Legislature seeks audit of $600-an-hour contract with Trump's lawyer
The state doesn’t have a dime to spare, but Gov. Mike Dunleavy refuses to give up on the excessive contract with President Trump’s lawyer, who has already collected $500.000 to keep losing the anti-union crusade launched by former Attorney General Kevin Clarkson.
The arrangement with Consovoy McCarthy, started by Clarkson as a no-bid deal more than a year ago, is continuing under a dubious legal decision by acting general Clyde “Ed” Sniffen Jr.
Sniffen is looking to spend upwards of $200,000 more on the crusade, though the Legislature said that state couldn’t do that by hiring contract lawyers.
In summer 2019, Clarkson chose Consovoy McCarthy, a Republican connected right-wing law firm in Washington with ties to Trump to carry his anti-union campaign for $600 an hour. Lawyer William Consovoy said he gave Alaska a discount from $900 an hour.
Consovoy is the lawyer who claimed that Trump could murder someone and be immune to prosecution as long as he remained president. In other venues, Consovoy is trying to keep Trump’s taxes secret and his firm is now in court in Pennsylvania trying to stop the vote count, a direct attack on the democratic process.
Consovoy’s law firm has also challenged “efforts to loosen voting rules because of the pandemic, representing the Republican National Committee and the Trump campaign. Those two committees paid his firm nearly $2.5 million in 2019 and 2020, campaign finance records show,” the Washington Post said.
What’s wrong here is that the state has a capable army of lawyers in its civil division who could mount a losing crusade in the state and federal courts for a much lower price, a situation that the Legislature recognized last spring when it tried to put a limit on the $600 an hour contract with Trump’s lawyer.
There’s no need to pay someone back East $600 an hour to write windy documents claiming Kevin Clarkson was a brilliant legal strategist.
Clarkson and now Sniffen claim that under the so-called Janus decision, state workers who voluntarily pay union dues are being denied their First Amendment rights. Various courts have so far ruled that rights are not being violated because workers voluntarily agreed to pay dues.
The Legislature put a $20,000 limit on outside contracts dealing with the Janus decision, but Dunleavy vetoed that money in the budget.
Anchorage Rep. Andy Josephson, a lawyer, says that the veto means that the state “has no legal ability to spend any of their civil division appropriation for FY 2021 on contracts related to this matter.”
At Josephson’s request, the Legislative Budget and Audit Committee voted 6-1 Friday to review the matter, starting with how much is being spent on contracts related to Janus. He said Sniffen hasn’t provided details on how Consovoy is getting paid, but Josephson suspects the state is violating the rules on shifting appropriations.
Anchorage Sen. Natasha von Imhof questioned the idea of an audit and said maybe the case isn’t that expensive compared to other contracts. She said she "has to respect” Sniffen’s interpretation and that it appears to her that the state has a legitimate case.
In the request for proposals for the second Consovoy contract, the state said: "Approval or continuation of a contract resulting from this is contingent upon legislative appropriation."
Sniffen, as acting general, may have visions of becoming the real general, so he has adopted all of Clarkson’s far-fetched claims regarding the Janus decision, which is probably what Dunleavy desires.
In a letter to Josephson, Sniffen said, in essence, that it is none of the Legislature’s business. That’s not a good answer. The wasteful contract should never have been signed.