Do not sleep on the office of the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York. While people in Washington are yelling at each other, and while white-shoe law firms are competing for who can come up with the most absurd legal theory to cover the ass of a criminal presidency*, the SDNY is busily beavering away at the bearing walls under the whole sordid mess.

On Thursday, for example, we find that the transition period between the Obama administration and Camp Runamuck was even more of a yard sale than we suspected it was. From the Washington Post:

[Stephen] Calk, the founder of mortgage lender Federal Savings Bank of Chicago, illegally used the bank’s resources to curry favor with Manafort, ignoring internal standards and lying to regulators, according to the indictment unsealed in the Southern District of New York. As the bank rushed through the loans, Calk gave Manafort a list ranking the senior administrative jobs he wanted, starting with Treasury Secretary, the indictment alleges. The list also included 19 ambassadorships, including to the United Kingdom, according to the indictment.

A list! My dude had a list of the government jobs he would have liked to purchase as a reward for throwing his bank's money down the rathole that was Paul Manafort's personal finances.

“Is that something you would be able to do?,” Manafort said in an email, according to the indictment. “I am happy and willing to serve,” Calk responded. Other members of the committee included now-Treasury Steven Mnuchin and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross. Bank employees raised concerns about the loan, including that they could not verify Manafort’s income and that he was delinquent on a $300,000 credit card bill, according to the indictment. But Calk allegedly continued to support the loan, which has nearly doubled in size, the indictment says. “I also want to again thank you for fixing my issue. It means a lot to me,” Manafort said in email to Calk.

The early line on the defense strategy is that Calk will portray himself as a civic-minded individual who only wanted to serve his country. The early line on whether a judge will laugh himself into a stroke upon hearing this defense has not yet been released.

The Manafort grift was relentless. Alex Wong Getty Images

While another storeroom at Manafort House of Felonies was being pried open, the Post also revealed that Senator Professor Warren was so good at her job, and knew so much about the kind of law she teaches, that people hired her as an expert to help them in actual legal cases. I, for one, am puzzled as to why this is news, especially since it comes from SPW's own disclosure forms. But I have a suspicion that shadows soon will be following this story, and clouds will begin to obscure it. Questions will arise. I know how this stuff works by now.

Warren’s presidential campaign released a list of 56 cases on her website Wednesday night, revealing a far higher number of cases than Warren (D-Mass.) had previously disclosed and lending detail to an aspect of her career that she rarely discusses in public. The Washington Post had requested a detailed accounting of her outside work and was conducting a review of her work from public records.

First of all, at least with regard to the asbestos case, she discussed it all throughout her first Senate campaign because Scott Brown never shut up about it, even though he clearly didn't understand the details of the work she'd done. Second, notice how the bold-faced elements of the story produce the clouds and shadows. That's what they're supposed to do. This is how elite newspapers get into bed with ratfckers like Peter Schweitzer and Clinton Cash.

Warren’s $675-per-hour rate of compensation to consult on several asbestos-related cases, described in court documents, was at or below market rate for her level of experience and was less than what some law firm partners charged to work on the same matters.

Seventh paragraph. Now, watch the shadows gather.

Outside income has become a campaign issue for candidates such as Warren who have positioned themselves as crusaders for the working class. Tax returns released last month by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), a self-described democratic socialist, revealed that he and his wife reported more than $1 million in income in 2016 and 2017, largely as a result of best-selling books.

Bullshit. Pure, unadulterated, stupid bullshit that's been flung at every wealthy candidate who ever tried to rejigger the economy so that most people get a better deal out of it. Both Roosevelts, all of the Kennedys. It's aged-in-the-wood nonsense.

At the time, Harvard Law School required faculty members to limit their outside activities to 20 percent of their “total professional effort,” according to guidelines issued by the school in 1991. Missing from the documents released Wednesday was any estimate of how much time she spent on each case.

Emails! Cattle Futures! Billing records! I've seen this movie before.

Warren speaks amid the clouds and shadows. Scott Eisen Getty Images

One of her most controversial clients was Dow Chemical, which she advised in the mid-1990s. A subsidiary that manufactured silicone gel breast implants faced hundreds of thousands of claims from women who said their implants caused health problems. Dow Chemical denied that it played a role in designing or making the implants and sought to avoid liability as its subsidiary, Dow Corning, declared bankruptcy.

Ooh, no! Hypocrisy! Clouds! Shadows! Questions! No, wait...

“In this case, Elizabeth served as a consultant to ensure adequate compensation for women who claimed injury from silicone breast implants who otherwise might not have received anything when Dow Corning filed for bankruptcy,” Warren’s list of cases said. “Thanks in part to Elizabeth’s efforts, Dow Corning created a $2.35 billion fund to compensate women claiming injury from Dow Corning’s silicone breast implants.”

Oh.

The Post could not immediately verify this figure.

Might've been nice if you'd held the story until you could, since you clearly framed the passage as SPW's "working on behalf of corporations, so questions might arise about her populist message wah-dee-doo-dah."

In the list released by the Warren campaign, most items include a summary in which Warren was cast as saving jobs by representing the interests of a company or advocating on behalf of victims.

Oh, for the love of god, Marty Baron, this is cheap. You couldn't verify the Dow Corning settlement fund numbers, but you feel safe in saying SPW was cast as X,Y, and Z? And for the cherry on top?

Warren has released only her last 10 years of tax returns, and much of her legal consulting work is not reflected in those documents.

Here's a pro tip: a lot of people, especially women people, watched what happened with the coverage of Hillary Rodham Clinton and her campaign in 2016 and they've grown wise in the ways of clouds and shadows. This kind of thing is going to get called out from now on, and the people writing it should get used to that fact. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on...you don't get fooled again. A president said that once.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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