Craig's Personal Funds running low

Wide Stance an Expensive Dance for Larry Craig

By Jill Kuraitis, 4-25-08

Funny footwork in airport bathrooms doesn’t pay.

Idaho Sen. Larry Craig has racked up more than $400,000 in legal fees to his lawyer Billy Martin since the June 2007 incident in which Craig was arrested, and pled guilty to, disorderly conduct in a Minneapolis airport men’s room. The fees have been paid, largely out of campaign funds.

But according to the Washington Post, Craig hasn’t used any campaign funds – something the Senate Ethics Committee warned him against continuing - to pay legal bills since his February admonishment by the committee.  Craig has recently made an $80,000 payment to Martin’s firm out of personal funds.

It doesn’t end there.  “Craig is continuing his appeal of a Minnesota court ruling that upheld his guilty plea, and he is continuing to rack up legal bills with Martin’s firm. He is left to fight this uphill battle with his own finances, which are incredibly meager,” says the Post story, written by Mary Ann Akers and Paul Kane.

“Aside from a pair of retirement accounts, Craig has just one other account to draw from. It’s with the Senate’s federal credit union and contains between $50,000 and $100,000, according to a financial disclosure report filed with the Senate.”

“He also could tap his wife’s personal account with the credit union—worth somewhere between $15,000 and $50,000—but we’re guessing Mrs. Craig may not be willing to foot the legal bills for her husband’s ‘wide stance.’”

[End of article]

Lets hope Craig does'nt make the tax payers, pay for his dirty, lying life style with their clean, honest hard working money.
Guilty or innocent we should not have to pay for that.

Wow! Jill copied someone else’s story and added lame peanut gallery comment to it. What journalistic skill!

"Copying" a story means stealing it without attribution to where it came from and without hyperlinks to the original story. Not only did I do that, I also credited by name the two reporters who wrote it. This is a common practice in the new media, where there is usually not a budget for legions of reporters.

If you are a regular reader of New West, you should know that I don't call myself a reporter. I am a columnist.

Way to go Jill.
What you are doing is real journalism. Too often these days we get a story out of the blue with no context of what else is going on or research into what other people are saying. Journalism has gotten away from calling a spade a spade as a result, and false balance (he said/she said) overrides objective analysis into who is telling the truth.
A good example is the US Attorneys firing scandal. Initially it was a bunch of random stories in local papers about attorneys getting replaced until blogger Josh Marshall compiled a critical mass of other people's stories and had his own bigger story he could then research. From then on the big papers were stealing his work unattributed. There is a real service in compiling from various sources and creating context and narrative.
In fact, you might go on from here. I'm speculating, and I don't know anything about Mrs. Craig, but does she work? If not, why does she have a bunch of cash in the bank? Is Craig pulling a John McCain and putting a bunch of stuff in his wife's name so he can hide it from Senate disclosure rules?

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