More Allegations Surface Against Second Dude Doug Emhoff

Last week I looked at Second Dude Doug Emhoff's legal career and began to match it up with Kamala's rise in politics. One thing stood out. According to Wikipedia,

He opened his own firm with Ben Whitwell in 2000, which was acquired by Venable LLP in 2006. Emhoff became managing director of Venable's West Coast offices. . . . Emhoff joined DLA Piper as a partner in 2017, working at its Washington, D.C., and California offices. He earned $1.2 million per year as a partner of the law firm. Following the announcement that his wife would be Joe Biden's running mate in the 2020 United States presidential election, Emhoff took a leave of absence from the firm. After the Biden–Harris ticket won, the campaign announced Emhoff would permanently leave DLA Piper before Inauguration Day to avoid conflict of interest concerns.

He married his second wife, Kamala, in 2014, while she was Attorney General of California. In 2016,she was elected to the US Senate as a senator from California. She assumed office in 2017, the same year Emhoff left Venable LLP and went to DLA Piper, where he stayed making $1.2 million a year until his marriage to Kamala became uncomfortable to that firm; he left permanently when Kamala was elected vice president in 2020.

Several things occurred to me last week. One was that DLA Piper didn't see any conflict when Kamala was a US senator -- in fact, they paid him $1.2 million a year precisely because he was married to a US senator. According to Wikipedia,

A 2012 survey by Major, Lindsey & Africa found that law firm partners' average annual compensation was $681,000 ($896,000 for equity partners, $335,000 for non-equity partners) and tended to go up based on number of years in the partnership[.]

So Emhoff, as best anyhone can tell, was a new partner at DLA Piper but earning at the top of the scale. Wikipedia prefaces its discussion of law firm partners with the statement, "In law firms, partners are primarily those senior lawyers who are responsible for generating the firm's revenue." It sounds as if DLA Piper was expecting Emhoff's connection with Kamala to pay off big, at least until, a few years later, it apparently started to make them nervous.

This brings us to the latest allegations against Emhoff, which date from his time at Venable LLP between 2006 and 2017. According to the UK Daily Mail,

Attorneys who worked with Doug Emhoff at his former firm Venable say he yelled expletives, held a men-only cocktail hour in the office, revoked work perks from women who didn't flirt with him, and took only young, attractive associates in a limousine to a ball.

A 2019 lawsuit also claimed sex discrimination by other partners in the LA office Emhoff ran, and that while engaged to Harris, he hired an 'unqualified' part-time model as a legal secretary 'because she was young, attractive and friendly with the powerful men in the office'.

. . . One senior former staffer claimed Emhoff 'bragged' about yelling 'get the f*** out of my office' to a female partner at the firm, later telling his top male colleagues that he had 'put her in her place'.

. . . 'What's worse was he bragged about it to the management at Venable and they were aghast. He's an a**hole. He told them how he "put her in her place". A misogynist, that's who does that.'

Although the story says Emhoff was promoted from Partner-in-Charge of Venable's LA office to West Coast Managing Director in 2015 after he married Kamala, then state attorney general, there seem to have been reasons for Emhoff to leave Venable two years later in 2017. On top of what are reported to have been continuing complaints of harassment and inappropriate behavior, I have a sense that even as the husband of the state attorney general and then a US senator, Emhoff wasn't bringing in the revenue the firm expected -- and this may have happened at DLA Piper as well, since all of a sudden, they saw a potential conflict of interest in his marriage to Kamala, when they hadn't seen one when they hired him, even though she was a US senator.

For starters, I suspect certain of Emhoff's senior colleagues were in fact "aghast" at his various escapades. Emhoff's apparent enabling of sexual harassment by his subordinates at the firm got them sued for it in 2019, after Emhoff had left. But I'll bet Emhoff had been wearing out his welcome at Venable for years, and his marriage to Kamala was, if anything, an attempt to maintain his standing there -- except I have a feeling that even his marrying the ditzy state attorney general never quite resulted in a windfall to the firm, and he was eased out notwithstanding. All of a sudden, his former colleagues are spilling the dirt. They couldn't turn down the opportunity, I would think, and they were happy to see him leave when he finally did.

I would guess the same applied to his brief tenure at DLA Piper: he led them to expect big things from his connection to Sen Harris that never quite paid out, and they suddenly discovered a conmflict of interest, even though they themselves had had great expectations from just the conflict Emhoff tried to sell them.

This just confirms my first impression of the guy -- above all, he's cheesy.

Yet More On Charleroi

An article in yesterday's City Journal fleshes out a litrtle more on the coordination between the federal government, NGOs, staffing agencies, and local power players that's behind the sudden migration of quasi-legal immigrants to places like Charleroi, PA, but it really doesn't add much that's new. First, there's the federal government:

[T]he White House has admitted more than 210,000 Haitians through its controversial Humanitarian Parole Program for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans (CHNV), which it paused in early August and has since relaunched. The program is presented as a “lawful pathway,” but critics, such as vice presidential candidate J. D. Vance, have called it an “abuse of asylum laws” and warned of its destabilizing effects on communities across the country.

The article then immediately skips to NGOs while only briefly recognizing that it's the federal government that's using the NGOs to pass through funding (less their skim), as well as to funnel the immigrants into federal programs:

The next link in the web [sic] is the network of publicly funded NGOs that provide migrants with resources to assist in travel, housing, income, and work. These groups are called “national resettlement agencies,” and serve as the key middleman in the flow of migration. The scale of this effort is astounding. These agencies are affiliated with more than 340 local offices nationwide and have received some $5.5 billion in new awards since 2021. And, because they are technically non-governmental institutions, they are not required to disclose detailed information about their operations.

I'd feel much more comfortable with pieces like this if the writers could avoid phrases like "link in the web". What other elementary defects are in their thought processes? But this does echo the questions other observers have had about who's paying for what in Springfield and Charleroi -- the immigrants somehow drive new cars, for instance, although they don't know how to drive. I think if I were the reporters writing this story, it would bother me a lot more than it bothers these.

Next are the staffing agencies:

A network of staffing agencies and private companies has recruited the migrants to the city’s factories and assembly lines. While some recruitment happens through word-of-mouth, many staffing agencies partner with local nonprofits that specialize in refugee resettlement to find immigrants who need work. . . . three staffing agencies—Wellington Staffing Agency, Celebes Staffing Services, and Advantage Staffing Agency—are key conduits for labor in the city. None have websites, advertise their services, or appear in job listings.

The agencies work closely with local sweatshop employers and slumlords, who often turn out to be the same people:

At the center of this system in Charleroi is Fourth Street Foods, a frozen-food supplier with approximately 1,000 employees, most of whom work on the assembly line. . . . The firm employs many temporary workers, and, with the arrival of the Haitians, has found a new group of laborers willing to work long days in an industrial freezer, starting at about $12 an hour.

The final link is housing. And here, too, Fourth Street Foods has an organized interest. . . . The owner of the company, David Barbe, stepped in, acquiring and renovating a “significant number of homes” to provide housing for his workforce. A property search for David Barbe and his other business, DB Rentals LLC, shows records of more than 50 properties, many of which are concentrated on the same streets.

After the initial purchases, Barbe required some of the existing residents to vacate to make room for newcomers. A single father, who spoke on condition of anonymity, was forced to leave his home after it was sold to DB Rentals LLC in 2021. “[W]e had to move out [on] very short notice after five years of living there and being great tenants,” he explained. Afterward, a neighbor informed him that a dozen people of Asian descent had been crammed into the two-bedroom home. They were “getting picked up and dropped off in vans.”

The piece omits other issues, especially occupancy laws. A dozen people in a two-bedroom home seems out of line, but the reporters here didn't follow up. What are the occupancy limits in Charleroi? Has anyone tried to report the situation? What was the result? This isn't much different from the problem of Haitians driving cars they don't know how to drive in Springfield, with local law enforcement looking the other way. Who's behind this? City Journal talks about it only in general terms:

the benefits of mass migration seem to accrue to the organized interests, while citizens and taxpayers absorb the costs. No doubt, the situation is advantageous to David Barbe of Fourth Street Foods, who can pay $16 an hour to the agencies that employ his contract labor force, then recapture some of those wages in rent—just like the company towns from a century ago.

. . . The evictions, the undercut wages, the car crashes, the cramped quarters, the unfamiliar culture: these are not trivialities, nor are they racist conspiracy theories. They are the signs of a disconcerting reality: Charleroi is a dying town that could not revitalize itself on its own, which made it the perfect target for “revitalization” by elite powers—the federal government, the NGOs, and their local satraps.

I don't understand the fatalism here. On one hand, Charleroi somehow can't revitalize itself on its own, but on the other, traffic laws, occupancy limits, and other local ordinances apparently aren't enforced, while federal laws on immigration either aren't enforced or bypassed by fiat -- and the writers at City Journal throw up their hands and say there's nothing they can do. Nothing, apparently, but blame Trump:

Former president Donald Trump, echoing the sentiments of some of Charleroi’s native citizens, has cast the change in a sinister light. As he told the crowd at a recent rally in Indiana, Pennsylvania, “it takes centuries to build the unique character of each state. . . . But reckless migration policy can change it quickly and permanently.”

It's all Trump's fault for bringing the whole thing up. Of course, that was something the journalists should have been doing before now, except they wouldn't have paid attention unless Trump brought it up. The thing I notice here, though, is how little actual effort the City Journal writers have put in to document much beyond what several amateur and part-time investigators have already revealed.

Who enforces the occupancy laws in Charleroi? Did the reporters try to interview anyone? How about the traffic laws? What does the police chief have to say? The mayor? I'd be ashamed to have my byline on this piece.

More Thoughts On The White House Baggie

Whatever the specifics of whose fingerprints or DNA might be on the baggie of cocaine discovered in the White House in summer 2023, as I noted yesterday, there's been a revival of interest in the case. I decided to go after the key questions not from the forensic evidence, which we may never learn, but from what we know about the nature of cocaine addiction. (I've never used it -- according to Wikipedia, the US cocaine boom started in the late 1970s, after I'd outgrown my undergraduate drug use in the 1960s).

As of July 7, 2023, I was already leaning in the direction that the baggie was Kamala's:

[Former Secret Service agent Dan Bongino] made the point that "protectees", that is, the president, vice president, and members of their families, are escorted past all checkpoints by Secret Service special agents, in part because the agents carry firearms that wouldn't get past metal detectors. For others, the checkpoints include drug sniffing dogs.

But as Bongino suggests, the pool of likely suspects, assuming family members are the likeliest, expands beyond just Hunter. Vice president Harris and her husband can't be eliminated, and the vice president in particular has something of a cackling, party-girl persona.

. . . Others have suggested White House security insiders already know who brought the baggie in, just as both the US Navy and the Royal Navy knew what happened to the Titan submersible the moment it imploded. I'm leaning in that direction myself.

More than a year later, Bongino's post that I embedded yesterday reported

Whistleblower stated that promotions are now being handed out to agents with inside knowledge of the details of the investigation into the cocaine found at the White House. These promotions are believed to be in exchange for silence on the matter.

Whistleblower also states that that acting Secret Service Director Ron Rowe is “under a lot of pressure” to “tie up loose ends” and to “destroy the cocaine evidence” before Trump gets back in office.

So this continues to confirm my theory that Secret Service protective details for both the First and Second Families have been fully aware of whose cocaine this was all along. But there are more implications here, as I noted on July 23, 2023:

[I]f the suspect is a protectee, which is to say Hunter himself, the mathematics of addiction say that someone like Hunter needs a lot more than a random baggie of cocaine to satisfy his habit. He needs near-industrial quantities of coke, and it just isn't worth his trouble to smuggle in a baggie at a time; the supply is too small and unreliable.

The Secret Service people say it's the protectees who are never searched, so logically, we would expect Hunter to bring his own drugs in anyhow. Why would he need a drop at all? That just doesn't make sense.

In that post, I went on to refer to comments to Jesse Watters by Jordan Belfort, the former cocaine addict and "Wolf of Wall Street", that

when you're in that mindset of an addict, you want to have little 'drop points' so you can kind of sneak in, take a quick hit, leave it there for safekeeping, and come back. So it was being stored somewhere.

This would be consistent with the theory of the speaker in the video I linked yesterday (who seems to be talking to the same people who are talking to Bongino):

Now, a man told Bolden that the cocaine was brought into the White House by a Kamala Harris staffer. The speaker explains that media blamed Hunter Biden for the incident, but some insiders knew that the VP's staff was involved.

. . . So it was Harris who brought the cocaine? No, but the cocaine was brought in for Harris. The one from the staff brought it. Clearly, some high-rating staffer," he added.

Although Bongino says that only protectees themselves and their families bypass the normal searches that include drug-sniffing dogs, I wonder if certain close stafffers like the so-called "body man" or "body woman", who attend to the protectees' closest personal needs, might accompany the protectee in the envelope that bypasses the checks. So I'm leaning toward a combination of the Jordan Belfort and Dan Bongino theories, with the anonymous commentator's remarks thrown in: someone heavily addicted to cocaine can't just rely on a single baggie. And in the post I linked above, I asked why Hunter would need a drop -- he's got a stash in the family quarters where he can get to it any time.

On the other hand, a vice preaident who needs an ongoing supply to get through the day can't just pull it out in a meeting -- it needs to be stashed somewhere, in a spot where it might be discreetly picked up on the way to the restroom facilities, for instance. So all this seems at least consistent with the idea that it was Kamala's -- Hunter wouldn't be wasting his time in security council meetings, for instance, but Kamala might, while Hunter wouldn't need a drop in a more public area, but Kamala might.

Still, as the saying goes, two people can keep a secret as long as one of them is dead. I would guess that too many people already know whose cocaine that was in the baggie, and that info has reached Trump already. Strategic promotions aren't going to be much help at this point.

This Is Too Good Not To Notice

BOMBSHELL: A recent report claims it was Kamala Harris, not Hunter Biden, who brought cocaine to the White House in 2023

Is this legit? pic.twitter.com/SFNfdbY6V4

— Futurist™ (@americasgreat) October 3, 2024

Let me start out being perfectly clear: these allegations are completely unsubstantiated, and the video has the air of something produced to look like a James O'Keefe-style undercover video, but made in some cheap studio. So take it with heavy skepticism. Even so, it has a certain ring of truth.

This post at MSN introduces and summarizes the video:

Independent journalist James Bolden posted a video on social media, showing a man claiming Kamala Harris is somehow linked to the Hunter Biden cocaine scandal. Without providing any evidence, the unidentified individual said President Biden's son took fall for the incident. Neither the president nor the First Son have reacted to the newly surfaced clip yet.

. . . Now, a man told Bolden that the cocaine was brought into the White House by a Kamala Harris staffer. The speaker explains that media blamed Hunter Biden for the incident, but some insiders knew that the VP's staff was involved. The scandal eventually led to a heated conversation between President Biden and Harris, he added.

. . . However, there is no concrete evidence to prove this theory.

The story quotes the unidentified speaker in the video:

"We either blame Hunter or put the blame where it rightfully belonged on Harris and her staff, which, you know, that would have destroyed Biden's campaign. Everybody knows that Hunter's a drug addict, but if people got wind that...Harris' work was partaking in the best-given use. This would cause a major problem. So it was Harris who brought the cocaine? No, but the cocaine was brought in for Harris. The one from the staff brought it. Clearly, some high-rating staffer," he added.

Last July 3, I said,

[M]y instinct says the Secret Service, the FBI, the DC police, and whoever else know, for instance, whose baggie of coke was in the cubby outside the White House Sit Room last summer, and it wasn't Hunter's. Frankly, Kamala's speech is just a little too nasal for it not to have been hers. I would guess the deep state is sitting on quite a bit that could be used as leverage. . .

This theory is indirectly borne out by a tweet from former Secret Service agent Dan Bongino a week ago:

BREAKING 🚨
With more details on my show at 11a on Rumble.

A Secret Service whistleblower has reached out to me with damning information about the ongoing White House cocaine scandal.

Whistleblower stated that promotions are now being handed out to agents with inside knowledge…

— Dan Bongino (@dbongino) September 30, 2024

This points back to the vetting problem I brought up in yesterday's post. Second Dude Doug Emhoff, whether he actually slapped his date at the Nice film festival in 2012, was clearly familiar with the jet-set partying lifestyle, and specifics aside, the Daily Mail had full documentation that he and his date were drinking heavily at a party they left at 3:00 AM. You have to be pretty cranked up to do this sort of thing in your late 40s, and I very much doubt that booze was all that was involved.

But here's another question: she married Dougie, a high-powered attorney, in 2014, when she was California Attorney General, an office she held from 2011 to 2017, when she took office as a US senator. Dougie remained a high powered attorney until Kamala was elected vice president, when it was belatedly determined that his position as a high-powered attorney would be a conflict of interest for her. Apparently nobody ever asked if Dougie's position was a conflict of interest while she was state attorney general, nor a US senator.

In fact, once I started to look at Dougie's career in more detail last week, I started to ask myself how someone living his cranked-up lifestyle could contiinue in the upper echelons of the legal profession, and it only dawned on me just the other day that he kept his jobs in the later phase of his career precisely because he was married to the state attorney general and then a US senator. In other words, hire Dougie or his firm, your case will have a sympathetic ear.

This, of course, was the Biden family frammis as well. But it's worth considering that the Biden frammis, with Hunter as a key ingredient, had to be assiduously covered up in the 2020 campaign, and its elements were a problem for Joe's reelection until his cognitive condition overtook everything else. But nobody has even begun to look at how Dougie's position represented a major conflict for Kamala in her career as state attorney general and US senator.

It's a major question how she and Dougie were able to bypass any sort of conventional vetting in the runup to her selection as Joe's running mate. This would have included, but not been limited to, their likely heavy cocaine use throughout their marriage.

I've Been Writing About Permission Slips All Year

Back in February, I first brought up the UK constitutional crisis of 1936, in which, although elites were fully aware of Edward VIII's intent to marry the divorcee Wallis Simpson, the UK press censored itself and didn't mention it until remarks by an obscure Church of England bishop were interpreted as giving "permission" to cover the story -- and Edward abdicated ten days later. Joe Biden's cognitive decline, on the other hand, has sparked a similar constitutional crisis, but unlike Edward's, which was resolved with remarkable speed, this one is ongoing, and it's been marked by only incremental "permission slips".

The most recent has involved Tim Walz, who's been controversial ever since his designation as Kamala's running mate -- but Kamala's own story this year has been just a sub-plot to the overall crisis, which has nominally been about Joe Biden's cognitive ability. Following Joe's June 27 debate performance -- which amounted to another "permission slip" for the press gingerly to take up the issue -- Speaker Emerita Pelosi attempted to bypass the 25th Amendment, which designates the vice president as the leader of a cabinet-based effort to declare a president incapable of serving, by personally bullying Joe into withdrawing as a candidate for reelection in favor of Kamala, which solved precisely nothing.

Tim Walz's performance in the October 1 debate has simply reignited the same consitutional crisis, which in fact isn't exclukively about Joe's cognitive abilities -- it's also about Kamala's, but the permission slip to talk about that hasn't been signed yet. As I noted the other day, Trump simply told the truth when he said there was "something missing" there, too, and respectable media has been raising the Harris-Walz question as gingerly as it can; Politico is treating it as some kind of vetting glitch:

Walz himself raised some of these issues with Harris and her team during the vice presidential vetting process, according to two people familiar with the conversations. Harris’ circle, for example, knew of Walz’s 1995 DUI arrest when he was a school teacher in Nebraska, despite Walz’s past campaign and official staff trying to downplay and in some cases outright mislead reporters about the circumstances of the arrest.

Harris’ vetting team called some of Walz’s former House colleagues and other allies to check out that episode, his drinking habits and temperament since then, according to two other people familiar with the calls at the time.

The subtext here, although Politico won't say it outright, is that Walz shouldn't have made it through the vetting process, which is another way of saying his candidacy is a big mistake. But what was the cause of this mistake? This was Harris's call, start to finish. And as someone wrote in The Hill right after his selection:

When I heard that Vice President Harris had selected Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz over Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro as her running mate, the first thought to hit me was that of revered baseball manager Casey Stengel: “Can’t anybody here play this game?”

This is an ever-so-oblique reference to Kamala, of course, and it's just an early confirmation of Trump's recent assessment -- there's something missing with Kamala, and everybody knows it. So the consitutional crisis is still with us, it doesn't stop with Joe, who is still in office anyhow, but there was something wrong with how Kamala was vetted back in 2020. Look at what's been coming out about Second Dude Doug, just as an example. Something's missing there, too.

But this leads us to a question of what caused Kamala to become vice president if, as is gradually becoming clear, she's no more capable than Joe and would never have been capable of exercising her respnsibilities under the 25th Amendment. Well, she was selected by Joe as his running mate (some would say as his insurance policy), and the vetting process was just as deficient in her case as it was with Walz. Doesn't this raise the question of whether there was something wrong with the 2020 election? In other words, isn't the ongoing constitutional crisis something bigger than just Joe Biden and the 25th Amendment?

This brings us to Sen Vance, who won the October 1 debate in effect by confirming Walz's own unfitness for office:

Senator JD Vance repeated a tired Republican lie from 2020 — that Donald Trump actually won the election, despite all evidence to the contrary — and then doubled down on it during a recent recorded encounter.

On Thursday, comedian Jason Selvig posted a clip of an interaction he had with Vance on X. During their brief encounter, Selvig repeatedly asked Vance if Trump won in 2020. The settled issue of who won the 2020 election came up again after Vance told viewers who tuned into Tuesday’s vice presidential debate that he would have helped Trump carry out his “alternative electors” scheme to maintain power in the White House.

“Who won the 2020 election? Could you just answer? Did Donald Trump win?” Selvig asked.

“Yes,” Vance replied.

After asking Vance to confirm that he was saying Trump won in 2020, Vance replied “Yep.”

What Vance, who is nothing if not smart, just said there was clear: the current constitutional crisis stems from the 2020 election. The permission slip we need is the ability to open the Overton Window to talk about it.

Is The Race Really "Razor Thin"?

We're continuing to see headlines like Emerson Poll: Presidential Race Razor-Thin; Senate Race Tightening. This has been some version of the story of the presidential race since Kamala's nomination -- except that in recent weeks, there's been another, like Robert Reich in The Guardian: Donald Trump is gaining on Kamala Harris in the polls. I have some theories why.

How can the race be stuck at "razor thin" when Trump is gaining? This is the sort of question I was taught not to ask in college, and as I was a schoolmate of Robert Reich back in the day, I must assume he absorbed that lesson well. He asks,

With less than 40 days until election day, how can it be that Trump has taken a small lead in Arizona and Georgia – two swing states he lost to Biden in 2020? How can he be narrowly leading Harris in the swing state of North Carolina? How can he now be essentially tied with her in the other key swing states of Michigan and Wisconsin?

More generally, how can Trump have chiseled away Harris’s advantage from early August? How is it possible that more voters appear to view Trump favorably now than they did several months ago when he was in the race against Biden?

He seems to be referrinmg generally to the Real Clear Politics aggregates, which have been static for weeks. As of this morning, Harris is ahead 2.2 in the meaningless national average, while Trump is ahead 0.1 in the "battlegrounds". These totals have changed little in the past month or so -- and they're the main reason anyone can claim the race is stuck and razor-thin. This piece cites Trafalgfar/Insider Advanatage:

#Updated Electoral Map Based on Trafalgar/Insider Advantage polling

🟥 Trump 296 🏆
🟦 Harris 226
——
Pennsylvania - 🔴 Trump +2.2
Michigan - 🔴 Trump +2.2
Wisconsin - 🔴 Trump +1.1
Arizona - 🔴 Trump +1
North Carolina - 🔴 Trump +1
Nevada - 🔴 Trump +1
Georgia - 🟡 Tie
——… pic.twitter.com/7Kwhf9SlKC

— InteractivePolls (@IAPolls2022) October 2, 2024

The piece cites similar numbers from Atlas Intel and Ipsos. Reich, hough, puts out another theory:

By now, almost everyone in America knows Trump and has made up their minds about him. Recent polls have found that nearly 90% of voters say they do not need to learn more about Trump to decide their vote.

But they don’t yet know Harris, or remain undecided about her. More on this in a moment.

Trump is exploiting this asymmetry so that when it comes to choosing between Trump and Harris, voters will choose the devil they know.

This requires, first, that Trump suck all the media oxygen out of the air so Harris has fewer opportunities to define herself positively.

. . . In other words, Trump is running neck-and-neck with Harris not despite the mess he’s created over the last few weeks but because of it.

In part, one could counter Reich by suggesting that Harris is forgoing opportunities to definme herself positively by avoiding press conferences and penetrating interviews. But on the other hand, Harris's main surrogates, Tim Walz and her husband, Doug Emhoff, haven't done well defining her, either. I covered Emhoff's latest escapade yesterday, but the fallout from Walz's debate performance is continuing:

Walz is more than a knucklehead. He's a liability. Why? Because vice presidential nominees take an electoral version of the Hippocratic Oath: Do no harm to the top of the ticket. Walz had a good rollout and a quick and effective speech at the Democratic National Convention. He entered the debate with positive favorable ratings. Yet he's become a distraction for Kamala Harris and her campaign. Walz is a walking reminder that Harris's judgment is questionable at best.

I no longer think "razor thin", "effectively tied", "narrow", and so forth are effective ways to describe the current state of the race, and Real Clear Politics is a major factor in enabling this misperception.

Nobody's Picked This Up

Apparently the disastrous outcome for Gov Walz from Tuesday's debate overshadowed a great deal of other news yesterday, not least the UK Daily Mail's story Kamala Harris's husband Doug Emhoff 'forcefully slapped ex-girlfriend for flirting with another man' in booze-fueled assault after date to star-studded gala:

Vice President Kamala Harris's husband assaulted his ex-girlfriend, three friends have told Dailymail.com.

The Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff, 59, allegedly struck the woman in the face so hard she spun around, while waiting in a valet line late at night after a May 2012 Cannes Film Festival event in France.

One of her friends told DailyMail.com that the woman called him immediately after the incident, sobbing in her cab, and described the alleged assault.

The accounts and surrounding documentation gathered by the Daily Mail provide a revealing glimpse into Emhoff's lifestyle, and I think more importantly, why Kamala would find this guy a compatible match. I decided to see where this episode fit into Emhoff's timeline. According to Britannica,

In 2000 Emhoff cofounded the [law] firm Whitwell Jacoby Emhoff. . . . In 2006 Whitwell Jacoby Emhoff was acquired by Venable LLP, and Doug Emhoff became head of that firm’s Los Angeles branch and later manager of its West Coast operations.

. . . Emhoff married film producer Kerstin Mackin in 1992. The pair had two children, Cole Emhoff and Ella Emhoff, before divorcing in 2010. Three years later Doug Emhoff met Harris—then California’s attorney general—on a blind date, and they wed in 2014.

Venavble LLP is a major white-shoe law firm. Its expansion to the West Coast was an important move, and Emhoff was put in charge of their operations. Heavyweight dude, right? The Daily Mail has a lot to put the story in context, including this e-mail from "Jane", the alleged victim, to a friend regarding the hotel she and Emhoff stayed at during the Cannes Film Festival (click on the image for a ;arger copy):

The story puts this in moire contextt:

Jane's friends said she was given tickets by wealthy friends to go to the Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR) Gala Dinner, an elite charity auction filled with top celebrities and Hollywood executives, held on May 24, 2012 at the Hotel du Cap in Antibes, near Cannes in Southern France.

. . . The friends said Jane brought her then boyfriend, Emhoff, as a plus one.

One of Jane's friends, a top New York businessman, said he was at home getting ready for bed that night when he got an unexpected phone call from her.

'It was hard to hear her because she was sobbing,' he said. 'She told me she was with a guy and he hit her.

'It was very clear what she was telling me. She said she was with a guy, her date, she was at the Cannes Film Festival, and he hit her. She was in the car with the guy at the time.

. . . 'In later conversations, but pretty contemporaneous with that, she told me more about the guy,' he added.

'It was something like 3am. They were trying to get out of there and they both had been drinking. There was a gigantic line for taxis.

'[Jane] went up to one of the valet guys, offered him 100 Euros or whatever, to get to the head of the line. She told me she put her hand on his shoulder. Doug apparently thought that she was flirting, and came over and slapped her in the face.

. . . A second friend, another female New York attorney, said Jane told her about the alleged attack at the time – and said it came out of nowhere.

. . . 'I think she asked him 'what the f*** was that all about?' in the car, and the only thing she could really get out of him was that he thought she was hitting on the valet.

'[Jane] told me she was so embarrassed. She couldn't believe he is the person that he is, and that it turned into this trailer trash moment.

'It woke her up about the self-delusion she was having, explaining away the teacher [i.e., the nanny] story. She realized he was bad news. This was the first time she saw his ugly side.

This sort of thing isn't good for a prominent lawyer's reputation. According to the American Bar Association's Model Rules of Professional Conduct,

A lawyer's conduct should conform to the requirements of the law, both in professional service to clients and in the lawyer's business and personal affairs.

As best I can tell, Emhoff's hard-partying, jet-setting lifestyle wouldn't be consistent with managing an important part of a white-shoe law firm's operations. He left Venable LLP in 2017 and became a litigation partner with DLA Piper, another white-shoe firm with Democrat connections. Married to Kamla in 2014, she was elected to the US Senate in 2016, and it would be hard not to interpret the move as connected to Harris's career, as well as growing dissatisfaction at Venable with Emhoff's escapades.

In fact, it looks like Emhoff didn't have a good reputation before his elevation to Second Dude:

This is a horrifying story. I will say that it matches with something I recently learned from two California individuals who know Emhoff fairly well and said his reputation for poor treatment of women was notorious in their circles. https://t.co/0UBAcs6j6d

— Mollie (@MZHemingway) October 2, 2024

A few commentators have3 raised the quesion of whether Kamala was ever vetted as a vice presidential choice, suggesting Biden's deal with James Clyburn to nominate a black woman for the job pre-empted any serious vetting process. It looks more and more to me as though it was a serious mistake not to look more closely into Emhoff beefore selecting Kamala.