After Harvard, Frampton served as a lawyer for VISTA in New York and then as a consultant on a Middle East peace project under the auspices of the
American Friends Service Committee, the
Ford Foundation, and Professor
Roger Fisher of
Harvard Law School. Frampton served, from 1973 to 1975, as an assistant special prosecutor on the Watergate Special Prosecution Force at the U.S. Department of Justice. In that position, he worked on the grand jury investigation and trial of
President Richard M. Nixon’s top aides in the Watergate cover-up. He and a colleague,
Richard Ben-Veniste, co-authored
Stonewall: The real story of the Watergate prosecution (1977). Frampton subsequently served as special counsel to the
State of Alaska in an investigation of Governor
Bill Sheffield and his chief of staff; as an assistant independent counsel to Independent Counsel Jacob A. Stein in the investigation of U.S. Attorney General
Edwin Meese; and deputy director and chief of staff for the
Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s Special Inquiry Group that conducted the agency's investigation into the
Three Mile Island accident. From 1978 until 1985, Frampton was a partner at the Washington, D.C., law firm Rogovin, Huge & Lenzner, focusing on complex and public interest litigation. In 1986, Frampton was named president of
The Wilderness Society. He served in that capacity until 1993 when he was nominated by President Clinton to be Assistant Secretary at the U.S. Department of the Interior for fish, wildlife and parks. Frampton was engaged in a range of issues, including Everglades restoration, the regional plan for preservation of Old Growth Forests, wolf reintroduction, and the development of the first multi-species habitat conservation plans under the
Endangered Species Act of 1973. He was the lead federal trustee on the Exxon Valdez Oil Trustee Council and helped develop a strategy with Governor
Wally Hickel of Alaska to spend more than half the fund purchasing Native corporation lands and bringing them into the federal and state conservation systems. In 1997, he resigned as Assistant Secretary. In 1997, as Clinton's second term was beginning, Frampton represented Vice President
Al Gore as his personal counsel in the preliminary investigation into Gore's fundraising activities, and served as corporate advisor to the
EarthSat. Within a year, President Clinton had named Frampton the Chair of the
Council on Environmental Quality, and he served in that position until Clinton's departure in January 2001. After leaving public service, Frampton moved to
New York City and was a partner at
Boies Schiller Flexner LLP until 2009, also working as operating advisor to Pegasus Capital Advisors. From 2009 to 2014, Frampton was senior of counsel at
Covington & Burling in the firm's climate and clean energy practice. Frampton is a co-founder of the
Partnership for Responsible Growth, a non-profit, along with former Congressman
Walt Minnick and former Ambassador
William Eacho. In 2017, the Partnership for Responsible Growth advocated for a
carbon tax in a series of advertisements. == Personal life ==