$2.5 Million for Nothing, or for Something

"There is a deep state. It’s called the Federalist Society." So said a Twitter account called Duty To Warn a few days ago.

Did you hear the news, which I guess came out on December 20, that Kellyanne Conway sold her polling business in 2017 for $2.5 million with the help of Leonard Leo, the influential but secretive man behind the Federalist Society?

I didn't hear anything about then... it was only a few days ago during a brief story on All In With Chris Hayes, which was sandwiched between two of the many segments about Biden's drib-drabs of classified documents showing up in the wrong place. 

Looking it up now, I see a handful of stories about it from back then, none of them from the big newspapers or mainstream television news organizations. The original reporting was by Heidi Przybyla at Politco.

Basically, Conway had to sell her private polling company when she started working for the White House. The company essentially had no value because she was its brain, its sole intellectual property, but Leonard Leo moved money from one of his dark money groups to float the transfer to a conservative PR firm he owns, paying Conway for her essentially worthless shell of a company.

It's not unreasonable to see in it what Przybyla writes:

While former President Donald Trump — a onetime supporter of abortion rights and former registered Democrat — was considered unpredictable by some social conservatives, Conway proved from the earliest days of Trump’s presidency to be an outspoken advocate for Leo’s list of handpicked candidates.

The dark money fund that helped transfer Conway's company was also used by Leo to funnel millions to groups that promoted the nominations of Supreme Court nominees Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. Because the dark money group is a nonprofit (oh, it's so hard for me not to put that nonprofit in air quotes!), it doesn't have to disclose its donors to anyone. 

Did Conway's company really have no value? Well, as one critic of the deal put it, "We don’t know if she received fair market value for the company, and that’s an important question. It also seems she was having trouble selling it, and that alone is a gift if you’re buying something nobody else wants to buy."

The PR firm that bought Conway's polling firm in 2017 has not since added polling to its list of services, and the original company no longer functions as a subsidiary. So it has basically disappeared as a functional entity: the PR firm paid $2.5 million for nothing. Or they paid for something, it just wasn't for a polling company.

Corruption or the appearance of corruption. We used to care about both, but of course in the Trump years we were told not to care about either.