to help y’all dodge the Nag Wall:
To say the lone face-off of the 2010 attorney general’s race drew little fanfare would be an understatement.
It was held at noon far from the state’s biggest media markets and inside a practice courtroom at the law school of the University of California, Davis. To the best of anyone’s recollection, it did not even air live on television. The moderator, a local television political reporter named Kevin Riggs, had sat down with three other journalists who served as panelists just that morning at a coffee shop to divide up topics.
Dan Morain, who worked for The Sacramento Bee’s editorial page, asked who would bring up double-dipping — that is, taking both a public salary and a public pension. It had been an issue in the Republican primary, first raised by John Eastman, Mr. Cooley’s primary opponent. Mr. Eastman is better known now for his efforts to keep Mr. Trump in office after the 2020 election, which resulted in an indictment and disbarment.
“I’m going to ask that,” replied Jack Leonard, a Los Angeles Times reporter who covered Mr. Cooley.
Public pensions were a white-hot topic at the time, and Mr. Cooley was making waves for prosecuting public corruption in the city of Bell, where local officials were pulling in outlandish salaries in an impoverished municipality.
Inside the practice courtroom, Mr. Leonard outlined that the $150,000 salary of the California attorney general was half of the $292,300 salary that Mr. Cooley was earning as the local district attorney. If he double-dipped by taking a taxpayer-paid pension as a former district attorney and a taxpayer-paid salary as the state attorney general, Mr. Cooley would be in line to make more than $400,000.
“Do you plan to double-dip by taking both a pension and your salary as attorney general?” Mr. Leonard asked.
“Yes, I do,” Mr. Cooley said without hesitation.
He glanced at Ms. Harris. She said nothing.
“I earned it.”
But Mr. Cooley was not yet done. “I definitely earned whatever pension rights I have, and I will certainly rely upon that to supplement the very low, incredibly low salary that’s paid to the attorney general,” he added.
“It was tone deaf,” Mr. Riggs said. “It was startling,” Mr. Leonard said. “It was awful,” Mr. Morain said. “It was jaw-dropping,” Mr. Smith said.
And it was, Mr. Cooley recalled in a recent interview, truthful.
“The point is I answered honestly,” Mr. Cooley said. “It was a mistake. A lot of people said, ‘You should have dodged that one, Steve.’”
Kevin Spillane, Mr. Cooley’s top strategist, blamed himself for not coaching Mr. Cooley to evade better. “That’s a credit to his character,” Mr. Spillane said of his client’s honesty. “But that’s a liability in politics.”
For her part, Ms. Harris had stood in silence. Mr. Morain, who has since written a book about Ms. Harris’s career, called it her “Vin Scully moment,” likening it to how the famous baseball broadcaster often let the sound of the game speak for itself.
“Anything you’d like to add to that?” Mr. Riggs offered.
“Go for it, Steve!” Ms. Harris said during the debate, letting loose her now familiar laugh. “You earned it!”
It was all over in less than a minute. The good news for Mr. Cooley was that practically no one had seen how he answered the question. The bad news was that was about to change.
The bastard was straight up planning to have his cake and eat it too, corruptly and hypocritically swindling taxpayers after he tried to prosecute people for doing the same fucking thing but through different channels, and Kamala… she just … ohhh gods the SASS. “You earned it.” BY THE ALLFATHER’S LOST EYE
here’s the exchange:
(CAUTION: MIC CLIPPING)I posted in [email protected] to offer one solution for paywall content annoying people:
I posted in [email protected] to offer one solution for paywall content annoying people: