Today in “How not to plant a political hit job on an opponent”
I shouldn’t even bother to dignify this, but Politico is out tonight with what I assume someone would think is a SICK BURN on Elizabeth Warren, citing her for HYPOCRISY because she opposes investor-state dispute settlement, but one time 15 years ago she was paid to stop a corporation from winning an investor-state dispute settlement case. If you don’t follow, you’re not alone.
In 1999 and 2000, the Justice Department paid Warren between $200 to $400 an hour to serve as an expert witness against a Canadian funeral home operator called Loewen Group that was seeking $725 million from the U.S. under the North American Free Trade Agreement. Her role in the case, NAFTA’s first major test of the procedure known as investor-state dispute settlement, has gotten little public attention — even as Warren has made ISDS her main line of attack against the sprawling Asia-Pacific trade deal that Obama is seeking.
There’s a pretty good reason this has gotten little public attention: because it’s not contradictory to her current position in any way. She was a legal advisor in her area of expertise, bankruptcy law, paid for by the government to defend against the expropriation of money through a trade settlement by a corporation, precisely what she’s arguing shouldn’t be allowable in future trade deals. The logic here is that she should have told the Justice Department that she was too pure to involve herself with a trade settlement process she found abhorrent, and should have therefore denied the government her expertise and helped the corporation win.
A parallel hit piece would be something like, “Warren SAYS that she hates money in politics, so why did she RAISE money to run for Senate?!?!?”
Even this former Bush trade official sees nothing in this “revelation”:
“I really don’t see any connection between her provision of expert advice to the government in Loewen and her position on ISDS in her current capacity as a U.S. senator,” said (Ted) Posner, who is a partner at the law firm of Weil, Gotshal & Manges. “The advice she gave in Loewen was in her capacity as an expert on U.S. bankruptcy law. She was not acting as an expert on ISDS.”
There’s not even any reason for the Administration (I can’t pinpoint who planted this, but I can guess) to act this desperate. They secured cloture on fast track today in the Senate. Is the House vote this shaky that they need to launch a pathetic, laughable attack on Warren’s credibility?
Good grief.
