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Brian Williams

Brian Williams provides counsel to clients on all facets of a wide range of U.S. regulatory processes at the intersection of law, cross-border investment, technology, and national security. This including the transactional review process administered by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) and related national security and law enforcement reviews conducted by the Committee for the Assessment of Foreign Participation in the U.S. Telecommunications Services Sector (known informally as “Team Telecom”) that involve foreign applicants for certain categories of Federal Communications Commission (FCC) telecommunications licenses.

He has assisted dozens of clients on both the buy and sell side across a tremendous range of industry sectors (including AI, semiconductors, robotics, advanced transportation technologies, life sciences, and healthcare, as well as telecommunications, energy, and financial services infrastructure, products, and services) successfully evaluate and navigate these review processes to realize their transactional goals. Brian also has extensive experience successfully advising sovereign, private equity, and other fund clients on the unique challenges and opportunities they may face when coming before these regulatory regimes.

Brian also advises clients on related emerging areas of U.S. national security regulation, including the Department of Justice’s Data Security Program; the Department of Commerce’s Information and Communications Technology and Services (ICTS) and related rules (including the Connected Vehicle rule); and the Department of the Treasury’s Outbound Investment Rule.

Brian draws on expertise developed over 30 years of public and private sector service, including as an intelligence officer in the U.S. Air Force. After the conclusion of his military service, Brian spent over a decade advised a variety of U.S. government clients on issues related to national security, technology, commerce, and law. He is the principal architect of the risk framework that became the de facto standard for all transactional risk assessments conducted by CFIUS and Team Telecom and has counseled the most senior officials at the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security on how to identify, assess, and address potential national security risks potentially posed by foreign investments, acquisitions, and collaborations. He led multi-agency analytic teams that authored the majority of CFIUS and Team Telecom risk assessments during his tenure, while providing the U.S. Government diligence, risk analysis, and mitigation strategy development and negotiation support on nearly 1,700 CFIUS transactions and over 1,000 FCC license applications before Team Telecom.

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On the heels of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, pandemic-induced supply chain disruptions, and U.S.-China tensions over Taiwan, 2022 accelerated a sweeping effort within the U.S. government to make national security considerations—especially with respect to China—a key feature of new and existing regulatory processes. This trend toward broader national security regulation, designed to help maintain U.S. strategic advantage, has support from both Republicans and Democrats, including from the Biden Administration. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan’s remarks in September 2022 capture the tone shift in Washington: “…[W]e have to revisit the longstanding premise of maintaining ‘relative’ advantages over competitors in certain key technologies…That is not the strategic environment we are in today…[w]e must maintain as large of a lead as possible.”

This environment produced important legislative and regulatory developments in 2022, including the CHIPS and Science Act (Covington alert), first-ever Enforcement and Penalty Guidelines promulgated by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (“CFIUS” or the “Committee”) (Covington alert), President Biden’s Executive Order on CFIUS (Covington alert), new restrictions under U.S. export control authorities targeting China (Covington alert), and proposals for a new regime to review outbound investments by U.S. businesses (Covington alert). The common thread among these developments is the U.S. government’s continuing appetite to use both existing and new regulatory authorities to address identified national security risks, especially where perceived risks relate to China.

With a Republican majority in the U.S. House of Representatives riding the tailwinds of this bipartisan consensus, 2023 is looking like a pivotal moment for national security regulation—expanding beyond the use of traditional authorities such as trade controls and CFIUS, into additional regulatory domains touching upon data, communications, antitrust, and possibly more. In parallel, the U.S. focus on national security continues to gain purchase abroad, with foreign direct investment (“FDI”) regimes maturing in tandem with CFIUS, and outbound investment screening gaining traction, for example, in the European Union (“EU”). It is crucial for businesses to be aware of these developments and to approach U.S. regulatory processes with a sensitivity towards the shifting national security undercurrents described in greater detail below.Continue Reading Will 2023 Be an Inflection Point in National Security Regulation?