations and the status quo than actually fighting systemic issues.” 

As The Burner has reported in the past, former and current Microsoft employees have launched what they call a “Worker Intifada,” a movement demanding the company stop enabling Israel’s genocide in Gaza. This summer, The Guardian +972 Magazine, and Local Call reported that the Israeli military used Microsoft’s Azure cloud services to store and process huge quantities of intercepted telephone communications in Gaza and the West Bank. 

“To put it simply, Microsoft and its executives exploited our labor to cement themselves as the technological backbone to the Israeli genocidal machine that is blackmailing, kidnapping, massacring, and maiming millions of Palestinians,” the worker organization No Azure For Apartheid wrote on their website. “In return, the same executives raked in hundreds of millions of dollars by powering and sustaining the Israeli settler-colonial project of genocide, apartheid, displacement, ethnic cleansing, and war crimes that have put and continue to put Palestinians’ self-determination and very existence at stake.”

Microsoft cut some of its services with Israel in September, but the Human Rights Watch argues the company has not gone far enough to avoid contributing to abuses. 

If profitting off genocide isn’t a compelling enough reason for Zahilay to kick Smith out, the community letter also argued Microsoft has aided in Immigration and Custom’s Enforcement’s (ICE) fascist deportation scheme. The letter pointed to a $19 million contract the company signed with ICE that Microsoft employees petitioned against in 2018. 

Finally, the letter reminded Zahilay that Microsoft and other big tech companies have squashed efforts to make Washington’s uniquely regressive tax code fairer for working people. In the last legislative session, the Seattle Times wrote that Microsoft led the “lobbying blitz” against the wealth tax, which would have raised billions to address the State’s budget deficit without cutting essential public services and programming. DOGE shit, if that reference isn’t already too dated. 

In sum, the community letter argues, “In this state of emergency in our communities we don’t need to prop up the voices of those who have always profited within, and because of, our violent systems. We need new voices that represent our diverse communities and policies that center equity, community health and safety, and that benefit those most vulnerable in our county.” 

In an email to The Burner, Zahilay’s team thanked community members for raising their concerns: “Their engagement strengthens our collective ability to push for justice both locally and globally,” Zahilay’s spokesperson Erik Houser said. 

“Executive-elect Zahilay joins our residents in unequivocally condemning any facilitation of human rights violations in Gaza and anywhere in the world,” Houser said. “The suffering in Gaza is horrific, and we support continued pressure on all institutions to ensure their actions do not contribute to the violation of human rights. As he steps into his new role, Girmay will be reaching out to Microsoft leadership to understand their recent actions to address these concerns, and issues that continue to be raised in recent community letters.”

Houser went on to downplay Smith’s role on the transition team, reminding The Burner that it consists of more than 100 people from different interest groups and that “no individual committee member has any more authority or influence than any other member.” And before you cry “co-chair,” Houser added that Smith’s role will be to “facilitate a workshop within a subcommittee and report out a summary of what the participants discussed.” 

Zahilay’s team threaded the needle between defending their decision to include Smith on the transition team and distancing themselves from Microsoft's sins. Houser wrote that as King County Executive, Zahilay has the “obligation to engage with all major institutions operating in our region,” which includes Microsoft. Houser argued “[t]here must be space for leaders to hold institutions accountable for practices we strongly disagree with, while also collaborating when it benefits the people we were elected to serve.”