Yale Law Students Love Hookers
Sex, corruption, hypocrisy, oh my! And yet, should anyone even care about this? The answer is "yes," but not for any of the reasons you'll hear from the nattering nabobs....
Or at least the Washington Post alleges that one Yale Law student loved a hooker. Why is the Washington Post so interested in how a Yale Law student spends his time and money? Well, because that Yale Law student, Jonathan Dach, was working for the White House and hotel logs indicate he brought a woman back to the Colombia hotel where the president was set to stay. The Post claims that Homeland Security later fingered this woman as a prostitute. Hey, he was injecting his business into the local economy!
Anyway, the Post claims the White House covered this all up. Oh, and later promoted him to a job in the State Department. Which job? Policy advisor in the Office of Global Women’s Issues. [Dramatic Chipmunk]
If the idea of bringing prostitutes to hotels while traveling ahead of the president sounds familiar, it’s because the Secret Service did the same thing ON THE SAME TRIP, and the agents involved were pilloried and fired. So guess who’s really pissed off that the White House stuck its neck out for its own while throwing them under the bus?
AI Presents Both Opportunities And Risks For Lawyers. Are You Prepared?
Sex, corruption, hypocrisy, oh my! And yet, should anyone even care about this? The answer is “yes,” but not for any of the reasons you’ll hear from the nattering nabobs….
First of all, the Secret Service complaint is flat stupid:
Former and current Secret Service agents said they are angry at the White House’s public insistence that none of its team members were involved and its private decision to not fully investigate one of its own — while their colleagues had their careers ruined or hampered.
Ten members of the Secret Service — ranging from younger, lower-level officers assigned to rope-line security to seasoned members of a counterassault team — lost their jobs because of their actions in Cartagena. The agents were told that they jeopardized national security by drinking excessively and having contact with foreign nationals.
They were treated “radically differently by different parts of the same executive branch,” said Larry Berger, a lawyer who represented many of the agents, who were union members of the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association.
Sponsored
How The New Lexis+ AI App Empowers Lawyers On The Go
AI Presents Both Opportunities And Risks For Lawyers. Are You Prepared?
Happy Lawyers, Better Results The Key To Thriving In Tough Times
How The New Lexis+ AI App Empowers Lawyers On The Go
You can’t blame them for trying to garner some sympathy here. Given the events of the past week, America honestly believes the Keystone Police Department is better prepared to protect the president. What better way to detract attention than to whine about the White House being meanies? The real issue here is whether or not there’s a justifiable reason for treating the offending Secret Service agents differently than an advance team volunteer.
Of course there is. For Secret Service agents — charged with defending the president’s life — picking up prostitutes gives rise to Honeypot-style blackmail risks in a country about a decade removed from being one big drug cartel. On the other hand, there’s a volunteer whose job involved making sure there were water bottles en route. If the Secret Service wants to equate those two as merely “different parts of the same executive branch,” then it explains a lot about how effectively they’ve approached their job.
That said, the decision to hire Dach to “advise the government on women’s issues” is a bit more complicated. If any of this is true — through his lawyer, Richard Sauber, Jonathan Dach denies any inappropriate conduct in Cartagena — it would seem like a poor decision to give a “women’s issues” portfolio to a man with an alleged appetite for Third World prostitutes. It would raise real questions about his sensitivity to human trafficking or at least to the coercive effect that poor educational and economic opportunities have on women making the “choice” to enter sex work. On the other hand, prostitution happens to be legal in Cartagena, not every sex worker is a victim of human trafficking, and many feel the carte blanche assumption that prostitutes are victimized by their profession is rank paternalism. The focus on women’s issues, they argue, should focus less on shaming sex work and more on creating the opportunities to guarantee that whatever choices a woman makes are genuine. Should patronizing a prostitute automatically disqualify someone from a job promoting the well-being of women internationally? It all comes down to where you side in that debate.
However, why even risk this public relations nightmare? Screw the merits like they’re a Cartagena streetwalker: an international prostitution scandal will always look worst in the Office of Global Women’s Issues. Not only is it a fight not worth having over a kid in his 20s, it’s never a fight worth potentially covering up. This isn’t a Nobel Prize winner, what possible justification is there for embroiling the government in a cover-up scandal?
And here’s where you should get really mad:
Sponsored
Law Firm Business Development Is More Than Relationship Building
Curbing Client And Talent Loss With Productivity Tech
Dach’s father, Leslie Dach, is a prominent Democratic donor who gave $23,900 to the party in 2008 to help elect Obama. In his previous job as a top lobbyist for Wal-Mart, he partnered with the White House on high-profile projects, including Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move!” campaign.
He, too, joined the Obama administration this year. In July, he was named a senior counselor with the Department of Health and Human Services, where part of his responsibilities include handling the next phase of the Affordable Care Act.
Right. Allegations of campaign cash and possible nepotism. This isn’t going to be the primary focus of the rage you’ll see because Manichean political coverage can’t open the door to questioning whether the other side does shady stuff in the ravenous pursuit of money in the campaign finance free-for-all. But if the White House risked a cover-up scandal over to protect a donor’s kid, then that’s really troubling.
And the fact that this sounds entirely plausible should be the real story.
Aides knew of possible White House link to Cartagena, Colombia, prostitution scandal [Washington Post]
Report: Records Implicate White House in Secret Service Hooker Scandal [Gawker]
