Last week, South Bend, Indiana, mayor Pete Buttigieg accused Massachusetts senator and fellow Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren of a lack of transparency. It was the latest salvo in a tit-for-tat exchange: Warren had been criticizing Buttigieg over his closed-to-the-public fundraisers and the three years he spent working for the consulting firm McKinsey & Company. On Sunday, Warren released those tax documents, showing she earned $1.9 million from such clients over three decades, allegedly an unremarkable sum for such work.

Buttigieg reportedly had been unable to release the names of his clients while working at McKinsey due to a nondisclosure agreement (NDA). But the little information that was publicly available seemed questionable, fueling speculation that Buttigieg helped the consulting firm recommend massive layoffs at a Midwestern health-insurance company. Wendell Potter, a former health-care executive, wrote on Twitter his former company's CFO kept McKinsey on retainer and consulted with them whenever a division wasn't turning a high enough profit. "Those of us who knew about McKinsey’s involvement at our insurance corporation knew it would lead to 'cost cutting,'" Potter wrote. "That’s consultant talk for laying off workers, offshoring, and hiking rates. The McKinsey efforts would have code names because it had to be kept secret." Potter's assessment turned out to be fairly accurate.

McKinsey has since waived Buttigieg's NDA. And on Tuesday, the campaign released a list of the clients that Buttigieg worked for during his three years at McKinsey. The list includes nonprofits like the Natural Resources Defense Council and federal agencies like the U.S. Postal Service and the Department of Energy. But other clients that Buttigieg worked for have been dogged by bad headlines in the years following their work with McKinsey.

In his memoir The Shortest Way Home, Buttigieg describes his enthusiasm for joining McKinsey, then a prestigious gig for ambitious top recruits. After graduating, he writes, he knew "that the time had come to learn what wasn’t on the page and get an education in the real world. Which is why I went to McKinsey." While he was prohibited from naming his clients due to an NDA, Buttigieg wrote that while at McKinsey he worked on prices for a Canadian grocery store. It turns out that chain was the grocery giant Loblaw, which in 2017 admitted to a 14-year-long price-fixing scheme to raise the price of bread. When the scandal broke, Loblaw announced it would pay between $75 million and $150 million to affected customers.

According to his campaign, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan was his first assignment with McKinsey in 2007 and involved analyzing "overhead expenditures," but his work "did not involve policies, premiums or benefits." In 2009, after consulting with McKinsey and two years after Buttigieg's work with them concluded, the insurance company announced rate hikes and fired about a tenth of its employees. The massive layoffs sparked a lawsuit from Michigan's then attorney general, who published a report titled "Profits Over People: The Drive to Privatize and Destroy the Social Mission of Blue Cross and Blue Shield."

Talking to MSNBC's Rachel Maddow on Tuesday night, Buttigieg stressed that he didn't think his work led to Blue Cross Blue Shield's layoffs, but he turned the question around, using it as an opportunity to attack Medicare for All, the popular health-care proposal that would make for-profit health insurance obsolete. He told Maddow, "What I do know is there are some voices in the Democratic primary right now who are calling for a policy that would eliminate the job of every single American working at every single insurance company in the country."

While he pleads ignorance about Blue Cross Blue Shield's layoffs now, video of Buttigieg speaking at a 2011 mayoral forum suggests he was well aware of it. In it, he says, "I remember one client organization that was a large insurance firm that had grown in such a way that there was a great deal of duplication. Some people didn’t even know what the people working for them were doing."