Running the meter

KSTP has all the details on that $430,000 legal bill Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz racked up preparing for his testimony before Congress last month:

Invoices reveal more about what Gov. Tim Walz’s $430K in legal bills paid for.

Walz ran up the near half-million-dollar tab from a big-time Washington, DC, firm and has asked state taxpayers to cough up the cash to pay his tab. And let’s just say Walz didn’t exactly make us proud, or wow America, with his performance at the event itself. Did he even read the research they gave him?

J. Patrick Coolican of MN Reformer does the math:

Admittedly, that’s some expensive prep: $61,428 for every hour of the congressional hearing. 

Another calculation: 450 billable hours is 24 hours per day, for 18.75 days. Or about 110 hours per week, during the month of May. Am I glad that I never went to law school — when do they eat or sleep?!

So where did all the money go? From KSTP:

The invoices for a $430,000 legal bill run up by Gov. Tim Walz’s administration to prepare him for a congressional hearing last month ranged from $70 to review a letter inviting him to the hearing to $2,880 for “searches for news or statistics for crimes committed by transgender or nonbinary persons.”

Do we at least get a PDF of what they found?

KSTP reprints the invoices themselves, for those interested, but provides a few highlights in their story:

According to the documents we reviewed, 23 members of the K&L Gates firm in Washington, ranging from partners and associates to a librarian, charged from $350 to $700 per hour.

In a wide range of services, they billed $1,035 to research “anti-transgender comments” by House Oversight Committee members to $2,880 for a lawyer to spend over six hours reviewing “case law” regarding “executive orders” and “separation of powers.”

23. It takes a village. A $1,000 here, $2,000 there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money. As a side note, that seems to be a lot of research on transgender issues for a hearing on immigration policy. Perhaps, it was all about the state softball tournament:

But what do I know, I’m just a taxpayer. When you look through the 8-page bill for April, you see many line items relating to coordinating a response along with the Democratic governors of Illinois and New York and coordinating with the Democratic members of the House committee. The bill reads less like an invoice for professional services than it does a blueprint for a partisan political campaign.

KSTP asked Gov. Walz if a private law firm was really needed, at all:

Last week, when reports of the $430,000 legal tab first surfaced, we asked the governor whether his own lawyers and the Attorney General’s Office could have done the same work much cheaper.

“No, probably not, and they didn’t have the expertise for this for what they were asking,” Walz said.

What a telling remark. When you look through the itemized, 34-page bill for May (we’re still waiting on the June invoice), page after page includes line items referring to the Minnesota Attorney General, his office, and opinions and guidance provided by same. That neither Ellison nor his staff are capable of defending their own work speaks volumes.

These line items also caught my eye:

I sincerely hope that some of our past work on the subject made it into the briefing. Or perhaps they just looked at DC-based think tanks.

Either way, it’s possible that you, as a donor, both paid for the content creation and also paid (as a taxpayer) a Democrat law firm read the stuff you paid to produce.

[Note: An earlier version of this story ran on Power Line.]