“Now, voters can see for themselves that my work amounted to mostly research and analysis. They can also see that I value both transparency and keeping my word,” Buttigieg said in a statement released Tuesday night. “Neither of these qualities are something we see coming out of Washington, especially from this White House. It's time for that to change.”

These revelations come on the heels of a week-long back-and-forth with Elizabeth Warren, who has criticized Buttigieg by name for a lack of transparency regarding his corporate clients and his fundraising. Buttigieg, for his part, attacked Warren for not releasing tax returns from the years when she worked for corporate legal clients. On Sunday, Warren released an earnings breakdown, totaling $1.9 million, for her legal work over several decades, and she released the names of her clients earlier this year.

But Buttigieg could still face political blowback for his clients, particularly his work for Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Michigan and Loblaws, a Canadian grocery and retail chain in Canada — two companies that have been trailed by bad headlines.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren. | Scott Olson/Getty Images

In 2007, Buttigieg analyzed Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan’s “overhead expenditures,” like rent, utilities and company travel, according to a memo from Buttigieg’s campaign. But the campaign said his work “did not involve policies, premiums or benefits.” It was Buttigieg’s first project for McKinsey, and he was “largely involved on-the-job training to develop skills in the use of spreadsheets and presentation software,” the memo continued.

The insurance company was running into trouble, and two years later, in January 2009, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Michigan cut nearly 10 percent of its workforce, after the company reported a loss of $140 million on health care plans. It had been a target for Michigan’s then-attorney general, who sued Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan multiple times and, in 2007, published a presentation titled, “Profits Over People: The Drive to Privatize and Destroy the Social Mission of Blue Cross and Blue Shield.”

Appearing on MSNBC’s “Rachel Maddow Show” Tuesday night, Buttigieg said “I doubt it” when asked if his work might have led to or been involved with Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan’s decision to lay off workers and raise rates in 2009.

“I don’t know what happened in the time after I left, that was in 2007, [to] when they decided to shrink in 2009,” Buttigieg told Maddow, before criticizing the Medicare for All proposal put forward by Warren and Bernie Sanders. “Now, 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.”

Buttigieg’s next assignment sent him to Canada, where Buttigieg worked for Loblaws, a grocery giant, analyzing “the effects of price cuts on various combinations of items across hundreds of stores.”

In his memoir, “Shortest Way Home,” Buttigieg credits his hours spent crunching numbers in suburban Toronto for revealing, with “overwhelming clarity,” that “this could not be a career for very long: I didn’t care.”

But at the same time, executives at Loblaws were participating in a vast price-fixing scheme that began in 2001, in which several top Canadian grocers and bread manufacturers inflated and manipulated the price of bread for over a decade.

In 2017, Loblaws admitted to participating in the scheme and gave $25 gift cards to customers who declared they bought bread at their chains before March 2015. Loblaws is not currently facing criminal charges or penalties because it provided information about the scheme to the Canadian government.

“I never worked or was asked to work on things that I had a problem with,” Buttigieg said in an interview with The Atlantic, posted Tuesday night. “But it’s a place that I think, like any other law firm or firms that deal with big companies, just thinks about client work and doesn’t always think about the bigger implications.”

McKinsey has also recently come under fire for a series of investigations on its work for the Trump administration to halt border crossings, including “proposed cuts in spending on food for migrants, as well as on medical care and supervision of detainees.” Its work for the New York City government to curb violence at Rikers Island, but the firm reported “bogus numbers” as violence increased.

Buttigieg, who left the firm after these incidents, has criticized McKinsey, saying it has “made a lot of poor choices, especially in the last few years,” and he called its work for the Trump administration “disgusting.” McKinsey is rarely name-checked in Buttigieg’s campaign trail biography, though he does list himself as a “businessman” on his Twitter profile.

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The details Buttigieg’s campaign provided about his work for government agencies was considerably lighter. In 2009, Buttigieg worked with the U.S. Department of Defense for three months, which included travel to Iraq and Afghanistan, “focused on increasing employment and entrepreneurship in those countries’ economies.” And in 2009 and 2010, Buttigieg worked for the U.S. Postal Service to “identify and analyze potential new sources of revenue.”

Buttigieg also spent several months working on environmental projects, both for nonprofits and for government agencies. In 2008 and 2009, Buttigieg contributed to a project that published its work in a report titled, “Unlocking Energy Efficiency in the U.S. Economy,” for the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy.

And in 2009, Buttigieg also consulted for the Energy Foundation, an environmental nonprofit group, on projects focused on “energy efficiency and renewable energy,” according to the campaign.

Buttigieg’s other private client was Best Buy. Based in Chicago in 2007, Buttigieg worked for three months on a project investigating “opportunities for selling more energy-efficient home products in their stores.”

Daniel Strauss contributed reporting.

