The Maria Bartiromo Flap

One of the sponsors to Bruce Rivers's often-hilarious Criminal Lawyer Reacts YouTube Channel is Askalawyer.com. For $50 a month, you can get an AI answer, assisted by a real attorney, to your legal questions, and depending on your business, it could be a real bargain. But Rivers often plugs it when discussing some bizarre arrests and convictions, saying "For $50 a month, he could have used Askalawyer.com to find out if it's OK to rob a bank." Somehow, I get this feeling about Maria Bartiromo.

I don't subscribe to Askalawyer.com -- I'm married to a retired attorney who can just as easily explain why I shouldn't rob a bank -- but I did ask Chrome AI mode, "I want to release a text I got from my boss without going through corporate PR. Is there a potentisal downside?" It answered,

Yes, releasing a text from your boss without going through corporate PR carries massive potential downsides, including immediate termination, legal exposure, and long-term career damage. Going rogue and bypassing your company’s established communication channels means losing the protection of the organization and exposing yourself to personal liability.

According to AOL,

Bartiromo, fifty-eight years old, has since retained Bryan Freedman. Bryan is a Hollywood attorney who has represented the likes of Tucker Carlson, Don Lemon, and Megyn Kelly following their own exits from major media employers.

For $50 a month, she could have asked Askalawyer.com if it was a good idea to send a copy of rhe message from her boss to the White House and avoided the need to pay millions to Bryan Freedman. I think we can be pretty sure that a non-disclosure and non-disparagement clause were both in her contract -- again, for $50 a month, she could have asked Askalawyer.com if either was a good idea. Now she's gotta pay Bryan Freedman to try to fix this.

Here's another reaction:

Sundance at Conservative Treehouse has another insightful reaction:

Maria Bartiromo became increasingly popular amid the MAGA base during the research and revelations surrounding the ‘Spygate’ and ‘Russiagate’ storyline. Bartiromo often had several guests on her Sunday Morning Futures program that highlighted evidence of the corruption in the DOJ, FBI and U.S Intelligence Community. However, it also became more visible that Bartiromo was navigating between sensitive topics that often ran counter to the professional republican class interests in Washington DC.

Over the past few years Bartiromo softened her focus toward corrupt endeavors and began staying away from the most controversial aspects of how the structures of government operate. In a time when nearly all U.S. institutional credibility has crumbled, Bartiromo found herself in that awkward spot where you try to act like you’re not noticing the moment in the show when the marionette strings become visible.

. . . There is always that moment of choice, that time when your influence and affluence no longer run in alignment with uncomfortable truth. It’s a strange dynamic to watch unfold and even more strange when your proximity to the person gives you a different perspective than the average.

Bartiromo did as much as she could, until she couldn’t.

The problem I see is that like it or not, she's voluntarily gotten into the same boat as Tucker Carlson, Don Lemon, and Megyn Kelly, which is to say that her ego may have taken over. We didn't normally think of her in that same media-narcissist ctegory, but maybe we just didn't know her well enough. The problem for anyone in her income bracket -- the AOL link estimates her net worth at $50 million and her annual salary at Fox at $10 million -- is that she's being paid to be a team player. If she no longer wants to be on the team, she really ought to keep her mouth shut and be grateful for what she's had.

Sometimes well-known journalists with reputations for integrity, like Catherine Herridge, find themselves in personnel actions that may raise questions about the reasons for their leaving a network, although Herridge left Foz simply because her contract expired, and she left CBS as part of a larger downsizing. Maria Bartiromo doesn't seem to be quite in Herridge's league, and like Tucker Carlson, Don Lemon, and Megyn Kelly, she'd gotten rich as a team player before her eventual high-profile departure.

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