State's $600-an-hour contract lawyer loses longshot Supreme Court Pebble mine case

“This case is no ordinary challenge to an agency action,” the Dunleavy administration’s Virginia statehood defense lawyers claimed in a longshot bid to go straight to the U.S. Supreme Court with a federal overreach complaint.

“As defendants recognize, the state of Alaska has brought many suits against the United States and federal officers in lower federal courts. And the state will continue to do so when it is subject to federal overreach,” wrote statehood defender J. Michael Connolly of Consovoy McCarthy in Arlington, Virginia.

The U.S. Supreme Court found that the overreach claim brought by Consovoy McCarthy for Dunleavy and AG Tregarrick Taylor was an ordinary challenge to the action of a federal agency, in this case the EPA veto of the Pebble Mine.

Consovoy McCarthy has collected millions from the Dunleavy administration since 2019, with its top lawyers getting $600 an hour. The law firm has claimed that is the Alaska discount rate, down from $950 an hour. It turns out that other government entities from Guam to Florida have qualified for similar discounts, so Alaska is not exceptional.

The court rejected the state’s plea for special treatment Monday, meaning that the Dunleavy administration will have to file a lawsuit in a lower federal court and follow the regular route for its pursuit of Pebble. That will take time and money.

The state claimed it had no choice but to go directly to the Supreme Court because the regular court process would mean the “the state will lose billions of dollars in revenue, thousands of new jobs won’t be created, the nation’s dependency on foreign copper will continue to grow, and our transition to renewable energy will be further delayed.”

In dismissing the matter, all the Supreme Court said was: “157, ORIG. ALASKA V. UNITED STATES, ET AL. The motion for leave to file a bill of complaint is denied.”

It’s not clear how much the state has given to Consovoy McCarthy to receive that one-sentence rejection, but another law firm could have gotten the same result at a lower price.

Consovoy McCarthy, a conservative favorite, is the most high-profile law firm in in the $15 million Dunleavy/Taylor statehood defense overreach industry.

It was William Consovoy, a Trump lawyer who has since died from brain cancer at 48, who told a judge in 2019 that Trump was above the law as long as he was president.

The Pebble matter is one of two cases Consovoy McCarthy had before the Supreme Court for the Dunleavy administration.

The second is an appeal of the Dunleavy administration’s anti-union crusade that began under former Attorney General Kevin Clarkson in 2019. The Supreme Court may decide next week whether the anti-union case will be heard.

As I wrote here last month, Consovoy McCarthy did not compete for a contract to handle the Pebble Mine case.

The law firm was given a contract on June 17, 2022, to handle a Kuskokwim River subsistence fishing rights lawsuit, with the state asserting it was a “small competitive procurement.”

Three weeks after approving the contract on the Kuskokwim case, the state issued a request for proposals for a larger contract to handle the Kuskokwim fishing case.

Having the existing $50,000 contract on the Kuskokwim case gave Consovoy McCarthy a big advantage over its competitors and it received the second contract.

Here is the second contract with Consovoy McCarthy to handle the Kuskokwim lawsuit, starting off at $750,000.

The state revised the Kuskokwim River contract last March to include the direct appeal of the Pebble mine case to the Supreme Court as part of Consovoy McCarthy’s assignment. The two cases in two courts are to be billed separately.

The state did not include any extra money for the Pebble case before the Supreme Court. So either the $750,000 pricetag of the Kuskokwim lawsuit is inflated or the attorney general plans to supplement the contract with extra cash for Pebble.

The Pebble mine case has nothing to do with the Kuskokwim fishing case, so this should have been a separate procurement, but the Dunleavy administration likes to do business with Consovoy McCarthy and avoid competition.

Anyone should be able to track the status of payments to this firm and others through the Checkbook Online that is supposed to list state vendors, but payments to Consovoy McCarthy are among those that don’t appear in the state reports.

Also missing from the state Checkbook Online are the monthly contracted payments of $12,000 a month to former Attorney General Craig Richards, the “statehood defense coordinator.”

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