GUEST:
Jon Ralston, Ralston Reports
BY MARIE ANDRUSEWICZ -- A legal scholar calls it “problematic.” Pundit Jon Ralston says “it doesn’t look good.”
A PAC associated with Senator Harry Reid accepted a donation from a law firm during the time frame that Reid was considering Jennifer Dorsey, one of the firm’s lawyers, for a federal judgeship.
“Two people that she works for give $150,000 to a super PAC run by former Harry Reid employees that clearly has a nexus to Harry Reid,” says Ralston.
One of the partners, Will Kemp, says that Reid contacted him for support in early 2012.
“It was back then you may recall that the Dems are very worried about holding on to the Senate. And so (Reid) told him he needed some money and then said he could either give directly to the senators involved in any of the states, or he could give to the super PAC. And as Will Kemp described to me, that seemed to be the preferred route. You can give a lot more money,” says Ralston.
Ralston says that while the donations were legal, both the amount of the contributions and the timeframe create issues for the senator.
“Is there a legal problem here? I don’t think that there’s a legal problem so much as a perception problem,” says Ralston. “Although you never know what kind of complaint may be filed by the Federal Elections Commission, but those usually amount to nothing.”
Ralston says the irony is that Kemp says that Dorsey is “a real rainmaker” for the law firm, and losing her to a judgeship would cost him a lot of money.