AG Clarkson is gone, but his high-priced anti-union crusade with Trump lawyer drags on

Perhaps William Consovoy dreams of doing better than the IRS in squeezing money out of Donald Trump.

If not, Consovoy is never going to be compensated for his valiant legal efforts to hide the Trump tax returns from voters.

Consovoy, who didn’t get anywhere with his legal claim that a sitting president could murder someone and remain above the law until becoming a former president, is back before the U.S. Supreme Court saying Trump’s finances are a state secret that should be kept from voters.

Unofficially, there is little to hide. Trump paid $750 in taxes in 2016 and 2017, thanks to loopholes and an empire swamped with losses and a mountain of personal debt, according to the New York Times.

We don’t know how much Consovoy is charging Trump, but if Trump is really as broke as he claims to be to the IRS, then maybe the president qualifies for Consovoy’s Alaska discount of $600 an hour, not the usual $950 per hour.

But not to worry. At least Trump’s Washington, D.C. lawyer has a steady source of income from the state of Alaska, thanks to the generosity of former Attorney General Kevin Clarkson and Gov. Mike Dunleavy.

Clyde “Ed” Sniffen Jr., who is acting as attorney general, should have canceled the contract with Consovoy, but he hasn’t. He also hasn’t explained where the money is coming from to fulfill the contract, given that the Legislature blocked it.

The Legislature put a $20,000 limit on hiring lawyers to push the Clarkson anti-labor crusade, but Dunleavy vetoed the language, leading Anchorage Rep. Andy Josephson to contend that there is no money to legally spend on Consovoy.

Sniffen, who became acting AG when the former general texted himself out of a job, is still paying Consovoy for the faltering Clarkson-Dunleavy legal crusade against Alaska state employees.

The acting general claimed to legislators early this year that the man he called “General Clarkson” wanted Consovoy because he needed first-rate advice for his anti-union campaign.

The latest first-rate advice from Consovoy is this pretentious filing with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals that portrays the former general as a sharp legal strategist, creator of a novel interpretation of the so-called Janus decision that has fallen flat in court after court.

In the Janus case, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that those who are not union members can’t be required to pay an “agency fee” as a substitute for union dues. Clarkson claimed to know that the Supreme Court really wanted to make a broader ruling that applied to union members, allowing them to stop paying dues whenever they wanted, instead of once a year.

Apparently at state expense, Consovoy wrote a friend-of-the-court document for Sniffen that was filed with the Ninth Circuit. It shows the crusade is collapsing.

A three-judge panel of the appeals court did great damage to the Clarkson crusade last month. Clarkson and now Sniffen are using state funds to have Consovoy claim this is a First Amendment case, when it obviously is not.

The court said that the state of Washington and the union did not violate the First Amendment rights of workers by collecting dues that the workers had voluntarily promised to pay. The ruling would apply to Alaska unless it is overturned.

The Dunleavy administration has never said why it hired Trump’s lawyer to handle the crusade, a matter that could have been lost for next to nothing by any of the 160 civil division attorneys already on the state payroll.

I thought that perhaps Clarkson was looking for his next job, trying to boost his national reputation or maybe it was part of the Dunleavy pattern to copy Trump in every way possible.

Clarkson gave Trump’s personal lawyer a no-bid $50,000 contract at first to champion Clarkson’s claims. Clarkson doubled the contract to $100,000 and then added a separate $600,000 contract for his favorite Trump lawyer.

Of the $600,000, the state has so far spent $355,000, according to the attorney general’s office.

The $245,000 that has not been spent can still be saved by Sniffen and be put toward another debt the state has to pay because of the former general.

Clarkson illegally managed to delay the recall campaign last year by inventing bogus arguments that the Alaska courts rejected.

The state lost the recall case and has been ordered to pay the Dunleavy recall effort $190,000 to compensate for what it took to respond to Clarkson’s illegal claims.

Both the anti-union crusade and the recall court bill are the product of Clarkson’s bad legal advice.

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