Swampy Glass Houses and Whatnot

Someone on Twitter questioned why "a victim needed a team of high-powered Democratic-operative lawyers."

This led me to wonder why an alleged perpetrator needed to spend day after day after day after day after day at the White House preparing to answer questions about something he says he didn't do?

Just as he did several weeks ago to prepare for his confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court, Brett M. Kavanaugh was back inside a room at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building - again facing questioners readying him for a high-stakes appearance in the Senate.

Commenters on the tweet wondered who was paying for all of that, since the victim is merely a university professor, which caused me to wonder who's paying for all of Kavanaugh's practice. Maybe it's the RNC, which for a time handled the legal bills for the president, a self-proclaimed billionaire several times over (both the number of billions, and the number of proclamations)?

Here are just a couple of mentions of that:

Combined with the Republican National Committee, Trump's campaign paid a total of $5.5 million in legal bills during 2017 amid probes into Russia's role in the 2016 election. The payments were made to law firms, as well as the company owned by the president's family.

The Republican National Committee has for months been quietly paying expenses previously covered by the Trump campaign in an arrangement that experts say is bizarre, but legal. The payments include more than $37,000 a month in rent to president Donald Trump's company, and thousands more in salary to Vice President Mike Pence's nephew, John Pence. The payments started abruptly last September, when the RNC came under pressure to stop paying Trump's personal legal bills in the special counsel's Russia investigation.

Nope -- it's not the RNC. Actually, it's you and me who are paying for Kavanaugh's truth-telling practice sessions.

From the same Washington Post article linked in the second sentence of this post,

This time, the questions were much different. An array of White House aides, playing the role of various senators on the Judiciary Committee, quizzed Kavanaugh last week about his sex life and other personal matters in an attempt to prepare him for a hearing that would inevitably be uncomfortable. 

The article goes on to note

In a preparation session on Tuesday, Kavanaugh faced more than a dozen White House aides in the Eisenhower building, during which aides played different senators for more than two hours.

Dozens of aides, who knows how many hours over the past week or so, spent making sure Kavanaugh tells the truth no matter how he's asked, and that he doesn't lose his cool doing it.

And we're footing the bill.

I wonder why they're not asking Franklin Graham and Ralph Reed and the other evangelical leaders who are threatening the White House that the flock won't vote if the administration doesn't get Kavanaugh confirmed to pay for his 'practice', since they're the ones who have drawn the line in the sand?

Of course, it's nothing new for us to be paying the bills for Trump, his family, his staffers, and his companies.  That's right -- his companies. In this USA Today article from last fall, we learn

Taxpayers are footing the legal bill for at least 10 Justice Department lawyers and paralegals to work on lawsuits related to president Trump's private businesses.

Neither the White House nor the Justice Department will say how much it is costing taxpayers but federal payroll records show the salaries of the government lawyers assigned to the cases range from about $133,000 to $185,000. 

The government legal team is defending president Trump in four lawsuits stemming from his unusual decision not to divest himself from hundred of his companies that are entangled with customers that include foreign governments and officials.

In these cases, Justice Department attorneys are not defending policy actions Trump took as president. Instead, the taxpayer-funded lawyers are making the case that it is not unconstitutional for the president's private companies to earn profits from foreign government and officials while he's in office.

Comically, we're paying them to suggest that there's no difference between foreign government officials and their representatives actually paying to roll around on one of those glorious Trump Hotel mattresses and a different president selling a book.

President Obama, we know he received royalties from the sale of books during his presidency. Did he violate the Emoluments Clause because he likely would have received royalties from the sale of books to foreign government representatives? 

Hmm. Likely would have... actually did...  Yeah, there's a difference there, and you don't have to be a government lawyer to figure that out.

I don't care who's paying Dr. Ford's legal bills - she's entitled to her preparation, just like Kavanaugh is entitled to his. She can choose who'll pay her bills - but we're stuck paying Kavanaugh's, whether we like it or not.

I also care that you and I are constantly paying for the president's money-making business, whether it's office space rentals, or golf cart rentals, or legal bills. And that we pay legal bills for his children. And I care about all of the legal ways campaign contributions can be spent.

The bottom line here? People who are so upset about Ford hiring lawyers should stop and think about the lawyers that they're paying for, without their knowledge, permission or approval.

 And, by the way - people who live in glass swamp houses shouldn't throw pond scum.